BY SARAH STEPHEN
John Howard's government has been caught lying once again about asylum seekers. On November 12, the government's people-smuggling task force was forced to admit that, contrary to explicit claims by government ministers, 14 Kurdish men who landed on Melville Island, near Darwin, on November 4 had sought sanctuary in Australia.
"The passengers on the Minasa Bone did not claim asylum in Australia", declared foreign minister Alexander Downer and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone in a joint media release on November 9, after the Kurds had been forced back onto the Indonesian fishing boat on which they had arrived and been towed by the navy back to Indonesian waters.
On November 11, journalists first got a chance to ask the Kurds whether or not this was true. ABC Radio's AM program reported on November 13 the words of one asylum seeker, Abuzer Gules, 27, from a detention centre in Jakarta: "Thousands of times, thousands. I begged them, I pleaded down on my knees. They sent a Turkish interpreter and I pleaded with him saying, I'll do anything not to be sent back. We spent four days on the water, 10 days without sleep, it nearly killed us. I'm a human, I'm a human being, I'm a refugee", he said as he broke down crying.
"I met a policeman and when I met him I said 'I am sick' and I need a doctor and I am a refugee. He said he was a policeman and he couldn't help us", another of the asylum seekers told the Australian.
Another told journalists the group had been watched by up to seven armed navy and police officers while being towed towards Indonesia.
As a result of the asylum seekers' statements to the media, on November 12 the government did a backflip. According to the November 13 Sydney Morning Herald, Vanstone said: "We were always of the view that this had the potential to be a boat of people who would seek asylum. It's no surprise that there are now stories of people wanting to seek asylum and apparently saying it."
While admitting the group may have claimed asylum, Vanstone argued that "the key thing is, whether they did or didn't, they weren't in Australia's migration zone", She was referring to the regulations the government passed several hours after the Kurds arrived, retrospectively excising the Tiwi Islands north of Darwin, of which Melville Island is one, from Australia's immigration zone.
The next day, the head of the government's people-smuggling task force, Ed Killesteyn, issued a statement admitting that the Kurds had asked for asylum when they arrived at Melville Island, even to the point where one man indicated the word "refugee" in an English-Turkish dictionary.
Killesteyn, however, claimed that the task force only became aware that the men had asked for asylum on November 11, seven days after they had landed.
The incident looks set to become another "children overboard" scandal, when the government lied about asylum seekers throwing their children from a boat, and then went to great lengths to cover up the lie.
Michel Gabaudan, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' representative in Australia, launched a stinging attack on the government on November 11. Gabaudan told AM that the UNHCR has repeatedly asked the Australian government for information and access to the 14 men, but had been denied.
"Australia has shirked its responsibility, not only by refusing to hear the claim of the persons when they were at Melville Island, but also by transferring responsibility for these asylum seekers to a country which has not signed the refugee convention, without having made adequate safeguards to ensure that they would provide access to asylum procedures and would not send them back to a place they might be in danger", Gabaudan said.
Allegations that the government had violated the international refugee convention were given further weight by Mary Crock, a senior lecturer in law at Sydney University, who told the November 10 Sydney Morning Herald: "Excising islands off the coast from the mainland of Australia is no different [in] law to excising the Sydney CBD from Australia — it does not remove obligations in international law."
Vanstone expressed "surprise" and "disappointment" at the UNHCR's pointed criticism of the government's actions, arguing that it had not acted outside the refugee convention.
No claim could more ludicrous. In sending the 14 Kurds to Indonesia without seeking any information from them about their circumstances, Australia has breached a central plank of the refugee convention — a commitment not to return people to circumstances where their lives may be in danger.
In a November 9 media release, former Australian diplomat Tony Kevin pointed out the new low marked by the government's actions: "For the first time in our history, people who had set foot on Australian soil (for that is what Melville Island is) and were seeking asylum as refugees, were simply scooped up by a RAN [Royal Australian Navy] boat, with DIMIA [the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs], AFP [Australian Federal Police] and Attorney-General's connivance, and towed back to Indonesian waters."
