(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
For anyone entering Australia, a huge number is rejected. The pressure on the country is great, but immigration policy can hardly be called generous when at the same time you know that a refusal for many is comparable to a death sentence. So long has this been going on that the world has been bored. Its kind is no longer reported. Nevertheless, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of boat refugees have lost their lives in recent years. Most of them have died because they are forced to stay at sea longer than their craft can withstand.
In the past year, not a single boat refugee has escaped into Australia. The fate of the rejected is uncertain. No one has an overview of who they are, where they are, how many they were or how many are left.
With life as a commitment
Many of Australia's refugees and asylum seekers are willing to sacrifice everything, including their own lives, to enter the country. Every single cent they have scraped together has agreed to a place on some refugee transport, often illegal, and usually totally irresponsible to the fact that one has to do with human life. First, they might travel in overloaded trucks, often in miserable condition. Then they board boats so bad that they barely float. They have little water, food even less, medication may not at all. In these vessels they set off to sea. Many then put their lives to life.
This summer came the fiercest attack on this side of Australian politics; documentary and debate book Dark Victory: The Tampa and the Military campaign to Re-elect the Prime Minister, written by two of Australia's foremost investigative journalists. David Marr and Marian Wilkinson document Prime Minister John Howard's unscrupulous campaign for his own re-election this fall, 2001. Without having planned it like this, this campaign began with the rejection of Wilhelmsenskipet Tampa with 438 boat refugees on board. Ten weeks later, Howard was re-elected by a good margin, precisely on a campaign that focused on immigration policy.
refugee Prisons
Dark Victory fills the gaps in Tampa history, a story that includes lies and bribes, blackmail and media manipulation. The authors claim that the Howard government used illegal interception of talks between the Tampa crew and lawyers who pledged to conduct the refugee case. At the same time, military personnel with detailed knowledge of what was actually going on were given mouth baskets. The port of Christmas Island, where Tampa's captain Arne Frode Rinnan would go, was closed and flights, for example to photograph the overcrowded deck, were banned. Several secret political horse trades were entered into, all without the slightest regard for those that really mattered, the mainly Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban regime.
In Australia, there are almost equal signs between boat refugees and illegal immigrants. The debate over whether "boat people," as they are also called, is about to take over the country has been raging for several years, despite the fact that the actual number of potential immigrants is significantly lower than, for example, in the UK or Germany. Australia's handling of the problem is nevertheless so inadequate that the asylum reception centers – which Australians call detention centers, but which in practice are refugee prisons; often located far out in the desert, surrounded by high fences and forbidden area for outsiders – have long been crowded. This was the reason why Australia, rather than trying to save the refugees on board Tampa, pressured Indonesia to take over the problem. From the time the refugees' distress signal was perceived by the Australian Coast Guard, it took over 20 hours before other vessels in the area were notified of the sea distress. On this, Howard won great respect nationally. At the same time, he lost internationally, and especially in his own region.
Secret operation
In addition to the partly disinformation campaign Howard launched, his government established a secret People Smuggling Task Force whose goal was to develop even better strategies to keep boat refugees away from Australia. The result, of course, was that poor nations such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea were pressured to take over the problem and create asylum shelters where refugees' needs could be met. With the exception of 150 which was flown to New Zealand, it was then also Nauru Tampa eventually sailed.
After the Tampa experience, Howard created the secret "Operation Relex" that drew the Navy into the work of keeping boat refugees away. The instruction was to force all such boats back into Indonesian waters. If they were in obvious distress at sea, the refugees would be picked up and flown directly to Nauru. With such categorical orders, however, the ethical dilemmas did not go unnoticed. For example, should the truth be revealed when the Howard government knowingly and deliberately displayed images of Iranian children floating in the Indian Ocean, claiming that parents had thrown their own daughters and sons overboard to pressure the Navy to take them to Australia? The truth was different: The children were never thrown into the sea, but were photographed before being picked up after their boat fell apart.
Unscrupulous election campaign
In the course of the election campaign alone, leading up to Howard's overwhelming victory, more than XNUMX boat people were sent on to other shores. Many of these, including at least one full boatload, drowned. Still others disappeared, and of those who survived, the vast majority ended up in primitive detention centers, often for a very long time to come. Meanwhile, the laws were changed and the money for "Operation Relex" was tried to be kept hidden. Judges in the case received death threats, and representatives of Wilhelmsen ASA dared nothing more than silence. Howard's election campaign thus went a long way for his friend George W. Bush. But both experience is that a combination of unscrupulous patriotism, manipulation of the truth and cynical exploitation of voters' ignorance leads. If the problems are not solved by this kind of policy, the most important thing is still achieved. Bush was elected, Howard re-elected. Then the economy gets to sail its own sea, and the refugees sail on.
Niels Jacob Harbitz is the project manager at the Human Rights Foundation.
Terry Strates is a freelance journalist and media student.
