T A M P A S C A M P E R

Transcription

1 [ E S S A Y ] T A M P A S C A M P E R BROADCASTER AND AUTHOR PETER MARES ASKS WHY WE WERE SURPRISED BY THE TAMPA AFFAIR IN February 2002, John Howard described Australians as a much travelled and much travelling people. He said the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 were not only an awful attack on a huge metropolis, but also an attack on the capacity of the world to maintain that human mobility, that easy movement of people, particularly amongst the young, which has become a constant characteristic of the experience of nations such as ours. Reporting these comments, the Australian (4 February 2002) adorned them with the headline PM the young travellers defender. I can only presume the sub-editor was being sardonic. Five months earlier John Howard had prevented the Norwegian container ship MV Tampa from docking at Christmas Island to disembark 433 asylum seekers rescued from a sinking vessel in the Indian Ocean. The Prime Minister called out the navy to intercept subsequent boatloads of Afghans, Iraqis and Iranians most of them young, many of them in fact just children in order to prevent them too from setting foot on Australian soil. [114]

2 [115] Tampa Scamper John Howard s paean to human mobility indicates what is really going on here. Australia, an affluent, developed nation, demands for its people the right of free travel throughout the world, while constructing a fortress that will keep others from arriving on our shores, unless of course they too come from affluent, developed nations, or from the upper strata of society in poorer countries. If you can afford to visit Australia as a full-fee-paying student or wealthy tourist, then we will let down the drawbridge and grant you entry. So why were we so surprised by the Tampa affair? I am not trying to pretend that I could see the Tampa, or some similar vessel, steaming towards us through pre-election waters of The point of my question is that the treatment of the Tampa was consistent with the previous thrust of Australian refugee policy and, indeed, largely consistent with refugee policies as they have evolved elsewhere in the developed world. The broad aim of that policy is to stop asylum seekers from ever crossing your frontier, in order to prevent them from invoking the protection obligations enshrined in the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. The UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw acknowledged this in June 2000, when he was still Home Secretary and responsible for immigration. At a public forum in London, he pointed out that the 1951 convention gives people facing persecution the right to claim asylum, but does not oblige any nation to admit people through its borders so that they can make that claim. The consequence as he admitted is that asylum seekers are forced to break the law to seek safety. But it took the Tampa s arrival to lay bare these mechanisms, and those of us who were not busy applauding the government were shocked to see how crude the business of border protection really is. In fact the same processes have been operating for years, in an unobtrusive, bureaucratic way that does not discomfort us or offend our sensibilities. For example, Australia has Department of Immigration officials posted at major airports in South-East Asia. The job of these Airline Liaison Officers (ALOs) is to help airport counter staff to detect document fraud false passports, false visas and to prevent travellers holding such documents from getting on a plane to Australia. In , Australian ALOs intercepted a total of 353 people in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Denpasar. We will never know how many of them were refugees. Airlines are pressed to cooperate with this screening procedure. Fines of $5000 are imposed on any carrier that inadvertently allows an inadequately documented traveller refugee or not to land at an Australian airport. 1 Airport counter checks are preceded by another level of screening. When

3 Peter Mares travellers apply for a visa to visit Australia they are assessed against certain risk criteria. Applicants from so-called refugee producing countries will be refused a visa if they are deemed at risk of seeking asylum after arrival. This reached a level of absurdity in pre-reformasi Indonesia when East Timorese who wanted to apply for a visa to visit Australia were forced to fill out their application forms on the footpath outside the Australian embassy the fear being that if they were admitted to the embassy compound itself, then they might seek to claim asylum on the spot. 2 Without a visa to get you past immigration controls, the only legal route to refugee protection in Australia is the much vaunted offshore humanitarian resettlement program, which has an upper limit of 12,000 places per year. This is the queue that the Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, so frequently accuses the boat people of jumping. A more appropriate metaphor (coined by David Corlett at La Trobe University) is a refugee heap out of which very few are plucked for resettlement in countries like Australia. 3 Given the barriers erected on the legal route to Australia, it is not surprising that some asylum seekers will sell their land and whatever other possessions they have in order to scrape together enough money to engage a people smuggler and then risk a dangerous journey from Indonesia to an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. When the federal government prevented the Tampa from disembarking its passengers at Christmas Island, it was simply taking the next logical step in policy, closing off another route by which refugees might actually make it past our border controls, and so make a call on our obligations under the 1951 convention. This is not so different from what happens elsewhere. In the 1990s the US navy was used to intercept boat people from Haiti and Latin American nations were called upon to house the displaced Haitians on Washington s behalf. Dramatic actions on the high seas are the exception. Usually the mundane mechanics of border protection do not attract much scrutiny. The federal government s ideal scenario was that the Tampa and any subsequent asylum boat would be despatched back to Indonesia. This would be done under the rubric of regional cooperation. If the boat people wish to claim refugee status, they can do so at the Jakarta office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This is the local equivalent of European policy, where for example a Tamil asylum seeker who flies to Warsaw and tries to cross from Poland into Germany may be turned around at the German border, under agreements that asylum seekers must have their refugee claim assessed in the first European country in which they set foot. (The difference is that [116]

