I don't know how much of you have been keeping up to date with the latest refugee "crisis" to hit Australia. Here's a quick overview.
On Wednesday, 18 Special Air Service troops boarded the Tampa to prevent it from landing as it headed into Christmas Island without Australia's permission.
The background: On August 25 an Australian Coastwatch plane flying the line between Australian and Indonesian waters spotted an old Indonesian ferry with an SOS painted on its roof and reported its position to Indonesian authorities. The Norwegian cargo ship Tampa altered course after being alerted by Australian Search and Rescue in Canberra and picked up 438 mainly Afghani and Sri Lankan passengers from the sinking ferry on August 26.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Captain Arne Rinner, who with a crew of 27 was shipping Australian export goods to Singapore, says when he told the boatpeople he would take them to an Indonesian port 10 hours away, they started acting in an "aggressive and highly excited manner, and threatening to go overboard, some wanted to go back to the sinking ferry".
"We thought the situation was getting out of control," he said, so he asked Australian Search and Rescue what he should do. "They said, if we felt threatened, it was entirely the master's choice," he said. So he turned about and headed for Christmas Island four hours away.
• On August 27 Prime Minister John Howard said it was a problem for Norway and Indonesia, and Australia would not give the ship permission to enter Australian waters and disembark the boatpeople at Christmas Island, which had received almost 1,000 immigrants in the last two weeks.
``This is a very difficult, sad situation,'' Mr Howard told parliament. ``We have sought on all occasions to balance against the undoubted right of this country to decide who comes here ... against our humanitarian obligations as a warm-hearted, decent international citizen.''
• The Indonesian and Norwegian governments took the same stance. On August 28, as the boatpeople staged a hunger strike and conditions on board the stationary ship deteriorated, the Australian, Norwegian and Indonesian governments continued to debate the problem, with Indonesia indicating it was likely to accept the asylum seekers on a temporary basis.
But, even with Indonesia's permission, the captain does not believe the ship can make the voyage now with 438 agitated boatpeople on board.
``The tension is increasing down there (on the deck). As long as they see Christmas Island they are behaving quietly,'' he told Reuters.
As a humanitarian I fully sympathize with these refugees and their plight. I can only imagine the courage it must have taken to make a decision to flee an oppressive regime (Iraq in this case), get on a rickety boat, and set sail for a country half a world away, only to arrive and find out that that country doesn't want you and refuses to take you. It's heartbreaking. The Catholic in me says that we should take them in.
On the other hand, from a national standpoint Australia's stance is understandable (if not morally acceptable) - if they set a precedent by accepting these people now, what will be in place to prevent tens of thousands of others doing the same, filling Australia's already crowded asylum processing centres to overflowing? More importantly, how can they be fit into the asylum seeking process as a whole? Should more detention camps be built? Should these people get processed ahead of other asylum seekers who have already waited here in Australia (in some cases for a number of years?).
Australia accepts about 100,000 new migrants that apply through official channels each year, as well as 10,000 refugees formally resettled by the UN, as well as 5,000 illegal immigrants that arrive here by boat. I guess some of these people are seen as "queue-jumpers" who didn't want to wait to be processed at official UN refugee resettlement centres in Indonesia.
Indonesia is not a signatory to the UN convention on refugees and rarely accepts them into its own communities. However, it does have a well-established UN facility for processing asylum-seekers. Merat, where the Australian Government wants the 438 asylum-seekers on the Tampa to disembark, has an established UN presence.
If their refugee status is acknowledged by the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) after a series of interviews, it is up to developed countries to say they will take them in. Delays, however, are common.
Of 4,000 people who have gone through the facilities in Indonesia during the surge of activity in the past 12 months, about 1,500 remain in camps, unsure of their status. Just 500 were granted refugee status.
The country director for UNHCR in Indonesia, Mr Raymond Hall, said the slow settlement process had led to some of the same protests among detainees that have been experienced in Australia.
"We've had a series of demonstrations, from recognised Iraqi refugees notably, who are protesting about not having found placement in third countries," Mr Hall told ABC radio.
"Here in Indonesia being determined to be a refugee is only a step in the direction of a solution. You still have to find a country which will actually accept the refugees. And that is quite difficult to do." He said Indonesia was a major point of departure for asylum-seekers wanting to go to Australia.
I guess my questions are: 1) do you think Australia are taking the right approach; and 2) how are asylum seekers in other developed countries (Europe, US) treated? I know that it can take up to 10 years for a US greencard to be processed.
There's got to be a better way than how we're doing it at the moment.
------------------
[This message has been edited by Memnoch (edited 08-29-2001).]