CANBERRA: It now seems it was all a mistake that 353 men, women and children drowned trying to reach Australia from Indonesia in a leaking people-smuggling boat, but that no-one really cared.
The true story of what happened to the boat, code named SIEV-X for ‘suspected illegal entry vessel’ by the Royal Australian Navy, is being uncovered by an inquiry in the Australian Senate.
At the same time as the country learns what happened in its worst maritime disaster involving boat people, a hunt continues in the South Australian desert for ten other Middle Eastern and Afghani asylum seekers who escaped in a mass breakout from the Woomera Detention Centre a week ago.
Fears are growing for their safety, as the waterless, treeless rocky desert is frozen in the icy grip of the coldest winter in the history of European settlement in Australia.
The facts of the SIEV-X sinking are straightforward, but a web of evasive statements and half truths on the part of senior public servants and naval officers are raising doubts about what the Australian government knew and what its Navy did as the boat went to its doom.
The 19-metre long SIEV-X was not only desperately overcrowded with 397 asylum seekers when it sailed for Australia’s Christmas Island from Sumatra on October 19. It was also sailing into an Australian general election campaign in which the only issue was which party was going to be the harshest in its determination to repel boarders seeking a place in the sun in Australia.
A mere 11 days earlier the Navy had rescued scores of people from another sinking boat close to Christmas Island, and provided the government with photographs which it seized on as evidence that the asylum seekers had threatened to throw their children overboard if they weren’t taken on to Australian soil.
The Senate inquiry has already heard embarrassing evidence that top Naval brass ‘went along with’ the ‘mistaken’ misrepresentation of these images, which led to widespread media demonization of the asylum seekers as being persons unfit for inclusion in Australian society.
The SIEX-X sank the same day it sailed, drowning 150 children among its 353 victims, leaving 44 survivors to be picked up Indonesian fishing boats the following day.
On October 23 the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, said: “This boat sank in Indonesian waters. We are not responsible.”
However the documents and testimony given to the inquiry have revealed that the Navy had been given six detailed intelligence reports about SIEV-X’s condition, plans and movements before it sank.
With the Navy fending off the implication that it turned a politically expedient blind eye to the fate of the SIEV-X and ignored opportunities to avert a sinking or rescue the victims a further piece of evidence came forward.
The aerial surveillance patterns flown by a Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion ‘spy plane’ were released.
At the time and place where the boat is now known to have sunk the plane was in the area, but unable to acquire high resolution images because of the same wild tropical storm believed to have ended the voyage of the unseaworthy SIEV-X.
The Orion again flew over the area the following morning, but the storm continued to rage and it did not know the vessel had foundered or get the visibility that would have shown up survivors.
The SIEV-X part of the asylum seeker crisis is far from over.
Under the laws of the sea, Australia had the knowledge, and the obligation, to mount an intensive search and potential rescue operation for the boat, yet failed to do so.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.