Iranian refugee dies after setting himself alight

[Aractus]

So firstly, here's the video of the incident. While it is graphic I encourage you to view it because it shows the incident clearly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV7I5YCvtKA

His final words before setting himself alight were "I can't take it any more".

For background information, you can view my blog article that I wrote three years ago here. Especially watch this video:

https://youtu.be/-uMsi3cQFBI

Which will give you an insight into PNG's culture. PNG is 95% Christian, they are not receptive to Iranian Muslim refugees. That's no longer theory, it's fact. They don't want to be settled in a place that so apprehensive to them. This is the problem we were always going to face: offshore processing is a whole mirage. We can't offer refugees meaningful resettlement in countries which are apprehensive to their cultures. Australia is the single most multi-cultural country in the world: in fact our success in this area has been studied. We have well over 100 different cultures represented with people free to express their cultures; and besides Indigenous people none have any special legal privileges. And it's because we're unique. We don't have millennia old rivalries with other nation-states, represented by "foreign cultures". So we don't perceive foreign cultures as a threat in the same way that Europe does. That's why we're the only country in our region where Arab refugees can feel safe. It's not because we a first-world country. Even if we were, they wouldn't want to live here if we treated them as lesser people.

Now, our mandatory offshore detention centres have been found to contravene the UN Convention against torture. That's right - the UN found that they constitute a legally-binding form of torture. The Iranian man in the video above set himself alight on a day that UN inspectors were visiting the detention centre. He wanted to make the strongest possible point, and although he was still alive and conscious at the end of the video, he has since died from this extreme act of protest.

The detention centre has been found by the PNG supreme court to be unconstitutional. And Australia has know this for well more than a decade. We knew well before the policy that a detention centre in PNG would be illegal; and even had the PNG government pass legislation designed to make it legal. However the court finding was that it was unconstitutional - in other words, the changes in law did not address the constitutional rights of people residing in PNG. And we have been a part of depriving them their constitutional human rights for nearly three years!

We should be ashamed of this. It's fucking disgusting.

Yes we don't want people drowning at sea, and IIRC, about 2% of people sailing from Indonesia to Christmas Island drowned at sea. So that's a very real problem, and we don't want to re-open it. But this measure should have been used purely in a temporary sense to get Indonesia to shut down the human-trafficking, and open up official and safe avenues for people to apply for asylum.

[account_inactive]

Sad, I guess.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

What a bunch of dummies. The bystanders should have let the guy burn to death instead of beating on him putting out the fire. All they did was cause the guy prolonged agony from his massive burns. They had zero means of treating his burns. Their actions were despicable.

It's really surprising that suicide seems to be so rare among the refugees, considering all of the trauma and hardship they have gone through. The depression rate has to be astronomical.