Asylum Seekers
On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the sinking of SIEV X it is deeply troubling to see both major political parties using the tragedy as justification for ramping up Australia’s harsh and punitive treatment of boat people.
By citing SIEV X, both Labor and the Coalition are attempting to put a soft edge on their cruel bilateral policy of offshore processing by feigning humanitarian concern for future asylum seekers who they would have us believe need to be deterred from getting on boats because of the risk of drowning. No longer is it ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’ but ‘We will protect those who would seek refuge in this country by ensuring that they never come’. To use SIEV X as a warning or a threat in this way is particularly odious given the suspicions of Australian culpability in the sinking that have never been fully investigated.
Three hundred and fifty-three lives were lost on October 19, 2001 when SIEV X foundered. Most were women and children. We cannot know the exact numbers of people who have drowned attempting to come to Australia irregularly by boat but there is strong reason to believe that the deaths on SIEV X account for more than half the total asylum seeker lives lost at sea (see this table). So SIEV X stands out amongst the 500 or so asylum seeker vessels that have attempted the journey to Australia over the last 15 years, for both the sheer numbers aboard and for the huge number of lives lost. There was only ever one vessel that carried more passengers and that was Palapa that was rescued from sinking by the MV Tampa in August 2001. There are other disturbing aspects of the SIEV X tragedy that distinguish it from other drowning incidents involving asylum seekers.
A decade after SIEV X, questions of possible Australian complicity in the sinking remain unanswered. The boat set sail in the middle of the 2001 federal election a few days after John Howard’s People Smuggling Taskforce had discussed ‘beefing up’ people smuggling ‘disruption activity’. The full gamut of what exactly this ‘activity’ to disrupt people smuggling voyages involved remains shrouded in secrecy.
SIEV X went down in international waters south of Java in an area where Australia, under Operation Relex, was mounting a comprehensive surveillance operation. It is still not clear why SIEV X was not detected before it sank, or why it took three days before news of this massive tragedy became known. There has never been an official inquiry into the sinking of SIEV X but during the 2002 Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident (CMI) that investigated the Children Overboard Affair, and later during senate estimates, questions were also asked about SIEV X. In particular, it was Labor’s elder statesman, Senator John Faulkner, who vigorously pursued the Australian Federal Police and other agencies concerning people smuggling disruption activities in Indonesia. Faulkner questioned whether the disruption program may have borne some responsibility for the sinking of SIEV X. Indeed, the first recommendation of the CMI Report was for ‘a full independent inquiry into the disruption activity that occurred prior to the departure from Indonesia of refugee vessels’. Subsequent to the CMI Report, between December 2002 and June 2004, the Senate passed three resolutions reiterating the call for a judicial inquiry into the disruption program and issues surrounding the sinking of SIEV X (December 10, 2002; October 15, 2003 and June 22, 2004). Labor went to the 2004 federal election with this as part of its election policy platform. But after the 2004 election Labor dropped this policy commitment.
Despite Labor’s change of policy, Senator Faulkner has never publicly resiled from his concerns about the disruption program and its possible connection to the sinking of SIEV X.
Any doubts about the strength of Faulkner’s misgivings concerning the disruption program are dispelled by reading his three adjournment speeches to the Senate in September 2002. Reading Faulkner is one thing, listening to him speak is quite another. In the final two minutes of his third speech, Faulkner builds to an impassioned crescendo; with scathing fury he raises the chilling and confronting issue of sabotage of asylum seeker vessels including SIEV X, calls for a judicial inquiry and affirms his determination to get to the truth.
Listen to Senator Faulkner’s spine-chilling ‘Licence To Kill’ speech (Take particular note of the last two minutes).
It is significant that on the seventh anniversary of the sinking of SIEV X, in the first year of the Rudd Labor government, a resolution was moved in the Senate by the Greens calling for Labor to make good on its commitment to hold a judicial inquiry into the disruption program and the sinking of SIEV X. This was voted down by Labor, but Senator Faulkner who had been in the chamber earlier in the day was later absent when this resolution was put to the vote. Labor Senator, Jacinta Collins who sat on the CMI Committee with Faulkner and who also firmly believes in the need for a judicial inquiry on SIEV X was similarly absent.
Another SIEVX related resolution moved by the Greens was voted down by Labor again in the Senate last Wednesday with neither Faulkner or Collins casting a vote.
