War now off the agenda

 

By Brad Ryan/ Leader /

10 Jun 08

 FOR Elleni Bereded-Samuel, it all started with a group of 14 people and a challenge to tell some stories.

It was 1997, and Mrs Bereded-Samuel, herself a refugee from Ethiopia, had been put in charge of a Maribyrnong Council “story-telling project” for women from the Horn of Africa.

“There was turmoil back home in Ethiopia and it was hard to bring Eritreans and Ethiopians together,” Mrs Bereded-Samuel, who now lives in Point Cook, said.

“A lot of people from my own community, the Ethiopian community, said, ‘how dare you try to bring Ethiopians and Eritreans together’.

“It took me about three sessions to convince them we are not here to fight, we are here for a better life and for our children and grandchildren.”

The two countries once one have a history of conflict and bloody war.

But the collaborative storytelling project, which explored topics like childhood, marriage and life but steered clear of politics, war and death, was a success, with a published book the end result.

From that success, Mrs Bereded-Samuel went on to establish the Horn of Africa Communities Network and was employed by Victoria University to develop programs for migrants and refugees.

She is based at the university’s Footscray campus.

She has also been appointed chairwoman of the Royal Women’s Hospital’s community advisory committee and the SBS community advisory committee.

Her most recent appointment to the Federal Government’s new Australian Social Inclusion Board has got her particularly excited.

Mrs Bereded-Samuel has long been frustrated by bureaucracy and what she sees as its failure to effectively implement policy to help the nation’s most disadvantaged people.

“There is such a gap between policy makers, and the implementation of policy at a grass-roots level,” Mrs Bereded-Samuel said.

“Policy that is developed in an office doesn’t work.

“It needs to come from the grass roots up. Who would know better than a refugee who has experienced torture and war what a refugee needs?”

The solutions to problems of social exclusion need a more holistic approach than the present isolation of people and problems in “boxes”, Mrs Bereded-Samuel said.

Divisions needed breaking down between the three tiers of government local, state and Federal and departments within governments, she said.

“Health, education, welfare (departments) they are not communicating and co-ordinating.

“And the Federal Government will say ‘no, this issue is a state issue’, and the State Government will say ‘no, it’s a local government issue’.” Mrs Bereded-Samuel believes the Social Inclusion Board and Australia 2020 summit in which she participated as a member of the social inclusion stream are signs things are improving.

“When the Prime Minister said he wanted to hear the voices that are not being heard in the Parliament, that was very touching and very motivating,” she said.

“Here is the (national) leader coming out and saying, ‘we know there is an issue and we want to fix it’.”

The Australian Social Inclusion Board will meet every few months to advise the Government on preventing people being left out of the workforce, the housing market and community life

EU to freeze Iranian bank assets if nuclear enrichment continues

 

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor

The Guardian,

Tuesday June 10 2008

European Union member states have agreed to intensify financial sanctions against Iran, going beyond existing UN measures aimed at containing Tehran’s nuclear programme, it emerged last night. Diplomats said the agreement was reached last week and would be announced today in a joint communique at the US-EU summit in Slovenia.

In a draft obtained by the Guardian, George Bush and the European leaders voice common support for UN security council resolutions and declare themselves “ready to supplement those sanctions with additional measures”. The new EU sanctions will target Bank Melli, Iran’s biggest bank, and will be enforced if the Iranian government refuses to respond to a package of incentives to be presented in the next few days in Tehran.

The package offers western economic aid and technical assistance for Iran’s civil nuclear programme, provided that Tehran suspends its enrichment of uranium, which western governments believe could be used to make weapons.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, is due to fly to the Iranian capital as early as this weekend with the Foreign Office’s political director, Mark Lyall Grant, and his counterparts from France, Germany, Russia and China, to underline international backing for the package.

The Iranian government insists its intentions are peaceful and that it has the right to run a comprehensive nuclear programme.

The UN security council has imposed three waves of sanctions against Tehran, but there is resistance from Russia and China to further punitive measures. “The emphasis is now shifting from the security council to the European Union,” one European diplomat said yesterday.

Today’s draft communique states: “We will continue to work together … to take steps to ensure Iranian banks cannot abuse the international banking system to support proliferation and terrorism.”

A European official last night stressed that the EU had gone further than UN resolutions in exercising pressure on Iran in the past and had decided independently to do so again. “This has nothing to do with George Bush coming to town. This is a European decision,” the official said.

The EU agreement to tighten the sanctions on Iran was clinched at a meeting last week in Brussels where Italy agreed to drop its opposition to adding Bank Melli to an EU blacklist