“SIEV X – A Helpless Human Cargo”, -  by Tony Kevin, Online Opinion,  12 October 2000

(An article written to mark the Fifth Anniversary of the sinking of SIEV X, on 19 October 2001)

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The original of this Internet- published article is at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4985

If URLs do not work here, they will work there.

The resulting correspondence can also be read there.

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One February day in Canberra in 2002, I was having coffee in Manuka with my friend Professor Tony Milner of ANU, outlining my forebodings over the Australian Government's implausible official statements regarding the sinking of the boat I was soon to name SIEV X (“Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel, Unknown”) (Canberra Times, March 25, 2002).

This small overloaded boat sank in a storm on its way from Java to Australia's Christmas Island on October 19, 2001 - almost five years ago - drowning 353 asylum-seekers. Most were women and children, drowned trying to reunite with husbands and fathers already arrived in Australia over the previous two years.

I ran through the ways in which the government story was not making sense. Tony replied, “Whatever the truth may turn out to be, you won't let go of this: you'll be like a dog with a bone because once you get your teeth into an issue that is what you do”.

Later that week I wrote to Simon Crean, then leader of the Opposition, followed by two formal submissions in March and April to the Senate Select Committee into a Certain Maritime Incident - the CMI committee - set up to investigate the notorious “children overboard” incident. I asked the CMI to examine SIEV X: What did the Australian Government and its agencies know about this boat and its fate, and when? Did we have any responsibility for the tragedy? Did we have a duty of care to save the survivors that we shirked?

I testified before the CMI committee on May 1, 2002 and my questions were duly mocked by government senators as being beyond credibility.

SIEV X became a front-page story in May and June 2002. The media smelled an unravelling government cover-up. The government regained control by releasing spurious maps of RAAF air searches of the area where SIEV X went down. These apparently plausible search records turned out much later to be no more than “indicative” approximations of reality, not worth the paper they were printed on.

The Senate committee handed down an uneasily equivocal consensus report in October 2002. Opposition senators' misgivings on the SIEV X and Australian official people smuggling disruption activities in Indonesia were clear in their individual report chapters and in their oral statements, but were papered over in the main consensus report.

The media dropped the story, despite important later evidence in 2003 that government witnesses under oath had misrepresented truth in the inquiry. Four condemnatory Senate motions were passed in 2002-2004 and questioning by senators has continued even until now, by Senator Christine Milne of the Greens in particular. But government agencies continue to misrepresent the truth in lockstep, modifying the official version as it suits them.

There have been three successive official stories on where the boat sank: in Indonesian waters (from 2001 to early 2005), in international waters (for much of 2005) and now this strained form of words since early 2006, “The Australian Government's position is that the location where the vessel sank is unknown”. The truth (from Australian official documents and other strong sources) is that the boat sank 50-60km south of Sunda Strait in international waters, and in the declared border protection zone being monitored by ADF elements at the time of sinking. It is a truth the Australian Government is again now not prepared to admit.

The story of Abu Quassey, convicted organiser of the voyage, is also remarkable. Under international media outrage, he was detained in Indonesia for a year after the sinking as an illegal immigrant in conditions of great VIP luxury. Australian law enforcement agencies did everything possible not to bring him to Australia for trial over the SIEV X deaths, or even under people smuggling charges. Eventually, Indonesian authorities sent him home to Egypt where he was sentenced in a closed court to 5 1/4 token years as a people smuggler and for “accidental manslaughter”, under an AFP-provided brief of evidence never made public.

A minor accomplice, Khaleed Daoed, was extradited from Sweden in 2003 and tried in Brisbane in 2005 as a SIEV X people smuggler. To survivors' distress, the court was not interested in investigating the sinking, but useful information about Quassey's modus operandi and his powerful official Indonesian connections nevertheless leaked through the carefully controlled prosecution case. Daoed, who said little, received a light sentence.

The government thus appears today to have put the SIEV X genie back into the bottle.

Most mainstream media and academics, even those on the Left, have moved on from this uncomfortable story. SIEV X is rarely referenced in books on Australian politics, current affairs or human rights: unlike “Tampa” and “children overboard” which have become iconic phrases frequently used to shorthand that period of Australian history in 2001, when our political leaders and border protection authorities seemed maddened by hate and fear of innocent people whose crime was simply to seek refuge and reunite their sundered families in Australia.

Some Australian defence chiefs, as is clear from their CMI testimony, had come to see such illegally entering boat people as serious national security threats, even as enemies.

They instructed ships' commanders to ignore asylum-seekers' pleas to be treated as refugees. Asylum-seekers were regularly brutalised, intimidated, deceived, herded into holds using Taser weapons, sent to detention in Nauru or towed back to the edge of Indonesian waters where people in disabled unseaworthy boats were left to live or die. SIEV X is the worst event in a shameful period of Australian official inhumanity to fellow human beings.

Powerful people, from John Howard down, want SIEV X forgotten. They have failed. When it became clear the Senate investigation was going nowhere, I wrote my prizewinning investigative book, A Certain Maritime Incident - the Sinking of SIEV X, because I wanted SIEV X to be remembered. It sold well. It is still available on order from the publishers - there was a recent small second printing to meet continuing demand.