As long as the SIEV X disaster remains uninvestigated and surrounded in a fog of suspicion regarding possible Australian culpability, then it is extremely cynical, if not morally reprehensible for Labor to use this tragedy as fodder for their political propaganda to demonstrate the dangers of attempting to enter Australia irregularly by boat. They have it in their power to remove the stench surrounding this issue by holding the long-overdue inquiry that they pledged back in 2004.
When Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd in June 2010 she spoke of Labor losing its way and implied she’d put it back on track. But under Gillard Labor has more than lost its way – it has lost its heart.
Marg Hutton is an independent researcher and creator of the website sievx.com – a comprehensive archives of published material on the SIEV X tragedy which has been online since 2002
It’s time for the truth to allay, or confirm, our fears about SIEV X
By Steve Biddulph – 19 October 2011
It’s 10 years since the SIEV X disaster took the lives of 353 people, including 142 women and 146 children, at the height of a federal election campaign fought, and won, largely over refugees. Despite other incidents, nothing has come close to this scale of loss. SIEV X remains an unsolved mystery, with many disconcerting undertones that go to the heart of our national conscience.
During the five-year project to build a memorial to SIEV X in Canberra, I made friends with survivors of the sinking, and their stories add to the disquiet that was already starting to grow around the voyage.
The journey began for most through persecution by Saddam Hussein. Faris Shohani had been taken from his school classroom as a child by police and, with his parents, was forced across the border into Iran. His father died from the stress. Faris grew up, married and had a family in refugee camps, but never stopped dreaming of a better life. Today he is haunted by the memory of his wife and daughter drowning as he struggled to keep them afloat. Amal Basry was an educated woman whose engineer husband defied the regime with his political activity. She was the first person rescued after 20 hours in the water, and begged the fishermen to search for her young son. They saved another 40 people, before finally finding the boy, still alive. All around them though, across miles of ocean, the bodies bobbed ”like birds on the water”.
Nothing about the SIEV X story adds up. The passengers were taken hundreds of kilometres across Indonesia in a fleet of blacked-out buses, with motorcycle escorts. In Bandar Lampung they were kept in a hotel owned by the chief of police. Police with guns forced them to board the decrepit vessel, it was loaded until its gunwales were barely above the water. Nineteen metres of boat with three decks and more than 400 people, many had to stand or hold children on their knees in the crush. This did not look like a voyage designed to succeed.
The SIEV X had a cargo of women and children, for an Australian reason. The diabolical temporary protection visas, still mooted by Tony Abbott, took away the fathers’ rights to family reunification. Their families were thus trapped back in Indonesia. Vulnerable mothers and young children, running out of funds, they were easy prey for people smugglers. One man, safe in Australia, actually flew back to bring his wife and ageing mother on SIEV X. All three of them died.
Two years ago, I met Senator John Faulkner, whose forensic mind and fierce integrity are the stuff of legend. Faulkner had argued for the children overboard inquiry to widen its terms and, in the course of his formal and informal enquiries, had found out more about SIEV X than anyone. He gave a disturbing, yet guarded, testimony in the Senate that ended with these words: ”At no stage do I want to break, nor will I break, the protocols in relation to operational matters involving ASIS [Australian Secret Intelligence Service] or the AFP [Australian Federal Police]. But those protocols were not meant as a direct or an indirect licence to kill.”
Faulkner emphasised two things to me when we met. That without his investigations, we would have known nothing about a covert program called the people smuggling disruption program, which John Howard and Philip Ruddock set in motion with the help of the federal police and the Indonesian police. This involved agents whose activities may well have drifted into the ethical shadows. The question is whether these activities placed innocent people at grave risk, either by mischance, or as we must pray was not the case, by design. He also told me something of which I had been totally unaware – in the 2004 election, Labor had in its policy platform a promise to hold a royal commission on SIEV X. This policy was quietly dropped in the revisions Kim Beazley brought about after Labor’s electoral rout. I would argue that, while the political expedience of an inquiry may have changed, the moral imperative has not.
On the water that night, as more than a hundred people still clung to wreckage, two military boats appeared, close enough for them to hear the voices of the sailors. People called out, some began swimming towards the lights. The boats appeared not to see or hear them, and sailed away. Many people gave up after that, and slipped beneath the waves.
