Deporting asylum seekers

At the opening of the current Rugby Union world Cup Australian Prime Minister John Howard told the crowd "We welcome people from all over the world".

Yes, except, that is, those who arrive on boats.

The latest lugubrious deportation of asylum seekers from Australian waters involves the pathetically small number of fourteen. These people are reportedly Iraqi Kurds who have fled their war-torn homeland which was illegally invaded and then illegally occupied by an Anglo-American force with its Australian tag-alongs.

How fourteen people of this background can possibly pose a threat to a stable state is beyond comprehension.

As an Australian friend of mine quite rightly says, his country has a Gulag (as indeed does the U.S.) into which unfortunates disappear for months and years at a time. The Australian attack on the right of asylum seekers is of course all of a piece with the erosion of civil liberties underway in several of the Western democracies, including my own country, the UK.

British police invoked antiterrorism legislation to sweep up people protesting an arms trade fair in London.

The Kurds have for decades been used by outside powers, especially Britain and the U.S. This latest humiliation simply adds to a very large pile which has been dumped on them.

DAVID JARDINE Jakarta