Authors: Caroline Moorehead
The difficulties come with asylum seekers. There is nothing orderly about flight from persecution. Some arrive legally, on a tourist visa, and subsequently apply for asylum; others are overstayers, “unlawful non-citizens,” who fail to depart after their visas expire.
There are some 60,000 of these in Australia at any one time, and 21,000 are caught each year. The real problems start with those the Liberal government calls illegals—wrongly, as it happens, because Australia has ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention, which specifically recognizes that refugees are not obliged to have documents. These are the asylum seekers who reach Australia without a visa (most often by boat operated by a smuggler, usually from Indonesia) and then ask for asylum. The use of the word “illegals” suggests criminals, people who have done wrong, terrorists, certainly not people entitled to anything. They are seen as “queue jumpers,” stealing the places of the “good” refugees who have been patiently waiting their turn. On their way to Australia, it is said, the “queue jumpers” have passed through a number of “safe and secure” countries but rejected them in favor of greater affluence in Australia.
In 1992, when Keating introduced mandatory detention for these “illegals,” only about 220 were actually arriving by boat each year. They were soon processed. All through the 1990s boats clandestinely brought mainly Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese. Those found to be true refugees under the Convention—a minority—were allowed to stay; the rest were sent home. However, in 1999, in response to political instability throughout much of the Middle East, the number of people arriving by boat and asking for asylum rose to 3,274. Most of them were Iraqis, fleeing Saddam Hussein, or Afghans, fleeing the Taliban, and almost all came with smugglers from Indonesia, following an already well-established route. These, unlike the Chinese and Vietnamese, were “genuine” refugees under the 1951 Convention, and as such had valid claims for asylum. It was the fact that they could not, in theory, be turned away or deported that posed the first problems, as well as the fact that while Canberra felt a certain sympathy for anti-Communist refugees from Hanoi, it did not feel quite the same about people escaping from the Middle East. What was Australia to do with all these people, and were there many more to come? It was in 1999 that the Liberal party introduced a “temporary protection visa,” under which asylum seekers who had been recognized under the 1951 Convention received
three-year visas, which they could turn into permanent visas only if they could persuade the immigration authorities that they were still in need of protection. Then, and only then, would they be able to apply to have their families join them, a measure that changed the nature of the boat arrivals, for whereas before men came alone and asked for their families to join them, now families, if they wished to stay together, had to travel together. Boats once full of men were now full of women in the gowns and veils of the Muslim world, and of small children and babies in arms. They were not deterred by a video put out by the Department of Immigration depicting Australia as inhabited by poisonous snakes, fearsome crocodiles, and man-eating sharks.
And people kept coming. In 2000, there were 2,937 new applicants. In the first six months of 2001, 1,640 people arrived. These numbers were, of course, trivial compared with the numbers of those who apply for asylum in Germany, the UK, Italy, or France, but the Australian detention camps were packed, frantic, and beset by violence, much of it involving self-mutilation and suicide attempts provoked by the uncertainty and delays. The immigration authorities let it be known that they did not want anyone to mistake the detention centers for “holiday camps.” Meanwhile, given the changing nature of modern conflict and the outbreaks of armed conflict across large parts of Asia and the Middle East, the procedure for deciding who was or was not a genuine refugee was moving more and more slowly. Those in detention were now spending months and even years with no idea what would happen to them. And some, of course, were children.
Meanwhile, a wild political card had entered the game in the shape of a flamboyant, red-haired “old Anglo-Australian” called Pauline Hanson, whose parents had migrated from Britain before the First World War. Hanson ran a fish-and-chips shop in Queensland. In 1997, as an independent, she won a seat in Parliament on an unambiguously racist anti-Aborigine platform. Since everyone knew her feelings about the Aborigines—she was once quoted as saying that they were cannibals who sometimes ate members of their own
families—she decided to give her maiden speech on the subject of immigration. “I believe,” she declared, “that we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.” Though Pauline Hanson had no discernible political skills—her grammar was patchy, her voice was grating, and she had trouble reading her own speeches—a large number of Australians loved her. She expressed what they most feared about the boatloads of desperate people clamoring to reach their shores. Hanson formed a party, One Nation, and won a fair number of votes. In response, five former prime ministers—Whit-lam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating, and Gorton—issued a joint statement condemning her racist views.