Australia's political establishment and senior commentariat, on both Left and Right, with honourable exceptions like John Faulkner, Carmen Lawrence, Andrew Bartlett and the Greens, mostly turned away from SIEV X after 2002. The issue does not sit easily in the present Coalition-Labour mainstream political discourse which agrees that “robust” (read “ruthless”) border protection is necessary. There are too many powerful interests - the Howard national security departments and agencies, and the ADF and AFP lobbies - that work to discourage any public mention of SIEV X as an unresolved issue of government accountability.

Fortunately the people of Australia are not afraid to honour SIEV X as a major human tragedy in Australia's history of migration. People who have come into actual contact with any of the thousands of former Middle Eastern boat people now living quietly in Australia know their grief over wives, children and friends lost on SIEV X; people like the good folk of Rural Australians for Refugees and the many church and secular-based volunteer organisations engaged in the day-to-day work of helping refugees.

I pay tribute to individuals like Anne Simpson of Bellingen RAR who made the wonderful first short film on SIEV X - “Untold Tragedy”, Sue Hoffman and Kaye Bernard in Western Australia and Gordon Thompson on Christmas Island, Marg Hutton and her indispensable reference website, Mary Dagmar Davies and her memorial website “Jannah”, Arnold Zable, Eva Sallis, Steve Biddulph, Morris Gleitzman, playwright Hannie Rayson, artist Kate Durham.

All understand and have contributed to the epic power of the SIEV X story. These days I am only one in a large and growing cast of brave Australians who recognise the importance of SIEV X and will not let it be censored out of Australian history to suit the government's political convenience.

I have now largely withdrawn from SIEV X research and advocacy. The torch has passed to others. In terms of professional historical research, Marg Hutton leads the way.

Two major upcoming events in Canberra coincide with the 5th anniversary of the sinking. 

At 2 pm on Sunday, October15, people from all over Australia will gather in Weston Park for a memorial ceremony “The Raising of the Poles”, inspired by author Steve Biddulph and the Uniting Church of Australia, that will honour the 353 parents and children who drowned on SIEV X. The lead speaker is Jon Stanhope, ACT Chief Minister. Over 300 decorated timber poles will be assembled in procession, showing the eventual design of a permanent memorial on Lake Burley Griffin. Details here (pdf 149KB) 

On Thursday, October 19, - the actual anniversary - Emeritus Professor John Molony and Steve Biddulph will launch a new educational project initiated by Don Maclurcan at Parliament House: an Australian Secondary Schools Case Study on The Sinking of the SIEV X. 

The project was developed in consultation with a wide range of stakeholders and is planned for use in Year 11 Modern History classes across a number of States and Territories. It aims to provide a balanced, impartial set of materials for a 6-week case study, fitting within the New South Wales Board of Studies' Modern History Stage 6 syllabus, via which Year 11 students can develop the confidence, knowledge and skills to address the question, “Was the sinking of SIEV X and subsequent loss of life preventable?” More information can be found here.

Has my thinking on SIEV X advanced since I wrote my book? Yes. 

I now believe SIEV X sank at the height of a covert undeclared war between powerful Indonesian national security elements that had encouraged and protected so-called people

smugglers in Indonesia, with the aim to send large numbers of Middle East origin asylum-seekers down to Australia as punishment for Australia's alleged betrayal of Indonesia in the 1999 East Timor secession: and Australian national security agencies determined to stop this plan while not publicly announcing their knowledge of it. 

Many of the strange episodes noted in my book are more readily understandable under such a hypothesis. It would help explain the acute national security sensitivity of the story, the extreme ADF hostility towards the Middle Eastern asylum-seekers who came through Indonesia, all the contrived official cover-ups of fact since the sinking. It would help explain why the numbers of unauthorised boat people arrivals exploded, from 921 in 1998-99 to 4175 in 1999-2000 (DIMA Fact Sheet 73 “People Smuggling”, revised Oct 2002 (pdf 24 KB)).

It would help explain the high-level Indonesian protection of Quassey, the obsessive Australian police pursuit and sentencing of some “people smugglers”, and much more.

Most dramatically, such a view is now retrospectively supported by remarkably explicit Indonesian Government warnings to Australia earlier this year, that people smuggling of Middle Eastern asylum-seekers from Indonesia to Australia which ended in 2002 with the help of the Indonesian authorities might resume if Australia were to go on accepting West Papuan boat people as refugees. I understand statements by President Yudhoyono and Foreign Minister Wirayuda to be clear warnings. 

Is this latest twist in the SIEV X story provable? Not yet. Probably now it will take deathbed confessions, sworn notarised statements by men or women of conscience who are in the know. But it makes some sense in explaining the political context for an otherwise inexplicably cruel and ruthlessly covered-up event.

If the people on SIEV X were a helpless human cargo, innocent collateral damage in a secret war between two neighbouring countries' intelligence and special operations agents, this still does not explain how their boat was allowed to sail for over 30 hours out into the perilous open sea where it predictably sank and hundreds died without help from any quarter. My original questions remain unanswered. One day they will be answered. 

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Former senior Australian diplomat Tony Kevin (who served in DFAT and the Prime Minister's Department between 1968 and 1998, with his last postings at ambassador level in Poland and Cambodia), is the author of the prizewinning A Certain Maritime Incident – the Sinking of SIEV X ( Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2004). He has a website www.tonykevin.com. He joined the ACT Branch of the Greens party earlier this year. He recently returned from a therapeutic long pilgrimage walk in Spain, from Granada to Santiago de Compostela. Neither an anti-Semite nor a self-hating Jew, he takes pride in his Viennese Jewish heritage from his late mother, who taught him most of what he knows about human rights.