In Kevin's view, Australia should now be expelled from the UN Refugee Convention "because our government has dishonoured it".
On November 10, Downer tried to imply that Melville Island had been singled out by the people smugglers who helped the Kurds get to Australia. "Melville Island may have been targeted very specifically by these people".
But the account of a local fisherman, Les Woodbridge, makes a mockery of such an allegation. He told ABC Radio on November 12: "They sort of kept pointing at their chest saying, you know, Turk, Turk, Turk. One bloke actually picked up a handful of sand and gestured, was this Australia? I said, 'Yes mate, it's the Tiwi Islands, part of Australia'. And they all gave a little cheer and a dance."
The joint press release issued by Downer and Vanstone declared that the Minasa Bone's arrival "demonstrates the need for constant vigilance". The Howard government clearly hoped to manipulate the arrival of 14 hungry and exhausted Kurdish asylum seekers on an island 80km north of Darwin into a national issue of "border security", trying once again to repeat its election tactic in 2001. At that time, the manipulation of the MV Tampa's rescue of some 400 asylum seekers was based on creating a false threat, and then "repelling" it with "tough" policies.
Speaking on AM on November 5, Vanstone argued that the swift action taken by the government — towing the Minasa Bone out to sea — was not an overreaction to the arrival of only 14 asylum seekers, but pre-emptive action to stem what would otherwise become a torrent of people. "I don't know what your proposition is — "that we leave these islands not excised until we have thousands of people>", Vanstone rhetorically asked the sceptical AM interviewer.
Labor, the supposed "opposition", is making it so easy for the government to carry out its phoney "national security" agenda.
Labor foreign affairs spokesperson Kevin Rudd told ABC TV's Lateline program on November 12 that the government "talks tough on national security, but what are they actually doing on national security?" He condemned the alleged 40% downgrading of navy surveillance through Operation Relex.
Vanstone talks about making Australia's northern borders "strong and secure", and Labor does nothing to expose the ludicrous absurdity of this notion of securing Australia borders from people seeking sanctuary from brutal repression. Labor actually reinforces the Howard government's attempts to whip up racist anti-refugee hysteria.
More than a week after the Minasa Bone was towed out of Australian waters, Rudd complained that the government was "trashing Australia's international reputation" and being "loose with the truth", but he hasn't once expressed concern about the welfare of the asylum seekers.
The ALP makes no effort to point to the breathtaking hypocrisy of the government which, on the one hand, whips up support for a war against Iraq with lurid stories of Saddam Hussein regime's brutality against the Kurds, yet when Kurds flee torture and death in Turkey, the government orders the navy to tow them back to Indonesia, which has threatened to send them back to Turkey and possible death.
There has been a tidal wave of letters to newspapers expressing anger and disgust at the Howard government's treatment of the Kurdish asylum seekers. The combined effect of a sustained movement in support of refugees since 2001, and growing opposition to the war on Iraq, have created a situation where far greater numbers of people are prepared to question the Howard government's motives.
In an opinion piece in the November 12 Sydney Morning Herald, the brother of an SAS soldier who fought in Iraq with British Special Forces wrote: "All year those of us who opposed the invasion were accused of ignoring Saddam Hussein's bloody history, especially his chemical attacks on the Kurds invasion sceptics are still vilified for our lack of empathy with the brutalised victims."
Using the pseudonym Brian Westlake, the writer lamented that "such fraternal feeling for the world's oppressed [does not] extend to those who arrive on our doorstep", adding: "As Turkish Kurds, it is possible the Melville Island arrivals were driven to abandon their homelands by the regional terror, instability and poverty that my brother travelled overseas to tackle. I will not blaspheme as 'illegal' any uninvited arrival on our shores."
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, November 19, 2003.
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