Tony Dewberry
After years of struggle by asylum seekers and campaigning by the refugee-rights movement, the racist system of mandatory detention seems to be facing a crisis. Last week the federal government ordered the release from detention centres of all families with children.
In this new climate the refugee-rights movement is organising big demonstrations on the anniversary of the 2001 Tampa events. This year's anniversary protests were set in train by Labor for Refugees, and rallies will be held in many cities and regional centres.
Since August 2001, Tampa Day has been marked on August 26 to affirm public opposition to the crimes against asylum seekers committed by the Howard government, and to reject any idea that those crimes were committed in our name.
The 2001 Tampa crisis was set in train when Australian authorities alerted international shipping vessels that an Indonesian boat carrying asylum seekers was sinking 140 kilometres north of the Australian territory of Christmas Island. Captain Arne Rinnan of the Norwegian cargo vessel Tampa answered the distress call and took 438 asylum seekers on board. Many of them were severely distressed and in poor health.
The Tampa was a cargo vessel, not designed to carry people other than its crew. After picking up the asylum seekers, the overcrowding on board was terrible and many people needed medical assistance.
So, in accordance with international law but in defiance of orders from the Australian government, Rinnan took the rescued people to the nearest port, Christmas Island. At this point PM John Howard ordered the Australian military to seize the Tampa and kidnap the asylum seekers.
Most of the asylum seekers were Afghans fleeing the repressive Taliban regime, a government Australia would soon be at war with. The asylum seekers, who had committed no crime, were taken prisoner and dumped in hastily set up prisons in Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island. This became the so-called "Pacific solution", which condemned hundreds of men, women and children to appalling conditions of imprisonment over many years.
After the seizure of the Tampa came a series of government actions that showed the complete moral bankruptcy of Howard and his ministers. Facing an election, they would stoop to anything to demonise asylum seekers and turn public opinion against them.
The then defence minister Peter Reith claimed that the asylum seekers could include terrorists. Howard and Reith also claimed that asylum seekers from another sinking boat had thrown their babies overboard so as to force the Australian navy to pick them up. The politicians told and re-told this lie throughout the election campaign, despite all the available evidence showing that it was untrue.
The government also excised many Australian islands from the migration zone to prevent people claiming asylum in Australia before reaching the mainland.
Less than a month after the Tampa stand-off, a boat carrying asylum seekers, SIEV X, sank en route to Australia with the loss of 353 lives. To this day, the government has refused to address many unanswered questions about this tragedy and great suspicion surrounds the lack of action by Australian authorities to prevent it.
Four years on, it is hard to recapture the dark mood of those days. Until Tampa, only the far right, like Pauline Hanson's One Nation, advocated turning back boats carrying asylum seekers.
Howard stole this and many other One Nation policies, and took them into the mainstream. After Tampa, Howard did not merely adapt to racism but actively whipped it up.
This was a time when Howard showed his contempt for not only the United Nations refugee convention but also long-established international rules of rescue at sea. It was the absolute low point in Australia's treatment of refugees. The opposition caved in on every front, and public support for the government actually grew.
But a sizeable minority refused to endorse the crimes that were being committed in their name. The refugee-rights movement grew rapidly and took its opposition to the streets. The campaigning reached a high-point in 2002 with protests numbering in the tens of thousands.
The movement that grew out of those dark days has succeeded in forcing some concessions out of the Howard government. But we have no intention of packing up now.
The government is under unprecedented pressure to change its cruel policy and has as yet made only a few tiny steps towards meeting the movement's demands. All supporters of refugee rights need to do all they can to mark Tampa Day this year with the biggest rallies possible.
[See the Activist Calendar on page 23 for details of Tampa anniversary rallies.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 3, 2005.
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