Sparks: Malaysia begins controversial repatriation of asylum seekers to Myanmar

Seen from where a peasant stands, the dock is simple: men with stamped papers loading men without papers onto ships, and no one calling it what it is - selling people back to the men with guns.

Sending the persecuted home to their persecutors is called repatriation, and I note that a sufficiently foreign word can launder any cruelty into respectability.

Watching the officials sign deportation orders with the unruffled grace of men arranging a garden party, I find myself wondering whether the firing squads have also been invited.

Hearing them say the refugees lack documents and therefore lack protection, I point to the circle: the border stripped the documents, manufactured the incapacity, and now cites it as justification.

Holding the principle plainly before us, I ask: if a man flees violence and we return him to it, then every word we have spoken of human dignity is a word we did not mean.

Answer me this, plainly: what is asylum worth if it ends the moment keeping it costs something - a promise kept only in fair weather was never a promise at all.

Reading the procedure described as orderly migration management, I find the old truth again: freedom of movement offered only to holders of the right passports is freedom for the supporters of governments.

Having watched nations preach sanctuary from their constitutions while their docks do the opposite, I know which document they believe - the dock never lies.

Riding in the holds of ships, I know what bodies packed for return to a war feel like - the men counting them count heads, not lives.

Knowing what it costs to run toward freedom, I also know the arithmetic of the men who send the runners back: they have never walked that route at night, or they would not dare call it safe.

Before we tear down the old fence of non-refoulement, I ask who built it and why - men who had seen what borders do to the hunted, and our statesmen cannot even explain why it stood.

Having won revolutions only to watch the old machinery run beneath the new flags, I tell you plainly: a mercy that survives only in speeches was never a mercy at all.

Stripped to essentials, the matter reads: men with papers sending men without papers to the men with guns, and I find no word in the ledger that covers the difference.

Studying the channel through which the displaced are moved, I find it engineered like a sluice - open toward the flood, closed against it - and the design names the hand that built it.

Stating what the officials will not: a right that vanishes when exercised by the wrong man was never a right, and the authority that returns the hunted to the hunter has confessed its own emptiness.

Looking beneath the language of border management, I find the mechanism: the state secures its citizens' convenience by exporting risk to those least able to refuse the transaction, and the impartial spectator does not approve.

Following the policy to the woman it lands upon, I find she fled a burning village, learned the word asylum in a new tongue, and now the same word is stamped on the paper returning her to the ashes.

Observing how the arrangement arose, I find no designer - it accumulated, one quiet regulation at a time, each small enough to pass unremarked, until the whole apparatus returned the hunted to the hunt and called itself procedure.

Allow me to propose, with perfect economy, that since the returnees face conscription regardless, we invoice the generals for the shipping - the only part of the transaction not yet monetised.

Told the operation was conducted humanely, with proper documentation and full compliance, I remark that the hangman also uses a fresh rope - the civility of a cruelty is not the absence of it.