I guess those police checkpoints and man hunts reported by Au$$ie tv news about human rights dissidents escaping from a covid holding camp were just fantasy.
I was so hoping these brave people would make it to a neutral embassy like Sweden’s and ask for political asylum since their own country incarcerates them and then hunts them like animals for not taking an unwanted medical treatment.
Yeah. Your fantasy.
The basic story has some truth - but a huge amount of context is being left out. And calling these people human rights dissidents is ridiculous. They were three dumb kids who got bored.
I was so hoping these brave people would make it to a neutral embassy like Sweden’s and ask for political asylum since their own country incarcerates them and then hunts them like animals for not taking an unwanted medical treatment.
And this just shows how much the context matters, and how much ignorance of that context matters.
First of all, the medical treatment is not unwanted. These people have demanded this treatment - and they have the right to do so. They live in extremely isolated slum communities in the middle of the desert. It is part of an agreement between these people and government that in situations where they require medical treatment they will be taken at government expense to a location where they can receive it. Before this was the norm, the people in these communities just died. They want to continue to live on their ancestral lands and governments have taken action to make that possible.
And the nearest proper consulates or embassies to these people are about two and a half thousand miles away. They are basically in the middle of nowhere and that's important in understanding what is going on. This is a place where there are only twenty intensive care beds in a territory about twice the size of Texas, where about a third of the population is immunocompromised. They cannot afford any significant COVID outbreak - their hospital system would collapse in hours with potentially dire consequences.