ASYLUM SEEKERS AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS

As the asylum seeker situation spirals out of control, the international crisis is one in which most countries around the world have responsibility, both for causing the crises in so many countries and for then needing to deal with the situation in which hundreds and thousands of people who have fled disasters have to be housed and given sustenance and everything else to keep them alive and address the problem.

Most countries in Europe are affected, and the situations in the Middle East and Asia join the disasters from the African continent fleeing to Europe for some hope of survival and a future life.

One of the countries least affected by many thousands of asylum seekers is Australia. The number trying to get to Australia has always been small, the majority having tried to get to countries in other parts of the world.

An Australian prime minister who was nominally from a political party of the left introduced the first concentration camps to Australia in 1992, and in the last 24 years the crisis of asylum seekers has deteriorated so that some thousands of people are imprisoned in countries other than Australia and where they have no opportunity of ever obtaining justice for being locked up for "crimes" they never committed.

As a South African who lived in apartheid South Africa for the major portion of his life, I saw the consequences of the people who were incarcerated in the British concentration camps during the South African war of 1899 to 1902. Those people who had been locked up lived with the traumas ever afterwards and passed the traumas on to their children and grandchildren and beyond, to this day.

There will be the same outcome for the people Australia has locked up in its offshore concentration camps in Nauru and Manus Island of Papua New Guinea.

The population of Australia is to blame as much as successive governments because politicians and the media have continued to demonise innocent people fleeing tragedy and disaster in the countries from which they have fled.

Very few politicians do anything about remedying the disaster and the horror continues.

We need to use whatever forums we have at our disposal to keep on pursuing the issue until something is done to stop the tragedy unfolding.