Book Review Article:  ”Lost at sea scandal”, by Christopher Bantick, The Mercury (Hobart), Weekend 14 January 2006, page B13

”A Certain Maritime Incident: The Sinking of SIEV X”, by Tony Kevin,  Scribe Publications, $32.95

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I am republishing this review article,  with thanks to Christopher Bantick and the Hobart Mercury.  Bantick’s interesting review is not available on Google, but it is accessible on the Newstext News Limited newspapers database at  www.newstext.com.au/. 

Tony Kevin, 8.2.2006.

 

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Tony Kevin retired from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 1998 after a 30-year career as a public servant. In that time he served in the Prime Minister's Department and was ambassador to Poland and Cambodia.

 

Since retiring, Kevin has written extensively on national security and refugee politics; he is an honorary visiting fellow at the Australian National University Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

 

Since February 2002 his research has been on the sinking of the asylum-seeker boat he named SIEV X. His work on the SIEV X has come together in an important and unsettling book “A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of SIEV X”, which would be unlikely to get published under the newly enacted sedition laws.

 

It goes to the very heart of the way the Federal Government handled the sinking of the vessel. As well, Kevin asks curly questions about how much the Government knew of the circumstances of the SIEV X before it sank. Disquieting as the book is, last month it won the ACT Book of the Year Award, which Kevin called a hugely courageous move by the ACT Government. Since its publication, he says he has become ``a pariah in my home city, Canberra''. This did not stop the book from being short-listed for national awards.

 

In October 2001, more than 400 asylum seekers left Indonesia in a seriously overcrowded boat bound for Australia. The vessel sank with the loss of 353 asylum seekers. Kevin's book attempts to link the details of what amounts to government mismanagement, in particular, pointing to the behaviour of the Australian Federal Police and revealing AFP involvement in a people-smuggling disruption program.

 

On publication, it was bitterly denounced by the political and military establishment. Even so, Kevin says he wrote it out of a sense of duty and public obligation.

 

Would it have been published today? Under present legislation, it is much less likely. The book is saying it is not just a few rogue elements who behaved badly but that the whole Australian national security system is capable of helping to cover up what may have been Australia's involvement in criminal behaviour that led to the deaths of 353 people.

 

“When I ask searching questions and assemble evidence that supports them,”' he says, “I remind people of the extent to which the Senate was concerned by that evidence. Am I undermining public belief in the integrity of the Australian state and is that an act of sedition? These are questions publishers would have to consider.”

 

Kevin is well aware his book is not only controversial and critical of the Federal Government but, more than that, suggests there has knowingly been a cover-up over the circumstances of the sinking. He is prepared to pay for his convictions:

 

“I do not feel guarded about speaking in an interview like this. I have taken the view that if I have to go to jail, so be it. I don't say this with any sense of bravado -- I say it quite calmly. Freedom perhaps has to be defended by its martyrs.

 

”If the Federal Government thinks it can pass a law that constrains the freedom of speech we've had in Australia for a very long time, I believe that law has to be tested, not by bomb-throwing bearded mullahs but by ordinary people, intellectuals if you like, to say `I believe in free speech and I am prepared to go to jail for it'.”

 

The book, while corrosive to public belief in the propriety of government, does not present information based on speculation. It would be easy to dismiss it if that was the case. Instead, Kevin has assiduously trawled through what is on the public record and asked a series of questions, which he then supports with evidence. The result is a persuasive case and a compelling book.

 

So what have been the costs on a man backing himself against the Government?

 

“I haven't really exposed any information that was not available on the public record. The whole book is really an analysis of a compilation of the questions senators asked, things official witnesses have said and things that survivors have said. It's a kind of detective story based on public sources.''

 

Although it's a robust indictment of the Federal Government's handling of the incident and the subsequent inquiry, Kevin believes that within agencies of the Government, not least the Australian Federal Police, there are some “smoking guns” the Government is resistant to having examined.

 

Stymied as he believes the public has been for a full explanation of what happened to SIEV X and the knowledge the Federal Government had of it, he believes a comprehensive judicial inquiry into the circumstances of the incident is a matter of national honour that needs addressing.

 

“There is a duty of care. Every mariner has a duty of care to other mariners - it's the sacred law of the sea. When a person is in distress at sea, you rescue them. If our border protection regime means killing people or letting them die - people we could have saved - then this needs examination. If there are even questions as to whether this was possible, I think this is a huge slur on our national honour.''

 

 

Photo Caption:  PAINFUL MEMORIES: Author Tony Kevin talks to Mohammad Alghazzi whose family drowned in the SIEV X tragedy.