Phillip Adams talks about A Certain Maritime Incident – the sinking of SIEV X with Tony Kevin on "Late Night Live", ABC Radio National, Wednesday 18 August 2004 (transcript made by Tony Kevin)

 

Phillip Adams (PA) - Imagine a jumbo jet flying towards Australia with, say, 400 Italian tourists. It crashes into the ocean. 353 people die, mainly women and kids. Now, that would be a huge event, one of the biggest media stories of any year. Well, something like that did happen on October 19^th 2001. But it wasn’t a jumbo jet, it was a leaky boat. And it wasn’t full of Italian tourists, it was full of asylum-seekers. Same number of people on board, same death toll. And when it happened, in the middle of an election campaign that I found the most difficult time emotionally, I felt – well, this could change everything, it is such a monumental tragedy that Australians’ hard hearts will break, and we will rethink what we are up to with asylum-seekers.

Well, it bloody well didn’t. If anything, the heart of our nation became even harder. And what became known as "a certain maritime incident" played a major role in the outcome of that federal election. You know, there is a Schopenhauer quote:

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, secondly it is violently opposed, thirdly it is accepted as being self-evident."

Now, my next guest is certainly a truth-seeker, and he has been accused of everything from obsession to certifiable madness. But he is one of those individuals who has constantly sought to illuminate questionable decisions by government. I am talking about Tony Kevin, former ambassador to Poland and Cambodia, former official adviser in the Prime Minister’s Department, and author of a new book about what has to be one of the most appalling events in our history. Some of you are familiar with this maritime incident, others vaguely aware that there was controversy surrounding the tragedy, when that overcrowded boat sank somewhere between Indonesia and Australia with the loss of 353 lives. So I began by asking Tony to recap for the listener the essential events of that October …

Tony Kevin (TK) – Yes, glad to, Phillip. On 16^th of October, a people smuggler called Abu Quassey recruited about 430 people, mostly women and children, from little guest-houses around Bogor in Indonesia, to be transported from Indonesia to Christmas Island. He promised them a three-deck boat with safety and comfort on board. He said he would get them to Christmas Island in 36 hours. He signed up these people very quickly. Most of them had husbands or fathers waiting for them in Australia. He took a six-bus [TK sic- actually, four buses] convoy escorted by police across Western Java, and across the ferry to Sumatra. They spent the day resting up at a police-owned hotel in Bandar Lampung. That night they were taken to a bay in darkness, where they were taken out in small launch-loads to the boat which I named SIEV X . It was a 19 metre boat [TK sic- it was officially reported as 9.5 metres long], it had a makeshift chipboard upper deck fitted to it to cram more people on, it was reported to have a large crack in the hull, it was so dilapidated that it was described by one survivor as "no better than a packing case" And yet 400 –odd people were crammed on board –

PA – Most reluctantly?

TK – Most reluctantly, they were crammed on board by Abu Quassey assisted by 30 armed Indonesian police.

PA – Would you identify Abu Quassey, please? Who is he?

TK – He is an Egyptian people smuggler who had already sent three boats to Australian destinations. Two of the three were grossly overcrowded and very unsafe. He seemed to be suspiciously well financed, he had a large villa, many staff, a flash car. He burst on the scene – I believe he was not what you might call a "genuine" people smuggler. I believe he was actually a disruption agent set up and funded by Indonesian police.

Since the year 2000, we know now that the (Australian) government had been planning and gaming an upstream people smuggling disruption program, and it had also been coaching the Australian Defence Force into viewing boat people as a national security military threat.

PA – An upstream disruption program – what does that mean?

TK- It means taking various kinds of actions, both overt and covert, to deter boats from setting out or to ensure that they don’t get very far if they do set out, the object being to prevent them making landfall in Australian territory.

PA –How is this managed, what goes on?

TK – Well, there are two stories. There is the official story, that it basically consisted of distributing leaflets and t-shirts, and asking Indonesian police to round up vessels at the point of departure, arrest the organisers, and take the people to UN resettlement locations. I have seen no evidence of that ever happening. What I have seen evidence of happening, is repeated organisation of voyages that either sank or experienced engine failure or had cooking stove fires, whatever - a great many refugee accounts of those sorts of unsuccessful voyages; and of Indonesian police, and possibly military, at very senior and highly resourced levels, helping in these sorts of operations.

PA – Helping in what way?

