BY TONY KEVIN
Until the Senate "children overboard" committee began to enquire into SIEV-X, the boat that sank on its way to Christmas Island on October 19, 2001, drowning 353 people, mostly women and children, we knew nothing about a clandestine Australian people-smuggling disruption program in Indonesia.
What we now know has emerged slowly and very reluctantly: partly from Labor senators' persistent questioning of Australian Federal Police and immigration department witnesses in the committee, and partly from an initially separate investigation by Channel Nine's Sunday program, which has run four reports since February about a self-confessed Australian people smuggler and AFP-paid informant, Kevin John Enniss.
The disruption program was begun on September 27, 2000, by a ministerial direction authorised by AFP minister Chris Ellison, aimed at stopping suspected illegal entry vessels (SIEVs) from leaving Indonesia. On October 12, 2001, fearing a surge of SIEVs, the people-smuggling task force in the PM's department directed agencies to "beef up" the disruption program. SIEV-X sank a week later.
The Senate committee was given the English- language page of a tri-lingual leaflet widely distributed in Indonesia and other places where asylum seekers gathered, looking for ships to take them to Australia. It includes the statement: "The boats used by people smugglers are overcrowded and dangerous. Too many people have died trying to enter Australia by boat. Stop. Go back. Don't get further into the trap."
From the mouth of Enniss, Channel Nine has established that this is precisely the sort of activity that he engaged in. He took large sums of money from asylum seekers and in return promised them that, as an undercover Australian police agent, he would get them safely to Australia. He exposed them to great danger, sending them off in overcrowded and unseaworthy boats that experienced engine failure or sank.
Enniss did not get them to Australian territory. He defrauded them of their precious savings. He entrapped them. While Enniss was doing these criminal things, he was also working as an AFP informant. This has been admitted by both him and the AFP.
AFP commissioner Mick Keelty admitted to a Senate estimates committee in February that Enniss was not the only AFP informant in Indonesia. I believe that these people were not only informants, but were also as was Enniss active "sting" operators: people who presented themselves as "real" people smugglers, in order to conduct phoney operations that defrauded and entrapped people trying to reach Australia.
So here is the huge and ugly irony the people that the Australian government's leaflet so dramatically warned asylum seekers against using were almost certainly the people set up in business by the Australian government in order to demonstrate the truth of those warnings.
This may seem inconsistent, but in fact is entirely logical. Since the Australian government is trying to deter people smuggling activity, what better way is there to do that than to infiltrate the activity to ensure that it fails? What better way to drive the deterrent lesson home? I am confident that at the end of the investigative road, this will also be proven.
Keelty admitted in the Senate committee on July 11 that the AFP has an overt relationship with selected units of the Indonesian National Police (Polda). These selected units were given generous gifts not money, but things like training conferences in luxury hotels in Bali, promises of new patrol boats, new uniforms and office equipment. In return, Polda units so favoured were under a general not specific obligation to work to disturb and disrupt people smuggling activities: what Ellison referred to in the Senate as "upstream disturbance".
Remember that people smuggling is not a crime under Indonesian law. People smugglers, who are usually foreigners, can only be fined or arrested for minor passport offences.
Keelty said that the AFP hoped that Polda units would arrest people smugglers at the point of embarkation and deliver their passengers over to the UN agencies for migration processing. But he admitted that the AFP did not know how Polda units chose to implement their obligation. He admitted that the AFP would not know if, for example, Polda units decided to disrupt people smuggling voyages by sabotaging engines. He acknowledged that such activities would be illegal under Australian law.
This was an ominous admission. Some of the dangerous voyages that we know about not just SIEV-X, but also the earlier Palapa voyage in August 2001, whose 433 passengers were rescued by the Tampa involved reports of uniformed police taking people to the boats or forcing them to board overcrowded boats.
We know Enniss was working with Indonesian police in Kupang. But were these the very Polda units that the AFP was training and encouraging?
An AFP press release of August 24 boasts that Enniss' information came cheaply to the Australian taxpayer only about $25,000. Thanks to Channel Nine's Sunday program, we know why. Enniss largely financed himself out of the dirty profits from his entrapment operations. One young Pakistani man paid him $10,000, went out in a boat that sank, swam back to shore, but never saw his money again.
