33 research outputs found
Freeing Ali
No full textMichael Gordon introduces Ali Mullaie, one of the refugees he interviewed on Nauru for his new book, Freeing Ali: The Human Face of the Pacific Solution, published by UNSW Press in association with Australian Policy Online
THE DAY Ali Yawar Mullaie was to leave Nauru and begin a new life in Australia, he was asked to call by the office of the second most senior minister in the Nauruan government, David Adeang, and pick up a reference. For more than three years, Mullaie had simultaneously been a detainee at a refugee processing centre and a volunteer teacher in the Nauru education system. In 2005, his students included Adeang’s son and the daughter of the education minister, Baron Waqa. He may have been rejected three times by Australian immigration officials before his claim for refugee status was finally accepted in mid-2005, but he made an indelible impression on the tiny, near bankrupt cauldron that is Nauru.
Adeang’s reference was glowing. It began by saying that Ali Mullaie had been well known to the government and people of Nauru for almost four years. ‘He has endeared himself well with the community, particularly the teachers and students of Nauru with whom he was closely associated as a teacher - at the Aiwo Primary School, at the Arubo Catholic Mission and finally at Nauru College. He is of friendly and personable demeanour, and this allowed him to make many friends in Nauru, of all ages.
‘The government looks favourably upon Ali as a friend to our people, and appreciates very much the work he has done for our school children. He will be missed as he departs for Australia, but he carries our best wishes and we would welcome his return visit to renew acquaintances and make new friends in Nauru. I have personal confidence Ali will do well in Australia in whichever field he chooses.’
At Nauru College, a farewell party was hastily organised and principal Floria Detabene made a generous speech. Her reference told how the school had come to depend on Mullaie to fix its computers, help staff with computer skills and teach students in remedial reading and desktop publishing. He had even become the school’s digital photographer for the end-of-year magazine. In performing these duties, she noted that he had never complained about anything and always been punctual. ‘Mr Ali has become a dear friend to the students and staff of Nauru College. He will be greatly missed.’
Shamel Mahmoodi, who ran the processing centre for the International Organisation for Migration, also penned a reference, this one paying tribute to the work Mullaie had done teaching English and computer skills to the other asylum seekers. ‘As a volunteer, Ali was essentially on call 24 hours a day,’ he wrote. When he was not teaching, his ‘linguistic abilities enabled him to interpret for IOM and others in meetings.’ He also helped in camp management and ‘provided valuable suggestion for improvement of quality of life in the camps.’
All of this was said about a young man whose claim for refugee status was ultimately found to be genuine - someone clearly possessing outstanding qualities, yet also someone the Australian government had been prepared to make an example of in the name of border protection.
For Mullaie, leaving Nauru was considerably less traumatic than arriving in December 2001, or the many times since then when the isolation, uncertainty and memories of past trauma enveloped and very nearly suffocated him. But it was an event tinged with sadness because he was leaving friends who were still waiting for official recognition of their fear of persecution if they returned to their homeland - friends like Arif Hussaini, who had responded to Ali’s good news by hugging him warmly, then collapsed when he realised his own Nauru nightmare was not over.
And it was only the beginning of a new chapter of uncertainty for Ali Mullaie. He possessed refugee status but, under Australia’s border protection policy, that did not immediately entitle him to permanent protection or the prospect of being reunited with the parents and siblings he had been forced to leave behind.
ALI Mullaie’s life in offshore detention began in pandemonium. On 8 November 2001 the old Indonesian coastal trader on which he was travelling from Indonesia to Australia was intercepted by the Australian Customs vessel Arnhem Bay as it made its way towards Ashmore Reef. Mullaie owed his spot on the boat to Fatima Shahi Husseini, a young, pregnant Afghan woman who was making the trip with her husband, Sayyed. She had intervened when the people smugglers in charge of the vessel told Mullaie and several others they should wait for another boat. She insisted they had paid their money and were accompanying her. Reluctantly, the smuggler acquiesced.
Mullaie was at the front of the crowded vessel when a party from a second vessel, the patrol boat HMAS Wollongong, climbed on board. It was then that black smoke began billowing out from the front of the boat, triggering a panic on the deck. Next came an explosion and the instruction from the Navy sailors for all passengers to jump into the sea.
As one of the asylum seekers who were initially refused passage, Mullaie had not been given a life jacket. All he could find on the deck was a jacket designed for a child, torn in half and useless. He then found a plank of wood and weighed up his limited options. A tubby man behind him on the deck warned that he would hurt himself if he jumped in clutching the plank. ‘Give the wood to me,’ he suggested, promising he would throw it in after Mullaie was in the water. Mullaie did not trust him. He was almost petrified with fear because he could not swim. So he jumped in, holding the wood, and badly jarred his arm on impact. Then he invited others who were in the water to join him.
Also in the sea was Aslam Kazimi, another young Afghan asylum seeker. During his time in transit in Indonesia, Kazimi had seen a video of the film Titanic. As he struggled among the throng of flailing arms and legs, he felt as though he was an extra in the movie’s most dramatic scene. It was frightening, but almost surreal. He also remembered how, in the film, passengers dragged each other down attempting to save themselves, so he struggled to find some clear water, away from the others. Kazimi was barely conscious when he was pulled into a rescue boat and taken to the Wollongong. The first thing he recalls seeing was the bodies of two women who had drowned despite desperate efforts by crew members to save and revive them. One of them was the young and pregnant Fatima Shahi Husseini. It is among the many scenes Kazimi will never forget.