TK – Helping to escort convoys of buses through Indonesia, helping to load boats, at times by force – SIEV X is not the first report of that –

PA – What, on the take, or on orders?

TK - It’s hard to see how one people smuggler, no matter how profitable or successful,

could afford to pay off hundreds of Indonesian police and military. When we have a situation as in SIEV X where military boats appear on the sinking scene in the evening a few hours after the sinking, shine searchlights but do not rescue survivors, and then the next morning miraculously a couple of fishing boats arrive and pick up the few who are still alive. There are huge improbabilities in that story, and it certainly does not flow from a people smuggler paying off police.

PA – One of the big issues has been the Australian government’s claim that the sinking of SIEV X did not occur in Australia’s border protection zone, therefore we were not under duty of care so to speak – do you have any evidence to the contrary?

TK – Absolutely. I have four pieces of independent evidence, of which two are official Australian evidence, and two are good media-based evidence, that the boat sank in the heart of the north-west quarter of the Operation Relex surveillance zone.

PA – That, of course, is intensively patrolled?

TK – It was being intensively patrolled, by RAAF Orion aircraft. It was also, I believe, being carefully watched by Australian Jindalee Operational Radar Network, JORN.

PA – Now, the people smuggling disruption program, on which most Australians knew absolutely nothing, less than nothing, was to some extent revealed under scrutiny by Senator Faulkner, was it not?

TK - Yes. Senator Faulkner subjected Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty to a gruelling day of interrogation in the Senate Committee. Under that questioning, Keelty revealed that Australia had selected – that the Australian Federal Police had selected – twenty senior Indonesian police to attend a one-week training course at a hotel in Bali, to be trained in people smuggling disruption techniques.

PA – This is as early as 2000?

TK – Yes, October 2000.

PA - The AFP also has a history, I understand, of involvement with an self-confessed Australian people smuggler, Kevin Enniss?

TK – Yes, that was the second arm of the disruption program. The first arm was the disruption teams of hand-picked mercenaries within the Indonesian police, and the second arm were Australian, what they called informants, of whom Kevin Enniss was exposed, and they have admitted that there were others but they haven’t said how many. Now Enniss was not simply an informant – he was also an active and big people smuggler, reported to be the biggest in the Ashmore Reef area, and he also boasted of having sunk boats.

PA – Was Enniss called by the Senate enquiry?

TK – No, he was not .

PA – Why not?

TK – You’d have to ask them. (Pause). If I could just follow up on that: the Senate enquiry was basically only interested in the testimony of official witnesses.

PA – And even they were hard to get, were they not?

TK – Yes, they were. It assumed that official witnesses were telling the truth, because they were the rules of the game. And one person who should have been an official witness, Admiral Raydon Gates, never appeared.

PA – Let’s go back to the AFP. According to you, they trained people in disruption techniques and they were given a budget for this purpose, a specific budget?

TK – Yes, they were. According to Commissioner Keelty, this is from memory, it was of the order of $40.000, but I suspect there was quite a lot more going into other lines of expenditure. They were trained in things like information management, agent management, reporting, and so on.

PA - Was ASIS [TK - Australian Secret Intelligence Service] involved?

TK – There are reports in David Marr and Marion Wilkinson’s book Dark Victory that ASIS was involved, but I myself have never found any evidence of it. I assume that Marr and Wilkinson have some source of information on that.

PA – Now, are you implying that Abu Quassey was an agent of this program?

TK – Not necessarily directly. One is looking at a fairly long flexible chain, which creates deniability. I certainly believe that Abu Quassey was working in close cahoots with senior members of Indonesian police, who may have been those very police who were trained by the Australians.

PA – So he might have been a sting agent?

TK – Yes, he might have been a sting agent being run by Indonesian police disruption teams.

PA – OK, I remember you and I talking about this very early on. I was writing columns about this at the time. Because I just couldn’t comprehend why it wasn’t causing more consternation in the Australian media or in the public mind. But we talked about the forced embarkation … what evidence do you have of forced embarkation on SIEV X?

TK – Multi-source survivor testimony, as relayed through many independent journalists.

You have a situation from the 23^rd of October onwards, when the survivors got back to Jakarta – there was huge media interest in the story, the media descended on the survivors, and different journalists were having interviews with different named survivors. So what you have is a tapestry of media accounts, which I believe in its totality

forms a tapestry of evidence. And I analyse that evidence closely.

PA – At one stage, you told me that you suspected that the boat had been sabotaged by people or persons unknown. Do you still hold that view?

