Vol. 75/No. 1      January 10, 2011

Some survivors are in hospitals. The rest are being held at Australia’s immigration detention facilities on the island.

Two days after the tragedy, protests erupted among detainees at the detention centers. They targeted authorities for failing to rescue people and poor conditions inside the overcrowded camps. The Indonesian fishing boat was carrying more than 90 men, women, and children, mainly Iraqis, Iranians, and Kurds. About 50 island residents threw life jackets and ropes over a cliff to those in the sea who were trapped amid debris and high waves pounding the rocks.

After some time, a naval patrol boat and customs vessel arrived to dispatch smaller craft to rescue survivors. Thirty bodies were later recovered.

Scores of people, including at least one survivor of the disaster, joined a demonstration at one detention center December 17. Later the same day some 70 internees protested at another facility. There are 2,879 asylum seekers being held on the island in three detention compounds originally meant to house a few hundred.

Three inquiries have been launched following the shipwreck—a coroners inquiry, an Australian Federal Police investigation to find the “people smugglers” who organized the boat, and an operational inquiry into how the boat was missed by naval surveillance.

Labor prime minister Julia Gillard proposed a multiparty committee that would be briefed on the disaster.

Liberal opposition leader Anthony Abbott declined the offer. He claimed that “tougher” polices like those of the previous conservative government, such as offering only restrictive, temporary visa protection to recognized refugees, would avert such disasters by “stopping the boats.”

There is bipartisan agreement on the mandatory detention of asylum seekers without papers who arrive by boat.
 
 
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