BY SARAH STEPHEN
A 19-metre, rotting, leaky Indonesian fishing boat, with a capacity for 150 passengers, picked up more than 400 asylum seekers from Lampung on October 18 to make the journey to Christmas Island. A few hours out to sea, the boat started leaking and capsized within minutes, sinking rapidly. Over 200 people in the boat's hull went down with it.
About 120 people were left adrift in the ocean after the boat capsized, but only 44 of those survived after spending 30 hours in the water. It was by chance that an Indonesian fishing boat found them shortly after dawn on October 20.
Most on the boat were from Iraq. Many were women and children trying to join their husbands in Australia. Many were desperate.
Fawziqasim, a 37-year-old Iraqi man whose wife, four children and brother were among more than 350 boat people who drowned, told the October 24 Age, "Please, you must help me. I cannot stay here in Indonesia. I came here thinking the United Nations would help my family. But they have done nothing."
Another of the survivors, 35-year-old Iraqi Jalah Shohani, wept as he appealed for help, telling a Sydney Morning Herald reporter: "If 100 people from America die, all the world gets to hear of the news. But now 400 Iraqis have died here and nobody is thinking about us."
Who is to blame?
It is the people smugglers and Indonesian security forces who are directly responsible for this tragedy. A number of survivors have recounted how, when some refused to board the boat because of its bad condition, Indonesian police forced them on at gunpoint. Some were also beaten by police.
Prime Minister John Howard and Labor leader Kim Beazley bickered for a day over the incident, but in the end agreed that Australia was not responsible.
But members of the Iraqi and Muslim communities have laid the blame squarely with the federal government.
Ali-Mehdi Sobie, who lost his wife as well as three daughters, told the October 25 Daily Telegraph: "I told them 'No, don't come here', the Australian people are sympathetic to us but the government wants to drive us out. John Howard and Philip Ruddock caused this disaster. They played a big [role] in my family's death because they are not at all compassionate people."
Speaking at a memorial ceremony of 200 people in the Sydney suburb of Auburn, the Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj el-Din Al Hilaly, told the October 26 Sydney Morning Herald, "It is unfortunate to see that innocent lives are being used to win a few votes... Mr Howard closed all the legal and safe means for these people to find freedom and safety. He opened the gates of death for these people."
"Poor countries like Pakistan and Iran are looking after millions of asylum seekers and a vast country like Australia can't even receive 400," he added.
Hilaly has a strong case about federal complicity.
The federal government, with Labor's support, has increased penalties for people smugglers and crew, thereby making boat journeys more dangerous.
According to the October 24 Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian government admitted that increased penalties for the crews of people-smuggling vessels — now a mandatory jail term of five years — were leading them to take on bigger loads and less experienced crew, because they were having trouble attracting people to do the job.
A significant number of those aboard the boat were women and children, many desperate to be reunited with their husbands in Australia.
When found to be refugees, the men, who had also arrived by boat, were given three-year temporary protection visas which prohibit family reunion. If family reunion was a right for all Australian residents, many women and children would not have been on that boat. Islamic leaders have called on the federal government to relax visa restrictions which stop families from moving to Australia.
The Australian government has refused to increase the intake of refugees, especially from the centre of the people-smuggling trade, the Middle East.
For example, Australia does little to assist Afghan refugees at their point of origin. Last financial year, the Australian High Commission in Islamabad, Pakistan, issued 109 refugee visas to Afghans, a number UN officials criticise as inadequate. The Howard government has ruled out accepting any more refugees from war-torn Afghanistan in the coming year.
Waiting to come through official channels is not an option for those most in need of protection.
Australia is also reluctant to accept refugees who have been assessed by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Indonesia, on the spurious grounds that this would only attract more people to come to Indonesia.
The UNHCR representative in Jakarta, Raymond Hall, told ABC news on October 24 that there are another 500 people in Indonesia waiting for resettlement. Some have been waiting for years. They certainly aren't being rewarded for going through the right channels.
The UNHCR has also confirmed that 30 of the asylum seekers who drowned had already been granted refugee status in Indonesia but had been unable to find a third country to accept them.
The October 24 Sydney Morning Herald reported that one of the survivors showed a card proving he had been assessed by the UNHCR to be a genuine refugee. "Look, many of us have been waiting in Indonesia for years to be resettled in a third country", he said. "We have no option but to try to make these dangerous voyages."
Only under pressure from this latest mass drowning tragedy has Australia agreed to accept a paltry 40 refugees from Indonesia for repatriation. They won't, however, be those most in need of Australia's protection. In addition, they must already have relatives in Australia.
Immigration minister Philip Ruddock's response to criticism of government policy was chilling. He told the October 26 Daily Telegraph that those who paid people smugglers had to accept responsibility for their fate: "People have some personal responsibility in relation to the circumstances in which they put themselves".
The latest tragedy does not confirm the correctness of the government's campaign to "educate" asylum seekers of the dangers of travelling to Australia by boat. Neither does it confirm the correctness of trying to stop boats from leaving Indonesia altogether.
What it confirms is that people are prepared to risk their lives when all other avenues are closed off. It also confirms that Australia must help to undercut the people smugglers, who can only be made redundant by directly assisting asylum seekers to get to Australia.
In the late 1970s, Australia was one of a number of western countries that agreed to a program of assisted passage for Vietnamese refugees in camps throughout South-East Asia in order to undercut the need for people to make the journey by boat. As a result, 500,000 people were resettled without risk to their lives, and only a fraction took the risk of fleeing by boat. All had family reunion rights, regardless of how they arrived in Australia.
The current crisis in Iraq and Afghanistan demands a similar response.
Either Australia and other wealthy countries accept their responsibility to take far greater numbers of refugees through official channels, or the people-smuggling trade will flourish and the tragic mass drowning on October 19 will be followed by further tragic events.