What were those vessels doing? And how did they locate the wreckage? Had the vessel carried a tracking device? If so, whose was it? And since such devices are merely a broadcast radio beacon, would it not have been easily tracked from Shoal Bay or other Australian surveillance? Gough Whitlam once boasted he could hear a walkie-talkie on a building site in Jakarta, courtesy of Shoal Bay.
Those of us who built the SIEV X memorial are just ordinary Australians, we are not investigative journalists, or jurists who can subpoena witnesses. A proper investigation needs to be carried out to either set aside our fears, or confirm them. In a democracy, citizens are responsible for their country’s actions. We cannot stand tall as Australians until we dispel the possibility these people died because of us.
Steve Biddulph is a former psychologist and the author of The New Manhood (Finch Publishing).
Galang’s refugee hell
- Stephen Fitzpatrick
- The Australian – 2009
“NOW we are the only ghosts here.” The question had been how many Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees committed suicide waiting for the UN to determine their refugee status on this tiny Indonesian island 30 years ago.
The answer is frightening. Hundreds died here, either by their own hand or from natural causes; vastly more died at sea trying to reach this place.
Abu Nawas Tanawolo, an eastern Indonesian who grew up in the shadow of his country’s contribution to the great diaspora that followed the end of the Vietnam War, is in tears as he tells his truth.
The past weighs heavily on Abu, as it does on Jakarta’s leaders; none of them wants a return to the chaos that was Galang Island, the UN-created solution to the world’s first modern boatpeople crisis, when hundreds of thousands fled war in the hope somewhere else, anywhere else, would be better.
“On those trips they were so tightly crammed that they were forced to urinate and defecate where they sat,” says Abu’s boss at the surreal and deserted tourist park where the two men live out their shared past, remembering the arrivals at Galang’s UN-built port during its years of operation from 1980 to 1996. “The smell when they docked, after weeks at sea, was incredible. Sometimes you couldn’t even go close to them.”
Mursidi, the boss, is a grandfatherly Javanese man who used to tend to the diesel generators that supplied power to the camp. These days, retired, he sits in a museum housed in one of the few remaining intact buildings on the 80ha site, carefully rolling cigarettes of rough tobacco, one after another.
Now almost entirely forgotten, the Galang camp is only a few nautical miles from where Australian Customs vessel Oceanic Viking lies off the port city of Tanjung Pinang, waiting for a resolution to the faltering “Indonesian solution” Kevin Rudd so desperately desires.
The structures at Galang are mostly in ruins and the hulks of abandoned UN vehicles rot in the tropical rain, but the camp is an eerie reminder of the Indochinese diaspora that brought it about.
A beautifully maintained Buddhist pagoda, still used by the area’s Chinese community, speaks of the living; all else, including a desperately sad ramshackle cemetery full of tiny graves and a monument to “those refugees who died while travelling by sea to their freedom”, reeks of decay.
Just a handful of the 250,000 people processed through Galang in those years, many of them now Australian citizens, have been back to visit.
Those encounters are tearful times, with bitter memories of escapes by crowded fishing boat, of disaster, death and pirates on the treacherous South China Sea, of squalid conditions in the camp and, for the lucky few, resettlement in the US, Australia, Canada and select European countries.
Suicide by hanging or self-immolation was frequent as the years went by and the camp filled to bursting with those who, having had their refugee claims rejected, refused to be repatriated. Escape attempts, focused on sailing directly to Australia, were punished by the Indonesian Brimob police guarding the camp. Violence and rape – by refugees and guards – was a daily threat.
Melbourne newspaper publisher and editor Hong Anh Nguyen arrived in Galang in 1980, as the boatpeople surge following the end of the Vietnam War peaked.
Then 29, he spent 13 months on the island with his three younger brothers after their 12m fishing boat, with 154 people on board, was forced back to sea at gunpoint by Singaporean troops, firing rounds into the air. Nguyen and his siblings had travelled for a week from Saigon; his parents never escaped Vietnam. Nguyen says there was anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 people living in the Galang camp while he was there and, although he was not beaten, he knew plenty of people who were.
“Young people at that time who didn’t have their parents, they don’t have a good education, or something like that, so sometimes they behave no good, fighting between themselves, so the Indonesians, they treat them very harsh, they beat them,” Nguyen says. “We had many problems over there because when you live in a camp with about 15,000 people, so many problems. You had not very good facilities, especially the toilet, it was terrible.”
