Refugee Island

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2021

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2001, boats carrying hundreds of, mainly Afghan, refugees arrived on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru. This marked the beginning of the “Pacific Solution” – a policy by the Australian government to establish offshore centres for processing asylum claims. The policy was intended to act as a deterrent, discouraging people from travelling to Australia. Many of the refugees lived in the cramped conditions of Nauru for years.

In this Witness History, Josephine Casserly speaks to Yahya, an Afghan refugee who left his home country as a school student when the Taliban gained control of his local area. Yahya was one of the first refugees to arrive at Nauru’s detention centre. Like many, he was hopeful that his stay in the makeshift camp would be a temporary measure, and he’d be quickly resettled in Australia. But that was not to be.

(Asylum seekers on their first day in the compound at Nauru after their long voyage, Sept 2001. Credit: Angela Whylie/Getty images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Josephine
0:39.4	Kassily. Today we're going to the remote Pacific Island of Nauru, which has become a sort of limbo for asylum seekers trying to reach Australia.
0:47.0	Around 100 Afghan refugees have arrived on the Pacific Island of Nauru.
0:51.0	There was a warm welcome for the asylum seekers who have spent almost a month
0:54.5	at sea aboard a Norwegian freighter after Australia refused to accept them. Nauru has offered them shelter
1:00.4	whilst their claims are being processed. It was the 18th of September 2001
1:04.8	when the first asylum seekers set foot on Naru. They were greeted by
1:10.4	crowds of locals. Some were doing traditional dances, others were giving colourful flowers to the quite confused looking Afghans and Iraqis who were stumbling off Australian Navy ships.
1:20.0	The asylum seekers had been trying to travel from Indonesia to Australia on a fishing boat when they got into trouble.
1:28.0	They were rescued by a Norwegian freight ship called the Tampa, but the Australian government refused to take them in.
1:35.6	Eventually the Australian government paid the tiny poor island nation of Nauru 30 million dollars to hold the asylum seekers. This was the beginning of what
1:44.2	would be known as the Pacific Solution.
1:47.0	Yaya, and that's not his real name, was one of the first asylum seekers to set foot on the island.
1:54.1	We left the Navy ship in group, so I was in second or third group.
1:59.7	And what were you feeling when you first arrived?
	...

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