Vol. 73/No. 45      November 23, 2009

In a callous drive to stem this flow, the Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has upped its pressure on semicolonial neighbors, especially Indonesia, to cooperate in stopping and interning asylum seekers en route.

The Australian government has boosted its own border patrols to intercept boats with refugees, mostly from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Immigration Minister Christopher Evans said the government will continue “mandatory detention of unauthorized boat arrivals” at remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

Refugee boats are closely tracked by satellite in Australia. On October 16, the Australian government asked the Indonesian navy to stop a boat in Indonesian waters carrying 255 Tamil refugees. The vessel was escorted to Merak in west Java.

Two days later, at Jakarta’s request, another 78 were rescued by an Australian ship from a failing boat in Indonesia’s search and rescue zone. The Australian customs ship Oceanic Viking eventually took them to the Indonesian island of Bintan, near Singapore. A detention center is being built there with funds from the Australian government.

Both groups of refugees went on brief hunger strikes in protest, calling on the Australian government to grant them asylum. They have since refused to disembark in Indonesia to be interned.

The standoffs and some tense negotiations between the Australian and Indonesian governments over how to deal with the refugees has caused political problems for Australia's Labor government. Debate over “border protection” has resurged in capitalist politics and the media. Rudd has refused to rule out using force to “solve” the impasse of the boat-bound refugees.

Rudd’s deal with Jakarta has been dubbed his “Indonesia solution.” This echoes the “Pacific solution” under the previous conservative government, under which Canberra paid Pacific Island countries to intern asylum-seekers. Rudd ended that policy. The Liberal opposition proposes to resurrect it.

Australian naval and air patrols have also increased off the northwest coast. So far this year around 40 boats carrying 1,700 asylum-seekers have been intercepted.

On October 31, the Rudd government said it would double the size of the internment center on Christmas Island, an Australian territory, to house more than 2,000 people.

The same day, six men being held on the island refused to be "voluntarily" deported back to Sri Lanka. One of them staged an eight-hour protest. The six remain on Christmas Island.

So far this year there have been 115 such “voluntary” repatriations. Sri Lankans now make up about half those held at Christmas Island, the overwhelming majority of them ethnic Tamils.

Many Tamils fled during and since the 26-year civil war in Sri Lanka. That war ended five months ago when the Sinhalese-dominated government and military crushed the Tamil Tigers, an armed group that had fought for a separate Tamil state.

With the war's end, more than 250,000 civilians are being held in barbed wire internment camps in northern Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government allows no access by any refugee agencies into the camps. Thousands of Tamils have escaped to the nearest countries without visa requirements, particularly Indonesia and Malaysia. Others now head directly from Sri Lanka to Australia, crossing the Indian Ocean in old fishing boats.

Other refugees held by Canberra are from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.
 
 
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