The AFP is adamant that it did not know about Enniss' people-smuggling and extortion activities, and that if he did undertake such activities this would have been done in collusion with Indonesian police, not with the AFP.
Thus, whatever Enniss did that was illegal under Australian law was done with Polda. Whatever the AFP did with Enniss and with Polda was legal. But an eminent professor of criminal law at Sydney University, Mark Findlay, has challenged this. He said on Sunday on September 1 that for the AFP to use Enniss as an informant, if it knew anything at all about his criminal people-smuggling activities, would be likely to implicate the AFP in his criminality. We will no doubt hear more about this.
The AFP has refused to reveal the contents of a series of intelligence reports it had before and after SIEV-X sailed, on the people smuggler, Abu Quassey, and on his preparations for what we now know as the SIEV-X vessel, but which it then referred to as the "Abu Quassey vessel".
We know from other evidence that detailed reports on this vessel were reaching Canberra, but the AFP refused, on July 11, to reveal their content, on the grounds that this could compromise possible future legal proceedings against Quassey.
The AFP and other official witnesses claimed there were many disrupted attempted departures before the vessel finally departed from Bandar Lampung in Sumatra on October 18. But survivors do not support this claim. They remember only one overnight bus journey, from Cisarua near Bogor in Central Java across to Merak, then by car ferry to Sumatra. They hid all day in a hotel belonging to the local chief of police. They were then bussed down to the sea and loaded onto a 19-metre boat all 422 of them by armed police officers. Those who became frightened at the gross overloading, and tried to get off, were forcibly prevented from doing so.
The boat left before dawn on October 18. It had a long crack in the hull, and required bailing from the outset of the journey. A group of 25 passengers were allowed to get off on the way. They paid to be transferred to local fishing boats. They were the lucky ones. The rest went on.
The next day the engine failed, in international waters about 60 nautical miles south of Java. The becalmed and top-heavy boat started to roll heavily. The hull cracked open. Water poured in. The waterlogged boat overturned and broke up. Of the 397 passengers on board, 353 people, mostly women and children, drowned.
No crew members were ever seen again. During the night, many survivors saw mysterious large grey ships with searchlights and military-type deck structures. They shone lights on the waving and shouting survivors but did not rescue them.
On October 20, 44 survivors were picked up by fishing boats which happened to come out looking for them, it was claimed, because they saw floating luggage. The survivors were quickly taken back to Jakarta and presented to the waiting international media, as a tragic object lesson of the huge dangers of people smuggling.
The next day, the Indonesian government reversed its previous firm opposition to the Australian navy towing asylum-seeker boats back to Indonesian waters. Indonesia also finally agreed to co-host an international anti-people smuggling conference, something Australia had been pressing Indonesia to do for months. The flow of boats stopped within a couple of weeks. Boat people arrivals have not been a problem for the Australian government since then.
Quassey was arrested, tried and sentenced to a few months in jail for passport offences. He admitted to having accomplices, but would not say who they were. He became nervous when asked by an SBS Dateline reporter if his accomplices were from the police or military.
Survivors say that they were warned on pain of death to never testify against Quassey. If he was part of a Polda people-smuggling disruption operation, the Polda units concerned will have many ways to protect and reward him.
I do not think that any reasonable person could now claim, faced with all the circumstantial evidence outlined here, that the sinking of SIEV-X was nothing more than the tragic result of a greedy people-smuggler overloading his boat in collusion with equally greedy Polda accomplices. There are just too many smoking guns in this story now.
I believe this was a great and deliberate crime an utterly ruthless entrapment and deterrence operation, whose planners must have known that they were looking at the possibility of huge casualties if the boat did not sink early in the voyage and close to shore.
There is no evidence at this point that any AFP officers helped plan the SIEV-X sting. But the huge silences in AFP testimony, and its manifest reluctance to reveal the truth on the disruption program, do not encourage confidence that the AFP will share readily what it may know about what happened to SIEV-X especially if there is a possibility of any arms-length criminality being established.
[Tony Kevin retired from a 30-year career as an Australian diplomat in 1998. Concerns that Kevin first raised in March led to the "children overboard" Senate inquiry launching a parallel investigation into SIEV-X. This is an abridged version of a talk given at an October 3 Newcastle Action for Refugee Rights public meeting.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 16, 2002.
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