As it happened, John Howard, about to run for a second term as Liberal prime minister in the forthcoming 2001 elections, was not among those condemning Hanson. And though she soon lost her seat and was eventually sentenced to jail for three years for electoral fraud (she was acquitted on appeal), and although the country soon got back to its usual concerns about health, crime, and unemployment, Hanson had reset the boundaries of what was acceptable in a public discussion of race. The Liberals, whose chances of winning the election were at this point dim, took note.
And then, on August 24, 2001, a sixty-foot gray wooden fishing boat called the
Palapa
, coming from Indonesia to Christmas Island, was spotted drifting helplessly at sea, its engine dead. Lying below Java in the Indian Ocean, Christmas Island belongs to Australia. On board were 438 people, most of them Afghans. Children were seen, and many women. When the news reached Canberra, alarm bells sounded. There was no room on Christmas Island to take anyone else, a boat on the sixteenth having brought 345 asylum seekers, and another on the twenty-second, 359. Australia’s other detention centers were also full. The current minister for immigration was Phillip Ruddock, a man described by the Australian writer David Marr as having the “soul of a great bureaucrat” and an interesting political past, having on one occasion crossed the floor of Parliament to vote against his leader. Ruddock, as people would soon be saying, was a man of contradictions, a member of Amnesty International, yet very
hard on refugees, whose importance in the Liberal party had been growing with the growth in importance of the refugee issue. Here was the very challenge he needed.
At first, Australia tried to lean on the Indonesians, on whom Ruddock had already tried to bring pressure to act more firmly against the people-smugglers. Indonesia, a vast, poor, corrupt country, refused to be drawn in. At midnight, a storm blew up. Waves dashed over the
Palapa
. A hole opened in the hull. The people on board cried and clung to one another. At dawn, a man was spotted holding up a scarf, on which he had written, in engine oil, “SOS” and “HELP.” Conditions on the boat continued to deteriorate. After waiting eighteen hours, the Australians realized that they could delay no longer or the boat would sink. A call went out to all shipping in the area, soon answered by a 44,000-ton Norwegian tanker called the
Tampa
, three city blocks in length. The
Tampa
, on its way to China and Japan, had a crew of twenty-seven and carried a cargo of steel pipes, dried milk, other food, and timber. Its skipper was the highly experienced Arne Rinnan, and its owner, Wilhelm Wilhelmensen ASA, had done business with Australia for many years.
Captain Rinnan, obeying the laws of humanity and the sea, took the 438 people off the
Palapa
, which was now sinking. Among them were two pregnant women and a one-year-old baby. What Rinnan proposed to do was to drop them on Christmas Island, which was precisely what the Afghans wanted him to do, some on board having already tried once before to reach Australia and failed. What the Australians wanted was for him to take them back to Indonesia—or anywhere else, provided it wasn’t Australia. Though the rules of the sea are clear on the paramount need to save lives, there is no rule to say that a nation may not close its borders to unwanted strangers. Responsibility, argued Ruddock, lay with Indonesia, because the rescue act had taken place in Indonesian waters; or possibly with Norway, whose flag the
Tampa
flew; or perhaps even with Singapore, because that had been the
Tampa’s
next port of call. But it did not, he insisted, lie with Australia, even though the Australian coast
was nearest the rescue. Following early orders, the
Tampa
put back for Indonesia, then turned back to Christmas Island, Rinnan buffet-ted by the pleas and threats of the asylum seekers, the orders and counterorders of the Australian government, and the diplomatic maneuverings of the Norwegian government, the human rights lobby, and UNHCR. For the next eight days, through bouts of food poisoning and diarrhea, with near revolts and times of raging and despair, the asylum seekers from the
Palapa
remained on the
Tampa’s
decks, hot, miserable, terrified, and confused, treated with kindness by Rinnan and his men and corralled and marshaled by a unit of Australian SAS men, sent in to maintain order. Across the liberal world there was horror that traumatized people, many now severely dehydrated by the heat, and a few barely conscious, could be treated in this fashion. Behind the scenes, frenetic exchanges continued night and day between the
Tampa
, the Norwegian shipping company, and the Australian government and navy.