4 Tampa Scamper Poland has signed the 1951 convention and undertaken not to send refugees back to a place of persecution. Indonesia has not.) In choking off the maritime access route from Indonesia to Christmas Island, the federal government created the conditions in which children might be thrown overboard. We now know this did not happen in the recent case but I believed the story when it first surfaced. I found it conceivable that parents would throw their children overboard with life jackets on and I fear that something like this may yet happen in the future. My conclusions about why a parent might resort to such measures are rather different from the views of the Prime Minister, who so famously said I don t want people like that in this country, I really don t. ON the afternoon of Saturday 6 October 2001, HMAS Adelaide closed in on the Olong, a 25-metre wooden-hulled boat carrying 223 asylum seekers, which had set sail from Indonesia. 4 An inflatable craft was launched from the Adelaide and pulled alongside the Olong. The sailors noted the presence of at least ten children on board, including a small child holding a sign that read SOS. Most of the passengers were wearing life jackets. The sailors warned them that they were heading towards Australian waters without authorisation and instructed them to turn around. The Olong ignored the instruction and the Adelaide continued to shadow the vessel. By early morning on 7 October the lights from Christmas Island were visible on the horizon. The inflatable craft again pulled alongside the Olong and, as it entered Australia s contiguous zone, renewed warnings were issued. The vessel was told to heave to in English, Indonesian and Arabic, the message relayed from the sailors in the inflatable and by loudhailer and radio from the Adelaide itself. A couple of hours before dawn, after conferring with his superiors in Canberra, Norman Banks, the commander of the Adelaide, shone a searchlight on the water metres in front of the Olong. Over a period of twenty minutes, four bursts of warning shots were fired into the illuminated patch of sea. Still the Olong sailed on. The warship then manoeuvred more aggressively close to the vessel to slow it down, which facilitated a distraction and allowed an assault type non-compliant boarding by nine sailors armed with batons and pistols. The boarding party took control and turned the Olong back in the direction of Indonesia. It was still dark and the boarding party reported that many of the asylum seekers were angry, disappointed and making veiled threats to commit suicide, gesturing with wooden sticks and being very vocal. One man jumped overboard but he was quickly recovered. After dawn broke more asylum seekers jumped overboard. Alto- [117]

5 Peter Mares gether fourteen people ended up in the water and were recovered by the sailors in the inflatable. By this time, Commander Banks had concerns about whether or not the Olong was seaworthy. Water was coming out over the deck and running down the ship s side and some asylum seekers were beginning to damage the boat, by tearing off equipment and heaving it into the ocean. The steering and engines were disabled at various times, and there were acts of vandalism and arson. A second, nine-member boarding party was put aboard the Olong in an attempt to assert control. A medical sailor attended to some asylum seekers who appeared to be suffering from dehydration by rigging up a saline drip. In this situation, would it really have been so surprising if a child were thrown overboard with a life jacket on? Why might a parent do that? Perhaps because they believed that it was their child s only hope of rescue; stuck abroad a listing, wooden ferry, overcrowded with hysterical and desperate people, choked by diesel fumes, having heard warning shots fired in the dark, and now being forced away from the place where you had hoped to find sanctuary, aboard a vessel that seemed destined to sink, a parent might indeed make the heart-wrenching decision to throw their child into the water, praying that at least their son or daughter would be rescued and taken to Australia aboard the sturdy grey naval vessel that was both the cause of their anguish and their only hope of salvation. Government senators have sought to demonstrate that, whether or not children were thrown into the ocean, they did end up in the water as a result of the asylum seekers actions in rendering their vessel unseaworthy. This may be true, but the point is that these confrontations at sea were the product of Australia s decision to stop the asylum seekers making landfall at almost any cost. The federal government s response to the Tampa was policy on the run. All the signs indicate that it was motivated by a desire to win the November federal election. The Pacific solution was really a Nauru fix, an arrangement cobbled together out of political necessity, and with an open cheque book, when it quickly became apparent that the government s first preference of simply sending people back to Indonesia was not going to work, at least not initially. While the Tampa was still anchored off Christmas Island, the heads of Australian diplomatic missions around the region were receiving urgent cables, instructing them to sound out governments about the possibility of warehousing asylum seekers on Australia s behalf. The pressure was coming [118]

