Bulletin

Issue: November/December 2007

News

Study tours probe refugee issues

About 50 La Trobe University students have learnt firsthand about the complex issues that can follow global development and disasters – issues such as human displacement, flight and seeking refuge.

The students took part in study tours to Bangladesh and Bosnia-Herzegovina, conducted by the School of Social Sciences’ Refugee Health Research Centre (RHRC).

The tours were led by RHRC Director Professor Sandy Gifford and Deputy Director Dr Ignacio Correa-Velez in partnership with Lew Hess, Maria Tucci (Foundation House) and Professor Ron A dams and Mr Hariz Halilovich. Professor Gifford said learning took place through ‘cultural immersion and engagement’.

The tours were for a second and third year anthropology unit, ‘Development and Forced Displacement’. The Bangladesh tour was designed in partnership with the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture.

Twenty-four students spent 22 days in Bangladesh last December. They visited key research and service delivery agencies in the capital, Dhaka, including the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Centre for Trauma Victims, the UN High Commission for Refugees and the Australian High Commission. They also attended seminars by the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit affiliated with Dhaka University and then spent time in the field.

This included visiting displaced communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and a 24-hour journey up-river to learn about life in a religiously diverse village – gaining insights into the complex communal relations between Muslims, Hindus and Christians and learning about the stateless Biharis.

Professor Gifford said the tour also provided insight into the impact of the British Raj and how colonialism had ‘left its imprint on the lives of people in Bangladesh’.

Another tour took place mid-year: three weeks in Bosnia-Herzegovina during which students participated in an international conference in Sarajevo examining genocide and its prevention. They visited Mostar, Blagaj, Medjugorje and Srebrenica, and Graz, Austria. The group also attended a service at Potocari commemorating the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of an estimated 8000 Bosniak males, and spent eight days in Klotjevac, an ‘ethnically cleansed’ Bosniak village near Srebrenica, where they joined in the daily life of a shattered community trying to reconstruct itself.

‘Students learned a lot about the causes and consequences of the war and forced displacement, as well as the impact of reconstruction and rehabilitation in post-conflict societies,’ Professor Gifford said.

Having seen the hardships facing these people, the students organised two fundraising photo exhibitions for them, at the Brunswick St Gallery in October and at the Malthouse Theatre in November.

We had to do something ... and he did!

When Ugandan-born academic Dr Apollo Nsubuga-Kyobe arrived in Australia 21 years ago he believed he was here as a student, courtesy of the Australian Government’s Australian International Development Assistance Bureau and the International Confederation of Trade Unions, which had offered to fund his studies.

Instead, because of a change of regime in Uganda and a delay in the promised funding, he found himself in Melbourne as a refugee.

With few of his kinsfolk around to defray the culture shock, social alienation and personal challenges, the young African learned to fend for himself, working nights and grabbing a few hours sleep before rushing off to classes to get his PhD and a better life.

Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe has never forgotten his own struggle or the despair of many other young Africans who followed him – some as students, some as refugees, others as migrants, all facing the hardships of social and cultural dislocation.

Now a lecturer in management and organisational behaviour at the Shepparton campus, Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe dedicates his skills, education and much of his life to ensuring today’s refugees and migrants are better integrated into Australia’s communities, and better matched to employment opportunities.

‘To get this job,’ he says, ‘I had challenges. I still had challenges even when I was qualified. I understood what migrants go through. And I wouldn’t think my experience was the worst, because so many of these people come from war-torn places, many with interrupted education, without resources – not only Africans, but refugees from all parts of the world.

‘I saw those people brought here before these assistance programs started up. I saw what they went through; you had people dying alone and not connected to anything. We had to do something.’

And he did: Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe was instrumental in establishing many of the
African-Australian community groups and refugee settlement projects that help African-Australians in Victoria today, including the Melbourne-based African Holistic Settlement Services project and the Goulburn Valley Ethnic Professionals Association, both regarded as national role models.

He has also written government funded and NGO reports evaluating and benchmarking settlement services for African communities. He has taken part in local, regional and State migrant consultative processes to help successful settlement.

In January, he received a certificate of appreciation from the Australian Government for his contribution to the settlement of refugee families in Shepparton.

Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe is now seeking funding and industry support for a research project under the auspices of the University’s Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities to investigate migration in the Goulburn-Murray region, comparing patterns of successive waves of migrants.

‘We’ll be looking at where they came from, where they settled, what their skills were, what they brought with them, what skills they’ve acquired since arriving, what seems to have been converted to something useful – and then we’ll look at more recent arrivals, the Albanians, the Afghans, and the Africans, and their skills.’

At a conference on cultural diversity and social harmony in Shepparton in September, Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe spoke about links between skills and employment opportunities for African Australians.

The conference was hosted by La Trobe, in association with the Shepparton Inter-Faith Network, the Ethnic Council of Shepparton and District and the City of Greater Shepparton.