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ON Monday, the High Court of Australia granted a temporary injunction against the transfer of 153 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers to that country’s authorities after a boat conveying them from India was intercepted by an Australian “border protection” vessel near the Cocos Islands.
This followed an admission by Australia’s immigration minister, Scott Morrison, that a boatload of 41 people had been handed over to the Sri Lankan authorities off the port of Batticaloa. It has been claimed that only four of those would-be refugees were Tamils, and that the rest were Sinhalese.
It is unclear exactly when the transfer took place. Nor is there any clarity about the fate of the 153, given that Morrison and other Australian officials have refused to say anything about them.
This has been one of the most disturbing angles since late last year of Australia’s approach towards ‘boat people’: the reluctance to divulge the truth, which is remarkable for what purports to be a democracy.
The fate of Australia’s boat people hangs in the balance.
A vow to ‘stop the boats’ was among the more prominent slogans of the conservative coalition that won power in last September’s elections, and it was borne out shortly thereafter by a militaristic policy tagged Operation Sovereign Borders whereby refugee boats emanating from Indonesia, the main transit point, were towed back into Indonesian waters — at least occasionally violating its sovereignty.
Abbott’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party, had already declared that no one attempting to reach Australia by boat would receive refugee status: that the best they could hope for was “offshore processing”. Abbott enhanced that policy, and compounded it with a news blackout.
The policy of detaining asylum-seekers goes back to Labor prime minister Paul Keating, whose government introduced it in 1992. His successor, the deeply conservative John Howard, reinforced it, and a watershed moment came in 2001 when a Norwegian vessel, the Tampa, which had rescued hundreds of refugees from a floundering vessel, was boarded after it defied warnings to stay out of Australian waters, and most of the asylum-seekers were transferred to Nauru.
“We decide who comes to our country and the conditions in which they come,” Howard remarked at the time, and his attitude is credited with winning him the 2001 elections. What’s far less frequently recalled is that the claims of the vast majority of those rescued by the Tampa — a large proportion of them were Hazaras from Afghanistan — were determined to be genuine, and many of them were eventually accommodated in Australia or New Zealand.
More broadly, Howard’s approach, while feeding xenophobia at home, did sharply diminish the number of boats headed towards Australia. Would-be refugees did not, however, give up on perceiving Australia as a desirable destination, and the flow resumed after Howard was replaced by Rudd, who initially withdrew some of the more draconian restrictions.
One of the present regime’s mantras has been that it is actually doing asylum-seekers a favour by stopping the boats, given that deaths at sea are an inevitable corollary of their chosen mode of transport. That’s not an absurd argument, but there’s also another way of looking at it: try to imagine the desperation of those who, knowing the risks, still take this life-endangering path in the quest for a better life.
Another argument is that many of the boat people are in fact economic refugees, fleeing dire prospects unrelated to political or religious persecution. That may well be so in some cases, but is it really a crime? Global capitalism is more than comfortable with the free transfer of capital and profits, but human resources are viewed far less benignly.
No country is keen to invite an influx of refugees, but that should not entail casting all considerations of compassion, empathy and humanitarianism to the winds. UNHCR, has expressed “profound concern” about Australia’s latest acknowledged action, and many lawyers within the country are convinced it is flouting its international obligations.
A couple of months ago, a Tamil refugee in Victoria burned himself to death in the face of the imminent prospect of repatriation. At least two others have attempted self-immolation. Meanwhile, the nation’s human rights commission has documented “shockingly high” instances of self-harm and thoughts of suicide among children in immigrant detention.
The government remains bent upon keeping such news out of the media cycle, lest the average Australian be pushed to consider the demonised asylum-seekers for what they are: persecuted or deprived fellow human beings who have been promised that the prize for making their getaway is indefinite incarceration in a country they made the mistake of perceiving as a refuge.
Small wonder, then, that a growing number of Australians are increasingly ashamed of their country’s pathetically distasteful predilections, while there is little hope in the short term for a humane change of direction.
Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2014
