$3000 cash and a free trip home
The Daily Telegraph
01feb02
PRIME Minister John Howard yesterday offered a $3000 cash incentive to Afghan asylum seekers to return home.
Free flights and the individual cash payments will be used to tempt those who have travelled to Australia illegally, and hopefully ease the humanitarian crisis enveloping the Government.
The payment of up to $3000 for about 4000 eligible adult Afghans -- and about $500 for each child -- would cost Australian taxpayers an estimated $12 million.
But the plan, unveiled by Mr Howard in New York, will provide a far cheaper alternative to the Pacific Solution than the long-term costs of maintaining asylum seekers within detention centres.
Mr Howard stressed there would be no change to his Government's hard-line stance on asylum seekers, which is attracting significant and often critical attention overseas.
On the day of his announcement, the influential New York Times ran an article highlighting the suicide threat by nine Woomera inmates. But Mr Howard would not be swayed.
"I take the opportunity of reminding Australia's critics that we are one of the few countries in the world that maintains a refugee program ... and our record in relation to providing humanitarian relief for refugees compares very favourably with other countries," he said.
Any cash payout to Afghans will be a major windfall. Before the fall of the Taliban, clerks in Jilalabad were earning about $6 a month.
The offer will apply to those who had come to Australia illegally and been refused refugee status.
Those who are on temporary visas or held in detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea also will be eligible.
Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai has responded positively to the offer.
But he has insisted an Afghan ministerial delegation visit Australia first to discuss the matter and visit the asylum seekers in the detention centres.
Mr Howard would not put a total figure on the cost of the scheme to taxpayers. Eighteen months ago the Government offered Kosovar adult refugees $3000 and children $500 to go home.
"Given Afghanistan's circumstances, I don't think it's unreasonable or unfair or overdoing it to offer some resettlement assistance," Mr Howard said.
A Government spokesman said details of the compensation would be negotiated with the Afghan delegation. It was not believed the offer would go beyond the $3000 offered to the Kosovars.
"It must be taken into account the standard of living in Europe is a little higher," he said.
All Afghans who sought sanctuary in Australia would be safe to return home, Afghanistan's Honorary Consul in Australia Mahmoud Saikl
said yesterday.
Mr Saikl who returned from Kabul last week said ethnic persecution was a thing of the past.
But he warned his countrymen they would return to grinding poverty. Mr Saikl said infrastructure was non-existent in many Afghan provinces.
The province of Bamyam where the persecuted Hazaras lived had suffered a scorched earth policy with water springs destroyed and crops burned.
Many of the Australian asylum seekers would return to burned out shells where their houses once stood.
A cash payout should not be just a token sum, he said.
"When they go back they should feel they have something in their hand to rebuild their lives."
Mr Saikl dismissed concerns the Hazaras, who make up a large portion of asylum seekers in Australia, would continue to face persecution.
Ethnicity had been used as a tool of division under the Taliban, he said.
Mr Saikl said that while the Afghani stan government was only in its infancy the fear that ruled the land under the Taliban had disappeared.
"I felt in no danger at all," he said.
Executive director of the Refugee Council of Australia Margaret Piper said a resettlement package was right for those who wanted to return.
Immigration Minister Philip Rud dock said up to 4000 people may be eligible to accept the offer.