Australia offers cash to Afghan refugees

By CNN's Grant Holloway

CANBERRA, Australia (CNN) -- While the Australian government may have averted a tragedy at its Woomera detention camp for now, the issues concerning its policy on illegal immigrants -- particularly those from Afghanistan -- remains.

In the latest move in this contentious debate, Prime Minister John Howard has proposed offering payments to Afghan asylum seekers to assist them resettle in Afghanistan.

Howard made the announcement after a meeting with Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai in New York on Wednesday, Australian Associated Press reports.

Howard said the re-settlement assistance would be available to up to 1,100 Afghan asylum seekers currently being detained in camps in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

While not putting a figure on the resettlement sum offered, Howard said it would be a "sensible, useful," amount.

One of the key grievances of the more than 300 asylum seekers who went on a 16-day hunger strike at the Woomera camp was the government's decision in November to stop processing their applications for protection visas as refugees.

The government argued that the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan invalidated many of the claims for protection for persecution.

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The hunger-striking Woomera detainees, however, maintained that many of them were from the Hazara group in central Afghanistan, and were persecuted because of their ethnicity and adherence to the Shia branch of the Muslim faith.

They said they remained under threat in Afghanistan regardless of the political power of the Taliban.

It was not until the government agreed to restart processing their visa applications that independent negotiators were able to convince the hunger strikers to call off their protest.

Afghan leader Karzai, for his part, would like to see Australia accept more, not fewer, Afghan asylum seekers, despite his assurances that it would now be safe for them to return home.

Given that scenario, it seems unlikely that many of the Afghan asylum seekers in the camps will take up the Australian government's offer.

John Young, a migration agent representing 160 detainees at Woomera, said Thursday the offer to pay Afghan asylum seekers to return would not entice them to do so.

"The Hazara ethnic race has been persecuted for years and they see some of the new governments, people within the governments as being people that could cause them problems individually," Young told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Howard said Wednesday a delegation from the Afghan government would visit Australia, and possibly Nauru and Papua New Guinea, to discuss the future for asylum seekers.

"I think engaging the two governments on the issue is a very welcome development," Howard said.

Australia's policy of mandatory detention for all illegal immigrants, including women and children, has been cast into the international spotlight because of the Woomera protest action.

The 16-day protest and hunger strike, which included suicide attempts and the grisly practice of sewing lips together with cotton, came to an end Wednesday after three days of talks by an independent negotiating group.

In particular, the length of time the visa application process could take, and the harsh, spartan conditions inside the camps -- particularly the remote Woomera facility -- drew sustained criticism from human rights groups and church organizations.

About 800 people are held in the Woomera detention camp, which is located in the desert about 500 kilometers (300 miles) north of the South Australian state capital of Adelaide.

Unmoved

It is the largest of Australia's five onshore detention camps which hold about 2,000 asylum seekers, most of whom have come from the Middle East and Afghanistan via people-smuggling networks.

About 1,000 more illegal immigrants are held in Australian-run camps on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru and on the Papua New Guinean island of Manus.

Despite the international condemnation, Howard remains unmoved on his hardline policy on illegal immigration.

The tough stance has proved popular with many Australians and is considered instrumental in ensuring the re-election of Howard's conservative coalition for a third term of power in November last year.

"I don't retreat for a moment from the position that Australia has taken," Howard told CNN in New York.