Ali Mullaie spent almost two hours in the water and was the last asylum seeker to be rescued that day. He had been joined on the plank of wood, to which he was clinging, by four other people, including a young girl who would later become one of his students on Nauru. From time to time in the months ahead on that tiny island state, they would remind each other of their shared experience. One of the four would subsequently return to Afghanistan, one was still on Nauru when he departed, the girl was in Melbourne and the fourth had been accepted by New Zealand. Mullaie had to stay in the water when the others were rescued because there was not enough room on the rescue vessel for him. After he was saved, Mullaie was with Sayyed Husseini when the young farmer was told his wife had drowned. They wept together, and Mullaie remembers an Australian sailor retreating to the upper deck where he, too, broke down, consumed by the tragedy, hiding his tears behind his cap.
News of the deaths reached Australia on the last morning of the 2001 federal election campaign, which had opened five weeks earlier with the accusation that desperate asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard when their boat was intercepted. Evidence had just emerged that this claim was untrue, but it was overshadowed on election eve by reports that the fire on Ali Mullaie’s boat had been deliberately lit. As one slur on the character of the asylum seekers was beginning to be discredited, another was capturing the headlines. Much later, investigators would conclude that it was impossible to say whether the fire was deliberately lit and that there was no evidence of a plan among the passengers or the crew to destroy or damage the boat if stopped by Australian authorities.
Ali Mullaie was 18 when he was taken into offshore detention. His command of English was extremely limited and he had no computer skills. His escape from danger in Afghanistan was over, but the next chapter in his short life was about to begin. After spending almost two months on Christmas Island, he was off to Nauru, where more than 1200 asylum seekers were detained in two camps. Conditions were oppressive and outsiders were forbidden from offering assistance or reporting to the outside world who these people were, what were their stories and what was happening to them.
Freeing Ali is about my contact with Ali Mullaie and many others who were affected by the Australian government’s Pacific Solution, the name applied to its response to the problem of unauthorised boat arrivals. It is also about the network of Australian support that conducted a relentless campaign to give these people relief or, at least, a dose of hope. In many cases, it was ordinary Australians who played critical roles in improving the lives of asylum seekers and securing positive outcomes. The campaign began to pay serious dividends after more than four years when, faced with a revolt by moderate Liberals led by Petro Georgiou, John Howard agreed on 17 June 2005 that his policy of mandatory detention should have a ‘softer edge.’ •
Michael Gordon is national editor of the Age. His books include A True Believer: Paul Keating and Reconciliation: A Journey. He is a research associate of the Swinburne Institute for Social Research.
Photo of Ali Mullaie by Michael Gordo
Hybrid PSOTVAC/BFA technique for tuning of robust PID controller of fuel cell voltage
No full text171-178<span style="font-size:
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Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) which is one of the most important
types of fuel cell, during system load variations has been described. Fuel cell
output voltage should be kept in a constant value against the load variations
and a controller should be designed for this purpose. Accordingly, the modified
PID controller has been proposed which is optimized based on Hybrid Particle
Swarm optimization with Time Varying Acceleration Coefficients (HPSOTVAC) and
Bacteria Foraging Algorithm (BFA). In order to use this hybrid technique, at
first, the proposed problem is written as an optimization problem which
consists of the objective function and constraints, and then to achieve the
most desirable controller, <span style="font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:" times="" new="" roman";mso-fareast-font-family:"times="" roman";="" mso-bidi-font-family:mangal;background:white;mso-ansi-language:en-au;="" mso-fareast-language:en-us;mso-bidi-language:hi"="" lang="EN-AU">hybrid technique is applied to solve the problem. Simulation results are operated in
various loads in time domain, and the results show the efficiency of the proposed
controller in contrast to the previous controllers. Simulation results
demonstrate the good accuracy of the proposed controller performance by
considering the problem solving.</span
Nasiruddin Tûsî ve 13. Yüzyıldaki Sosyo-Politik Rolü
No full textBir bütün olarak insanlığın
medeniyet tarihinde ve kısmî olarak İslam medeniyetinde insan hayatının çeşitli
yönlerini değiştiren veya şekillendiren olağanüstü kişilikler olmuştur. Bu kişiliklerin
bazıları hakkındaki yargılar kütle halindeki tarihsel verilerle çevrilidir
The anatomy of ‘fake news’: Studying false messages as digital objects
No full textPublic concern about ‘fake news’ skyrocketed following the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum, and has only intensified since then. A burgeoning body of research on the topic is emerging, and conceptual clarity is vital for this research to converge into a cumulative body of knowledge; the purpose of this article is to underline and address some of the conceptual clutter and ambiguities around the concept of fake news and situate it within its social context. To do so, we first discuss the problems with current terminology and conceptualisation, and then draw on recent developments on the ontology of digital objects and their attributes to shift the focus from fake news to false messages, a type of syntactic digital objects comprised of content and structure and characterised by attributes of editability, openness, interactivity, and distributedness. Then we expand this concept further by placing it within a network of actors and digital objects. Our analysis uncovers several areas of research that have been overlooked in the study of fake news
Protonation Constants of Adenine and Adenosine in Different Aqueous Solutions of Methanol and Ethanol
No full textIonic Strength Dependence of Formation Constants, Complexation of Glycine with Dioxouranium(VI) Ion
No full textIonic strength dependence of formation constants, complexation of nitrilotriacetic acid with tungsten(VI) ion
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