Most Australians don’t want the so-called ISIS brides to come home to Australia, but for the Yazidi people who have immigrated here, the objection is personal.
There are about 4000 Yazidis living in Australia, mostly concentrated in regional communities such as Armidale, Coffs Harbour and Wagga Wagga in NSW, Toowoomba in South East Queensland and Mount Gambier in South Australia.
They are poster people for the success of multiculturalism – despite, or perhaps because of – the deep trauma they have brought with them from their experiences at home.
The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking ethnic minority from northern Iraq, and when ISIS captured the town of Sinjar in 2014, it carried out a genocide against them.
Many of the Yazidis in Australia are victims of ISIS.
Walking down the streets of Wagga and Mount Gambier, attending school in Toowoomba and catching the bus in Coffs, are survivors of unimaginable suffering – rape, slavery and vicious violence, and the quiet despair that comes with not knowing where family members and other loved ones are.
Two of the ISIS brides who returned to Melbourne earlier this month were charged with crimes against humanity relating to alleged slavery offences.
It’s difficult to think of a charge more barbaric – although the ABC’s Stephanie March has reported on an Australian man who allegedly joined ISIS (he denies this) and who has been accused of enslaving and raping a young Yazidi girl (he also denies this).
That man is in a prison in Syria; the Australian women who travelled to Syria and joined ISIS (although some say they were tricked or forced into doing so) are almost all home now.
One woman, Hodan Abby, remains in Syria and can’t get home; she is the subject of a two-year-long temporary exclusion order, which is the only real legal avenue the Australian government has to stop these citizens from returning.
In Britain, numerous former ISIS fighters and their wives have been stripped of citizenship; notably the much-demonised Shamima Begum, who was 15 years old when she travelled to Syria and married an ISIS fighter.
In Australia, the government can only strip someone’s citizenship on national security grounds when they have dual citizenship.
These are the democratic protections that many Australians think the ISIS-sympathisers traded away when they travelled to join a murderous extremist state.
But none of the people who take a hard line on the women has a defensible position on the children.
When asked specifically about the kids of these women, the prime minister says he feels “sorry” for them, and that it’s their mothers who are the “responsible ones”, while reaffirming the government’s position that it will provide no help to their mothers.
He elides the fact that the fate of the children is stapled to the fate of their mothers – something we all know whether or not we choose to acknowledge it.
The nine-year-old daughter of Hodan Abby, who has stayed with her mother in Syria, has horrific shrapnel injuries that have disabled her to the point where she can’t walk.
She suffers from stunted growth and development, and chronic headaches.
It is not emotive to say that the Australian government has turned its back on this child – it’s the objective truth.
Her innocence has been cancelled out by the alleged sins of her mother, one of the women that the prime minister says he has “nothing but contempt” for.
None of the women have been afforded due process. There is no such thing in contemporary Syria, and there certainly wasn’t under the medieval barbarism of ISIS.
Those who have been arrested and charged on returning home will at least get their day in court.
Meanwhile, the Yazidi people of Australia continue to suffer.
Trauma is its own kind of prison. It is borderless and doesn’t always fade with time or a change of setting.
The government is sensitive to the Yazidis’ situation – Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said this week that he has consulted various community groups about the return of the women from the Syrian camps, including the Assyrian and Catholic communities.
He said that there was “no meeting more powerful than when a delegation came here from Wagga, from the Yazidi community, which involved one woman who, from memory, she would have been 19, had herself effectively been a slave”.
This week the Australian Federal Police held a community meeting with Yazidi people in Wagga (where about 2000 Yazidis live).
The ABC reported that many in their community feel anxious and unsafe, and a worker from a refugee trauma support service said there had been a spike in calls to their helpline.
One Armidale-based survivor, 23-year-old Amera Ali, was 10 when she was captured by ISIS and sold into sexual slavery.
“I never imagined I would live in a country with ISIS brides,” she told the ABC.
“I am really scared about this news.”
It is an incredibly knotty problem – how to balance the righteous anger, not to mention the rational terror, of one group of traumatised refugees, against the citizenship rights of a group of deeply unsympathetic women, and their innocent children.
But it happens that we live in a system that is well-equipped to deal with conflicting rights.
A system that can unfurl moral and legal obligations that exist in tension with each other.
It’s called democracy.
It’s messy, but it’s non-violent and it’s fairer than any other organising system that humans have created.
If you’re an Australian citizen, you have the right to its protections.
The fact that your fellow citizens, and even your government, can’t abrogate that right is integral to its design.
Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and senior writer.
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