Time and distance are a salve. Having made his life and become a citizen in Australia – as have all three of his brothers – Nguyen is able to look back on Galang with a degree of equanimity.
“In any country, any authority from the police in the developing country like Indonesia or even in our own country, sometimes they are very tough, harsh, and many times they are corrupt,” he says.
For Indonesia the memories are conflicting, too: relatively few, aside from those working in the camp, know of the boatpeople’s precarious existence in their territory.
Those refugees accepted for resettlement in third countries – after what was in many cases effectively a lottery conducted on-site by UN staff, outside the building where Mursidi sits smoking his handmade cigarettes – were taken immediately to Singapore. In the Nguyen brothers’ case, that was followed by a flight to Adelaide.
But for those Indonesians who do understand – and they include many of the bureaucrats negotiating with Australia over how to deal with a new wave of sea-bound irregular migrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere – Galang is a thorn in their side. Talk of an Australian-designed Indonesian solution to the present surge only stirs anxiety over the idea of a new internment camp on its scale.
“We are living in a different era,” insists the Foreign Ministry’s Teuku Faizasyah. “That was the Cold War. And opening a processing centre now would be like a pull factor for those coming to our region, expecting that they would be processed and find the best country as a final destination.”
Instead, Australia helps Indonesia maintain its system of 13 detention centres nationwide, run by the Immigration Department with skeleton assistance from the International Organisation for Migration, and refugee claims that are processed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
It is a shaky arrangement. Australian-trained guards, for instance, are on trial for corruption in Tanjung Pinang, accused of having accepted up to $US15,000 ($16,500) from six Afghan detainees at the centre there to let them escape.
The Afghans were caught and thrown back in the centre, a forbidding new razor wire-ringed prison that Rudd hopes he can persuade the 78 Sri Lankans on the Oceanic Viking to voluntarily enter.
With many of the 78 having already lived in the Indonesian immigration system for several years, experiencing firsthand its inefficiency, brutality and venality, Rudd’s officials on the ground have been fighting an uphill battle during the past three weeks trying to pull off the improbable. And their Indonesian counterparts, while gracious, are quietly determined not to let Australia impose on the country another Galang.
It was the UNHCR that established the internment camp in 1980, after nearly five years of boatpeople fleeing the fall of Saigon had overloaded facilities on the nearby Indonesian islands of Batam, Bintan, Natuna and, especially, Kuku.
In a way it was a win-win arrangement for the businesses ranged around Indonesian president Suharto, who came to power on the back of a vast anti-communist bloodletting in 1965 but also understood the value of capitalism’s quiet logic in the years that followed. The UNHCR provided the funds for Galang; Indonesian corporations, many allied to the Suharto machine, built and ran it.
An Australian-funded hospital on the site was opened in 1980 by ambassador Tom Critchley, the great pioneer of the modern Indonesia-Australia relationship; other countries and international organisations also contributed to Galang’s operation.
Shutting up shop was a different matter altogether: it took from 1989, when the world decided to stop accepting Indochinese boatpeople as refugees and forced them to register as asylum-seekers, until 1996 for Jakarta to get rid of the foreign visitors it never really wanted. Most were repatriated, unwillingly. In the end, the Indonesian navy was deployed to force them out.
“It’s easy to open a processing centre, but when it comes to closing it you face a lot of difficulty,” Faizasyah says, with no irony.
Abu, 32, now a guard at the tourist site the camp has become, grew up here, after his Flores-born father abandoned his Sulawesi-born mother and she obtained employment as a cook for the camp’s guards.
He describes, with untouchable tears that turn to quiet sobs, the phantoms of the past he sees at Galang, but admits there is too much of him in the place to leave.
“Now we are the only ghosts here,” he says, indicating himself and Mursidi. “It’s all just memories.”
He lights incense at the grave of an infant in the miserable cemetery, one of the few still tended to in this rundown expanse of death. The Vietnamese government wants Jakarta to shut down the Galang site altogether, worried the place unites the diaspora against it. “The regional officials have told us they won’t do that,” Mursidi says. “This is important.”
On the hill above, a shrine to Dewi Kuan Im, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, watches over Galang. The shrine, like the pagoda nearby, is lovingly kept, a tribute to the faith of those who built it.
In the distance, the Oceanic Viking sighs heavily on the swell of the South China Sea.
Stephen Fitzpatrick is The Australian’s Jakarta correspondent.