Outback’s Afghan Refugees Find Friends as Eviction Nears

The stench of blood and entrails from freshly killed animals fills the air. For Afghan refugee Ali Daryab, it is the smell of freedom and the new life he has carved out working in this rural town’s slaughterhouse.

“I love here. This is good job, good living, and good peoples of Young make me happy here,” said Daryab, who spoke no English when he arrived in Australia in the fall of 2001 aboard a people smuggler’s decrepit boat.

For Daryab and 40 fellow refugees at the Burrangong Meat Processing plant, it is a life slipping through their fingers.

The Australian government, whose strict but popular immigration policy is aimed at deterring asylum seekers, says order has been restored to Afghanistan so the workers must go home when their refugee visas expire. That is only months for some, a year or so for others.

It’s a bitter twist for the men who fled Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, risked their lives in a perilous ocean voyage to Australia and cleared the government’s rigorous process for approving refugees.

No less a battle was the men’s fight to win over Young’s conservative townsfolk, many of whom were at first resentful and suspicious of the strangers. Now the town overwhelmingly supports their bid to stay.

One of Daryab’s co-workers, Salehi Mohammad Kabir, whose family sold most of their possessions for the $3,000 demanded by smugglers for the journey to Australia, said he fears for his life in Afghanistan.

Kabir, 34, and Daryab, 33, are Hazaras, a Shiite Muslim ethnic group in Afghanistan that believes its people are descended from Genghis Khan’s Mongol armies that swept westward out of East Asia in the 13th century.

The Hazara have a long history of oppression at the hands of Pushtuns, Sunni Muslims that make up Afghanistan’s biggest ethnic group and predominated in the Taliban religious army.

The slaughterhouse began hiring Hazara refugees more than 18 months ago when owner Grant Edmonds expanded his work force from 100 to more than 300.

Edmonds could not find enough people among Young’s 12,000 residents willing to do the hard, bloody work. He approached a Christian employment agency, Mission Australia, with the idea of hiring refugees and soon had all the workers he needed.

“We had a need and they had a need and it works well,” Edmonds said. “I’m quite sympathetic to them now. When you hear some of the stories, it’s dreadful some of the things those people have been through.”

Edmonds’ company has written repeatedly to Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock seeking permission for his workers to stay.

“They are good workers and over time they have settled very well into the community,” he said.

But Ruddock, the architect of Australia’s tough refugee policy, won’t relent, and the law makes him the final arbiter.

The problem is the visa system introduced by Ruddock in 1999 to discourage an increasing flow of asylum seekers coming by boat to Australia from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Previously, people like Kabir and Daryab who were judged genuine refugees were given permanent residency rights. Now refugees are reassessed every three years. Because Afghans are no longer being persecuted, the workers in Young no longer meet the requirements, Ruddock says.

Even though the federal government said last year that it was studying ways to encourage immigrants to move from the cities to take jobs in rural communities, officials have been deaf to the pleas of Young’s city government in support of the slaughterhouse and the Afghans.

“They are playing a vital part in our community, but we can’t convince the federal government that if they send them back we will have a labor shortage,” said Mayor John Walker.

Walker said the town council’s interest is to support a local business that is suffering a labor shortage. But the mayor also said he has been surprised at the turnabout of opinion since the Hazaras first came to his town in a ranching and fruit-growing region a few hours west of Sydney.

A book in the council’s office inviting comment from citizens when the Afghans first arrived indicates the town was split down the middle. But Walker said he believes public opinion is now running more than 80% in their favor.

Out on the main street, passers-by were supportive or neutral about the Afghans.

“I haven’t had any involvement with them, but they seem quite polite when you see them in the street,” said Carmel Hardcastle, a lifelong resident.

Steve Ingram, a spokesman for Ruddock, said the Afghans will be sent home as their visas expire, regardless of the community’s pleas.

“The refugee program is designed to protect people from persecution, not provide labor. If they [the slaughterhouse] want labor they will have to apply under the government’s skilled migration program,” he said.

Kabir, who said he has “11 months and two days” left on his visa, harbors hope that the government will give in, but is adamant that he does not want to return to Afghanistan. “I would rather going in prison than going home in Afghanistan.”