Until this moment, despite Pauline Hanson, immigration had not been dominating the coming elections. Overnight, it became the only topic that mattered. The
Tampa
had unleashed an apocalyptic vision of a future overrun by the yellow hordes Australians had always feared. One of Howard’s first moves was to try to push through, in the heat of the moment, new legislation that would allow Australia to return to the high seas anyone who entered Australian territory without permission. And though Jim Beazley and the Labor opposition effectively defeated the bill, Labor’s slightly hesitant protests and lack of leadership combined to dash its prospects of an easy election victory. Labor, it was said, looked like “a party trying to walk both sides of the street.” Howard and Ruddock between them gave the impression of being not just in control but of being the leaders of a party able to secure Australia’s threatened borders. They were thus able to draw toward them voters otherwise heading for Hanson’s One Nation. “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come here,” Howard announced, defining what was to be the essence of his refugee policy. His words touched some chord among Australians
who feared that at any time Indonesia might collapse, sending thousands of economic migrants their way. The largest Muslim nation in the world was, after all, no more than a boat ride away.
It was about now that the infamous Pacific Solution was born, a strategy with a gentle name and terrible consequences. It was not new—the British had blockaded Palestine in the 1930s, refusing to let Jewish refugees land and pushing them to Cyprus—but in the context of modern refugee politics it was dramatic. No future boatload of “illegal” people would be allowed, Howard decided, to reach Australia. Refugee vessels would, if possible, be intercepted at sea and returned to Indonesia. If that was not possible, they would be transferred to “off-shore processing centers” and to a number of designated countries willing to hold them in detention while their futures were sorted out. At no time would they have access to Australia’s legal processes, and there would be no right of appeal. Like the game of tag played along San Diego’s fence, getting past the guards would become part of Australia’s immigration process.
Nauru, in the Pacific Ocean, is a small, bankrupt republic, once famous for the richness of its guano deposits, sold off long ago for phosphates. In August 2001 it was said to owe $16.5 million on its desalination plant alone. In exchange for $26.5 million Australian, Nauru now agreed to take 150 of the
Tampa’s
asylum seekers and hold them in detention, as well as to take others from other boats; Papua New Guinea agreed to do the same, lending Manus Island for the experiment. In both places, the claims of the detainees would be assessed by UNHCR and the Australian government. At the same time, a number of islands regularly reached by smugglers from Indonesia and used as drop spots for their passengers—among them Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef—were “excised” from Australia for purposes of migration. Australia had effectively, by a stroke of its pen, shrunk its borders. What was so cunning about this move is that it put the
Tampa’s
asylum seekers, and those who chose to follow their example, beyond the reach of the Australian courts, where they might have had access to lawyers, appeals, and review hearings.
The Australian Migration Act is now one of the most powerful instruments in the country, able to sideline even the judiciary.
When, after ten days, the fracas had died down, the deals had been struck, and the requisite administrative orders put in place, the asylum seekers were transferred to an Australian naval vessel, HMAS
Manoora
. A very lucky 150 went to New Zealand, which took them as part of its normal humanitarian response to such situations. They were quickly processed; all but one proved to have valid claims under the Refugee Convention and were offered asylum. The queue jumpers were, after all, genuine. Others were taken to Nauru, to a hastily built camp rushed up by Australian military personnel on a sports field and the remains of a phosphate mine, in makeshift huts built of corrugated iron, plastic sheeting, and green cloth. Howard and Ruddock now set about tightening up the whole process of asylum. The measures they took were bold, bolder in fact in their entirety than had been attempted elsewhere. In “Operation Relex,” a task force of naval vessels and aircraft was assigned to patrolling Australia’s coast with orders to turn back asylum seekers approaching from Indonesia, and with new powers to search boats and to detain passengers and remove them, if necessary by force; and the government attempted with great success to restrict access to Nauru, which now proved virtually unreachable by journalists, human rights advocates, or lawyers, and discouraged the press from publishing “personalising or humanising” images, anywhere, of asylum seekers. Officials of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs entered into close relations with the border police of neighboring countries, to try to stem the flow of boats. And the temporary protection visas could now be renewed only as farther temporary visas, with no chance, ever, of having families join the applicant. The Labor party, which could have opposed and defeated the amendments, endorsed them. The fact that it was illegal, under Nauru’s constitution, to lock people up indefintely without charge or trial was soon solved by declaring the asylum seekers to be visitors, on special visas that confined them to the
camp. That Australia had effectively bribed one of its poorest neighbors to break its own laws drew little comment.