TK – Since I spoke to you last, the evidence that has accumulated since, and in particular the evidence that was withheld, including that notorious cable from the embassy [TK - Australian embassy in Jakarta] on the 23^rd of October, which it took 16 months for the Senate to obtain, convinces me that there was sabotage.

PA – Let’s talk about media management of the story, the media’s role in buying into the saga. What was the information strategy, in your view, being created by the government – at a time, of course, when Her Majesty’s Opposition was, to say the least, silent on these issues?

TK - Let’s assume charitably that they didn’t know this was going to happen. Let’s assume charitably that it took them by surprise. What happens is you see a media management strategy that very quickly contextualises the story, gives it the desired messages, that the Indonesian government must do something to stop these boats departing, that it must set up an international people-smuggling conference, that Australia must be allowed to tow boats back to Indonesia for humanitarian reasons. So it’s certainly true that the tragedy was exploited in a very skilful way by those responsible for managing it and conveying it to the media.

I also see, and this is very interesting indeed, in the early days after the tragedy, three narratives coming together. Firstly, you’ve got the survivor narrative which I regard as entirely authentic. These people had no reason to lie, and the multi-source nature of it makes it very credible. Secondly, you’ve got all these messages coming in from unknown sources, contextualising messages: with incredible details – the itinerary, the size of the boat and so on. And thirdly, you’ve got the mistakes. Things like the story of the forced loading getting out. Things like the story of the military boats in the night getting out. And most dramatically of all, the discovery by a reporting team several months later of a report in the Harbourmaster’s Office in Jakarta of the exact coordinates where the survivors were picked up.

PA – At the start of the book, Tony, you’ve a declassified document, detailing the Australian government understanding of the sinking, with large blacked-out areas – well, that’s not surprising. Almost every document that falls off the back of a truck or comes out of FOI [TK – the Freedom of Information Act] has large bits of black. What is this and what do you think those blacked-out areas might contain?

TK – I’ll come to that in a moment but let me first say why that cable is so important, and why very unusually it starts off the book. I’m sure it’s the first time a book has ever started with a declassified Australian cable.

It’s very important firstly because of its distribution list. We know now that that cable which came into Canberra at 10.21 am [TK – on 23 October 2001] had the Prime Minister at the head of the list, and everybody else that mattered in the national security world in Canberra. Secondly, it’s important because there is so much technical information about the voyage, that could not possibly have come from a survivor. Thirdly, it’s important because it says in black and white that the boat sank anywhere up to 8 degrees south latitude – which puts it well out into the Operation Relex zone.

So that cable gives the lie to everything the Prime Minister was saying on the 23^rd of October onwards – that the boat sank in Indonesian waters and that it’s not our responsibility. Here is the strongest possible evidence that he knew that the boat sank in our area of responsibility.

PA – And the blacked-out pieces would confirm this?

TK – I believe they would. In fact I believe the first blacked-out piece would give reference to who Abu Quassey was, because - I was a public servant for 30 years – Abu Quassey is referred to in paragraph 3, but without any description of who he was. And the first rule of …

PA – This would suggest that he was completely familiar to those on the receiving end of the document?

TK – Not quite, but you’re nearly there. The first rule of writing a cable is that it should contain self-contained information, so who Abu Quassey was is set out in that first blacked-out section.

PA – One element that’s disturbed me – under persistent questioning of Faulkner - focusses on tracking devices, whether they’ve been placed on boats, monitored by the People Smuggling Taskforce [TK – an inter-departmental committee headed by the Prime Minister’s Department]. Now, Marr and Wilkinson assert this in their book Dark Victory.

TK – Yes. I do more than assert it, I think I prove it. Because this starts with the logical point, that it’s a statistical impossibility for a boat to sink 60 miles out to sea and then to be stumbled across or happened upon by fishing boats the next day. It just wouldn’t happen that way, fishing boats wouldn’t go that far out, and if they did they wouldn’t know where to go, and so on and so forth. There had to be a way of knowing where that boat sank. A tracking device is the most simple and logical explanation, because you simply secrete it somewhere on the boat, and when it stops beeping you know that that’s where the boat sank.

PA – Tony, it has to be said before we go on with this story, that many people who have followed your lone battle on this – and it’s been virtually a lone battle – even people who were sympathetic to you, became concerned with what they have described as your degree of obsession: do you regard yourself as unhealthily preoccupied with this? Or are you just embittered by this line of argument?

