'Do they actually care?' Rwanda survivors don't understand why Australia took in rebels

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/02/do-they-actually-care-rwanda-survivors-dont-understand-why-australia-took-in-rebels

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Celestin Ngoga knows what happens when Rwanda’s traumatic history comes hurtling into the present.

He’s been on European streets with genocide survivors when they encountered their attackers by chance. It can happen in English classes, he says, or on the train, or in shopping centres.

“From my experience, I have seen people in Europe just collapsing,” Ngoga said. “You ask ‘what happened?’. They say ‘that’s the person who killed my mum. That’s the person who cut me in my face with machete, sorry’.”

That’s why Ngoga was shocked when he learned, through the media, that Australia had resettled two former members of the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda – an offshoot of the forces responsible for the country’s brutal 1994 genocide.

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Ngoga represents the Rwandan Diaspora of Australia, the main Rwandan-Australian community group. He sees it as his duty to protect the many survivors living in Australia from further trauma.

At no point did the Australian government tell his group about resettlement of the two men, either before or after the story broke in US media outlet Politico.

“We have a duty of actually just protecting these survivors of genocide, they are young,” he said. “The ones who can identify those who were trying to kill them, because most of them have got scars, physical scars, we don’t want them to experience an additional trauma.”

Ngoga asks simply of the Australian government: “Do they care? Do they actually care?”

The two Rwandan men came to Australia last year, after languishing in US detention for more than a decade. They posed a headache for the US government. It had extradited them in 2003 to face trial for the slaughter of western tourists in 1999, in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, just near the Rwandan-Ugandan border.

But the case against them collapsed. The questionable confessions they had made fell apart under scrutiny, shifting and changing with time, and plagued by inconsistencies.

The pair, doctors later confirmed, had been tortured by Rwandan forces. Their injuries suggested shackling and beatings. A US district court found that they were “subjected to periods of solitary confinement, positional torture, and repeated physical abuse”.

Australia agreed to take the men from the US in a secret asylum deal, which the prime minister, Scott Morrison, appeared to try to place at the feet of his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull had earlier told Donald Trump he was willing to “take anyone that you want us to take”, while trying to convince him to uphold a deal to take asylum seekers from Australia.

Ngoga wasn’t the only one to be left in the dark. Family members of victims and survivors were also not told that the two men were in Australia.

Morrison’s office did not respond to a request for comment. But he has previously said asylum cases required sensitivity and privacy.

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“These are very sensitive matters, when you’re dealing with any refugee cases,” he said. “And the privacy of those arrangements is always important. Whether you’re dealing with Sri Lankan refugees, whether you’re dealing with Iraqi refugees, Syrian refugees, indeed, or those out of the Sudan.”

The treatment of the pair has prompted accusations of double standards in the application of migration law. The law allows Australia to refuse or cancel visas on character grounds, including if an individual has had a past association with a criminal group.

Ngoga said he knows of many refugees who were denied entry into Australia following the 1994 genocide. He said he didn’t understand what process the government used to clear someone to come into the country.

“These are things we don’t really understand and we don’t control,” he said. “Nobody is asking us, until now. We ask ourselves why now they didn’t inform us?”