These children deserve a safe place they can call home.

By DR GRAHAM THOM

As a father myself, there’s something particularly haunting about seeing kids trying to play in a desert, made up of rocks and dust, devoid of anything you’d relate to a normal childhood.

Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan is 12 kilometres away from the border with Syria and a place I recently visited as part of my role as Refugee Coordinator at Amnesty International.

This camp is temporary ‘home’ to more than 85,000 people. Over 17,000 of them are children under the age of five.

These kids are highly traumatised by the armed conflicts they’ve fled and often sit quietly alongside their parents as they recount stories of beatings, kidnaps, rape and murder.

One couple I met had three young children that sat and watched nearby as they told me how the husband’s sister had been brutally murdered. They explained how not long after, while the family was at home, militants invaded. The husband was assaulted in front of his family, he had bones broken, including his shoulder. His wife, who had only given birth a few months before, to the couple’s youngest child, was brutally kicked in the stomach.

Their two young boys, both aged under five, were also beaten. One of the boys had his tooth smashed and the other was hit in the forehead with the butt of a rifle, leaving him with a large scar. The militants stole anything of value and smashed everything else, telling the family “You have to leave”.

Later that day, I watched as these kids played with other children from the camp in trenches that had been dug as an extra security measure, around the perimeter of the camp. For the kids, this wasn’t a reminder of the precarious situation they were in: it was just another thing they could climb and play in and have fun.

These are the kids that Australia can and should do more for. They are the innocent survivors of civil war in Syria and Iraq, hoping trauma is a memory left behind in the ruins of their homes.

Hundreds of thousands of people across northern Iraq are fleeing ethnic cleansing by the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS or IS) and bloodshed in Syria has claimed the lives of over 100,000 people and driven 9.35 million people from their homes. These numbers are made up of innocent men, women and children, including those who now languish in refugee camps like Zaatari.

The Australian Government’s response to this refugee crisis has been to spends millions of dollars on offshore processing, subjecting asylum seekers to humiliating treatment, in a deliberate attempt to pressure them to return to their country of origin. This is regardless of whether or not they are genuine refugees.

It would be nice to be able to welcome Thursday’s announcement by the Australian Government highlighting the 4000 refugee places under a ‘Special Humanitarian Program’ (SHP) available to offshore applicants. But this ‘announcement’ is not actually providing extra places for refugees, as the statement would suggest, but instead simply restating the governments policy that it will will resettle 4000 people, globally each year, under its SHP. The  Iraqi and Syrian Christians mentioned will still have to be sponsored by close family members in Australia. Yet how many of those fleeing the current violence have close family members here?

Compare this to the fact  that Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey are currently supporting more than 2 million refugees that have crossed their borders in the past two years. Meanwhile, Australia committed to providing just  13,500 spaces for its entire humanitarian program in 2013/14, actually reducing the intake from the previous year. The Australian government has the capacity to increase this, to at the very least, the previous 20,000 places.

If you’re undecided about this, I’m sure what we can agree on is that like my own children, the kids in Zaatari, still playing in their makeshift playground in the dirt, deserve a safe place they can call home.

Dr Graham Thom is the Refugee Campaign Coordinator at Amnesty International.