TK – I’m neither preoccupied nor embittered. I’m simply a decent-minded, I hope, traditional old-fashioned Australian, defending the idea that every human life is precious and that our law and the conduct of our state agencies have to reflect that principle. When I see a situation where 353 innocent human lives were lost, in an area on our patch where we had a duty of care, there’s just no question that I have to do something about that.

PA – Have you got enough hard evidence or have you got material which suggests – I’m talking about the whole range of what you’re hypothesising ?

TK – I’m quite convinced that what I have amply supports the Senate’s demands over three years for a full-powers independent judicial enquiry into this.

PA – Have you got the smoking gun?

TK – Yes.

PA – What is it?

TK – Well, it’s the whole book.

PA – Big gun.

TK – It’s a big book.

PA – Big gun. You created the name SIEV X, didn’t you – why ? .

TK – Because at that time the Defence Force was putting out evidence to the Senate Committee about the conduct of asylum-seekers on 12 SIEVs, suspected illegal entry vessels, that were intercepted. So I found it a convenient label and I purloined it, and said "Let’s call this boat SIEV X".

PA – I think we’ve got to make the point that neither major party wanted to touch this with a barge-pole. There was no great enthusiasm for an investigation on the part of the Labor Party, it was pretty much Faulkner, on his own I think, backing you. How did this

Certain Maritime Incident investigation happen?

TK – Well , I’ll just correct your facts there on one thing. It wasn’t only John Faulkner. He was ably supported by Peter Cook and Jacinta Collins and Andrew Bartlett. And I pay tribute to all four of them.

PA - It’s still a very small number of people here …

TK – It’s almost as if their ethical and constitutional personalities were at war with their political personalities, because what they exposed in their own questioning was so horrendous – and yet when one read the CMI Report as agreed by all the senators including the government senators, it is so bland and watered-down and – frankly speaking – misleading, that one wonders how the same people can have been involved. And one sees this duality when one studies closely the individual chapters by Faulkner, Cook, Collins and Bartlett in the Report, which are completely different from the consensus chapters, and reads their tabling statements on the 23^rd of October. These were men and a woman who could see that something very wrong was happening here, and to giver them credit Phillip, the Labor Party and the Democrats and the Greens’ subsequent remorseless questioning of SIEV X, against the most blatant and gross interference by the government, has continued to this very day.

PA – To some extent the Labor Party distanced itself from this Report later? Was there a deal done ?

TK – I don’t want to speculate about their motives -

PA – Oh go on, speculate !

TK - - and nor do I want to give any opportunity to Mr Howard to drive wedges between myself and the Labor Party. I was certainly disappointed that the Report did not simply say, "We’ve been given unsatisfactory evidence on SIEV X and we demand a judicial enquiry". I believe that would have been the best way to go. But having as it were let SIEV X through the net in the Report, they then made good by continuing to challenge it in Estimates committees.

PA – One of the fascinating things were the difficulties in getting the story even in front of the Senate Committee. What obstacles were put in the way of a clear and appropriate enquiry?

TK – I think the biggest obstacle is what Jack Waterford of the Canberra Times called our cultural presumption of regularity. We are a society that wants to believe firstly that our political leaders, although they may be guilty of various forms of chicanery, would never ask our public servants or police or soldiers to do unethical or criminal things; and secondly, that in the unlikely event that they ever did ask them, those orders would be refused.

PA – Within your experience as a public servant, isn’t that second assumption pretty safe?

TK – I used to think it was safe but I no longer do so. I think we’ve got a very radical government over these last few years, which is prepared to push the limits of executive control over the public service to a point where it is very hard for senior public servants to say no. We are seeing this all the time.

PA – A Certain Maritime Incident – the sinking of SIEV X , by Tony Kevin, published by Scribe, a valiant small publishing house. Finally, how are you surviving? You’ve become unemployable, haven’t you?

TK – Well I hope not: I hope that Canberra, which has three universities and several think- tanks and research institutions where I have the skills to work profitably and usefully, after all this is over, will re-establish me. I certainly have been disestablished. I’ve become a sort of a Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn, let’s face it. But I am hoping that when normality returns to Canberra and to our public life, there will be somewhere for me to be employed.

PA – Tony Kevin, Whistleblower of the Year and author of A Certain Maritime Incident.

And, let’s acknowledge the extensive research provided by Marg Hutton, who set up the SIEV X website.