Refugee policy awash with lies

WHY have the Greens — and leftists such as former prime minister Malcolm Fraser — made Sri Lanka their favourite villain?

Is it to better pretend that boat people from its Tamil minority are genuine refugees?

Is it so they can now attack Prime Minister Tony Abbott as a criminal for sending back two boats with 200 Tamils intercepted a week ago?

I suspect so, because the Left’s self-pleasuring rage is almost pornographic, with Fraser even tweeting the return is “redolent off (sic) handing Jews to Nazis in 1930s”.

Meanwhile, Greens leader Christine Milne called the Government “shocking and cruel” for sending “people back to the people who have persecuted them”.

But wait. First, if Sri Lanka really is a tropical Third Reich, why did newspapers report in December 2011 that Milne was off on “a holiday in Sri Lanka and a rare chance to relax”?

If Sri Lanka’s Tamils are so persecuted, why did the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees last month boast it had “helped over 11,400 Sri Lankan refugees who have returned voluntarily to restart their lives”?

Why did the UNHCR also praise Sri Lanka for its “great strides in reintegrating 573,651 returning internally displaced persons”, mostly Tamils driven from their homes by the civil war?

And why did the most famous Tamil, spin bowler Muttiah Muralitharan, attack Western critics, saying: “In wartime I went with the UN, I saw (the Tamil north), how it was. Now I regularly go and I see the place and it is about a 1000 per cent improvement in facilities.”

I don’t deny there are still some bitter hatreds and police abuses. But let’s not be so naive about the Tamils claiming to be refugees, and choosing to sail 5400km to Australia rather than 30km to India’s Tamil Nadu.

Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, portrayed the latest boatloads of Tamils as fleeing a country suspected of “systematic abductions, torture, rape, extrajudicial killings and the ‘disappearing’ of its citizens”. But the story eventually quoted the wife of one of the Tamils, who admitted her husband had actually been living lately in Tamil Nadu. Moreover, he “had crippling debts and had needed to escape to a country where he could earn money”.

So not a refugee. Not from Sri Lanka. And not sent back to Fraser’s Nazi state.