Asylum process

The second section examines places such as national asylum tribunals and immigration offices where the refirgee voice, while heard, is also probed, scrutinized, and dissected. It briefly discusses issues of truth and credibility in the asylum process and brings to the forefront the impact which the culture of disbelief that pervades the as um system in Western liberal democracies has on forced migrants and their voices. 

A widespread and pervasive culture of disbelief underpins the asylum process, with public attitudes to asylum seekers in many Western countries being overwhelmingly negative, tending to see them as Bars or bogus claimants. 

There is, of course, method in all this The poor must not only be oppressed they must also be kept in perpetual helplessness and dependence upon their masters. This explains the need to deny them their own indigenous healers, a process clearly discernible as early as the Middle Ages and, despite disclaimers to the contrary, in full sway today. Instead of allowing them access to their own helpers, the poor are supplied with physicians employed by the State. Insane asylums, public health facilities, and charity care in municipal teaching hospitals thus displaced the white witches who, though... 

It is ironic, indeed, that despite the historical record summarized above, no male psychiatrist, no modern male psychiatric historian, acknowledges the witch as healer and therapist, the true mother of the modem, privately practicing physician and psychotherapist. Instead, as we have seen, Man (the Masculine Physician) robs Woman (the White Witch) of her discovery he declares her mad, and himself the enlightened healer. This process is repeated over and over in the history of medicine. Semmelweis, protector of the parturient woman from the disease-producing hand of the physician, is likewise declared mad, and imprisoned in an insane asylum. Anna O., Joseph Breuer s immortal patient, teaches her physician... 

The last scene of The Fool is set in an asylum. In this scene I ve tried to show that rational processes were still being worked out even in the apparently insane world of nineteenth-century Europe. The English slums of that time were like slow-motion concentration camps - death takes longer in slums than in concentration camps. Art has always looked at the atrocities of the age in which it was created. What Adorno and Auden said about poetry and Auschwitz misses the point. They would have hit it only if Auschwitz had been the summing up of history - and of course it wasn t. (Bond, 1987, p. 79)... 

Most asylum seekers turned back from Australia in October and December 2001 were still detained in Indonesia five years later. Held by the lOM, processed by UNHCR, and paid for by the Australian government, over 100 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran were impounded in detention camps around Indonesia in Bogor, south of Jakarta, on the islands of Lombok and Mataram (Fig. 98.1). 

As it is clear, that we Afghan Refugees were attempting to seek asylum in Australia but unfortunately the navy forces of Australia pushed us back to Indonesia on October 2001 till our cases can be processed by UNHCR. Now it is more than two years that no solution is there for our desperate life. UNHCR does not care about us and other countries also accept refugees through recommendation of UNHCR. 

The need for funds to pay bribes to obtain documents, work permits, and licences is widely reported. In South Africa, corruption plagues the process of obtaining asylum documents applicants often have to offer fees in order to fQe their asylum claims, even though this process is free by South African law (Landau 2006 317). 

In the same vein, the American and British governments expanded deportation measures once it was clear that traditional mechanisms for border control—asylum (p. 261) processes in Europe distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate refugees, and the border itself in the United States— failed. Once the press politicized the issue by drawing attention to the gaps, literal and metaphorical, in British and American policy, both countries took measures that sharply increased deportation. 

At first sight this seems less problematic for states, which are concerned with ciiminalizmg a process, but in fact using a migration lens to interrogate anti-trafficking can also reveal difficult policy tensions, both with reference to labour migration and with reference to asylum. 

The next section discusses issues of truth and credibilily in refugee status determination processes and the culture of disbeUef that pervades the asylum system in Western liberal democracies. 

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