6 Tampa Scamper from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The gut response in senior ranks of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was that the policy was wrong and that it would damage Australia s reputation, as it almost certainly has done. The narrow aim of the policy preventing the arrival of asylum seekers on Australia s shores appears to have been met. Since the Tampa, no asylum seeker arriving by boat has managed to gain access to Australia s refugee determination system; since December, no boats have been detected even seeking to enter Australian waters. Three alleged smuggling syndicate bosses have been detained and intelligence reports suggest the number of people arriving in Indonesia en route to Australia has dropped dramatically. No doubt the changes in Afghanistan have helped. With the demise of the Taliban, Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran have more hope of returning home, and fresh outflows of refugees from Afghanistan itself have been halted, at least for now. The tragedy of the SIEV X, the overloaded asylum boat that sank in the Indian Ocean with the loss of 353 lives on 19 October 2001, has probably also served as a deterrent. There are still plenty of refugees from Iraq or Iran, Kurds and Palestinians and others who are seeking a durable solution to their plight, but they have been effectively deflected or diverted from Australia, for the time being. The smugglers will offer them passage to Canada, or the USA, or a European destination, instead. While many countries criticised Australia for its actions in the Tampa affair, politicians and bureaucrats are taking note around the world, watching to see how this Australian experiment will pan out and what might be gleaned from it to augment their own border defences. The British government has been toying with the idea of despatching warships to intercept asylum boats in the Mediterranean, while the USA and Australia have been discussing a kind of refugee exchange. The USA would resettle Afghan and Iraqi Pacific solution refugees who were trying to make it to Australia, and Australia would take Cuban and Haitian refugees who were trying to make it to the USA. A Department of Immigration representative has denied that this amounts to a refugee swap, but this is the implication of the minister s own words. In April 2002 Philip Ruddock said in London: What we re looking to see is that people s migration intentions of reaching Australia, even if they are refugees, [are] not realised that is, that they will often go to places that they hadn t anticipated they might be going to and hadn t planned to go to. 5 [119]

7 Peter Mares In other words, people would be given protection as refugees, but not in a place of their own choosing. The policy rests on an assumption that refugees shop for their destination of choice. There is no doubt some refugees will try to reach a country where they have relatives or friends. But many other refugees end up in Australia by default, because that was the destination on offer from the smuggler they happened to encounter. If they had been offered passage to Canada or the USA or the United Kingdom, then they would have gone there instead. Whatever legal and physical fences Australia erects around its borders, in the longer term the pressure for greater human mobility will only grow. One year ago, fourteen Mexicans men and teenagers died of exposure after trying to cross the Arizona desert to enter the USA. Smugglers had directed them onto a dangerous route known as The Devil s Path in order to avoid stepped-up border patrols elsewhere in the state. The Arizona desert itself only became a popular crossing point after stricter border controls were introduced in California and Texas in the 1990s. As the Economist commented (31 March 2001), developed nations put up stronger barriers and force migrants to more dangerous measures. The same logic saw fifty-eight Chinese suffocate in the sealed back of a refrigerated truck while trying to cross the English Channel and two boys from the Congo freeze to death after stowing away in the wheel well of a Brussels-bound passenger jet. Unless there is a fundamental rethinking of refugee and migration policy worldwide, to open up new, legitimate channels of movement, then we must expect to witness more such tragedies. N O T E S A version of this essay was first prepared for the seminar Gone Overboard: Nationalism, Gender, Race and Rights organised by Gender Studies and the Ashworth Program for Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, 3 May Protecting the Border: Immigration Compliance (2000 edn), Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (Canberra, 2001), pp. 17, 28 29, 38, Louise Williams, Bias claims on Australian embassy, Age, 14 July 1998; Gervase Greene, Embassy off-limits for East Timorese, Age, 15 July The risk profile assessment of visa applicants is described in Glenn Nicholls, Unsettling Admissions: Asylum Seekers in Australia, Journal of Refugee Studies, 11 (1), David Corlett, Politics, Symbolism and the Asylum Seeker Issue, University of New South Wales Law Journal (The Refugee Issue), 23 (3), [120]