No foreign aid unless there is justice for children
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
He is only ten years old and has filed a legal case suing the Australian Government because he was psychologically damaged by being incarcerated in the razor-wired concentration camp for immigrants for two years. The boy Shayan and many more like him still suffer the scars and trauma of imprisonment.
The detention without trial of hundreds of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants that fled to Australia to escape political oppression or poverty has been severely critiqued worldwide as being inhumane and without compassion.
However it seems to strike a popular cord with millions of Australians who support the iron fisted policy of Mr. John Howard and this electorate has kept his conservative government in power for four consecutive terms.
You would think that the majority of Australians wouldn't stand for it. But most sadly do. They have forgotten their past. Many Australians are descended from Irish convicts sent there by the British colonial government that occupied Ireland to provide prison labour. Thousands of starving Irish were convicted for a trivial offence like stealing food for their children.
They were dying by their thousands in a potato famine while British merchants were exporting from Ireland hundreds of tons of food to England and then impoverished men women and children exported to their colonial lands. Later thousands more became migrants seeking to survive. What a sad history of misrule and injustice. The Australians who vote for the detention policy have apparently forgotten this.
Here in the Philippines, we have at least 20,000 and at most 56,000 children behind bars suffering worse trauma than Shayan ever did. Some of them filed a complaint suing the President and her officials for imprisoning them and violating their rights. The ombudsman dismissed it out of hand a few weeks ago.
Here they are condemned without evidence or just cause to suffer disease, hunger and deprivations that you wouldn't inflict on cats and dogs.
The recent CNN report told it well and showed what the inside of these prison cells are like for boys as young as eight year old. Mixed with Pedophiles, murderers, and rapists. The children said they are forced to perform oral sex on the adults and get beaten up if they refuse.
A major Daily Newspaper in its editorial accused the CNN and ITN news networks of violating journalistic standards for exposing the truth about kids in jail. It failed to publish my letter answering their unfair criticism and I pointed out that they should have exposed these crimes against Filipino children themselves. Some are in jail for just stealing a pair of flip-flops or a cheap worthless necklace. Others were caught sniffing industrial glue to ward of pangs of hunger.
Yet without trial they are punished as criminals. While Filipino congress people have never bothered to invite me to testify on the suffering and conditions of kids behind bars it’s amazing that the US congress has.
This September I will be in Washington DC to testify before a US congressional committee on the suffering of the street kids, many who end up in filthy rat infested prisons. Political induced poverty being the major reason for they’re wasted lives. I will endeavor to explain this to the US congress people.
I asked the Zambales Government to help the children by giving the abandoned buildings in San Nicholas, Castellijos for a children’s home but they said it is better for the vehicles and offices of the Department of Public Works and Highways. I asked the Secretary if that is what he prefers too, as I received no answer.
To the US congress people I will explain how the hardhearted officials refuse to help and give a home for children we rescue from the jails. The place was most likely built with US disaster relief money for the victims of the Pinatubo volcanic eruption but never used by them. The United States Government should give no more foreign aid money until the rights of children are protected. [End]
