“Vilifying asylum-seekers,  and falsifying SIEV history”

 

-           Open letter from Tony Kevin to David Marr, Marian Wilkinson, Marg Hutton, Margo Kingston, Julian Burnside, Hannie Rayson, Hilary McPhee, Robert Manne,  William Maley,  Frank Brennan, 11 September 2005 ( to be published on my website  www.tonykevin.com) :

 

Dear Colleagues,

 

I trust you are all by now aware of the provocative Keith Windschuttle speech given prominence in the latest issue of “Quadrant”. Marg Hutton has helpfully made it available on her website:

 

http://www.sievx.com/articles/mentions/2005/200509xxQuadrant.html

 

“Vilifying Australia  - The perverse ideology of our adversary culture”, Keith Windschuttle,  Quadrant, September 2005.  (2005 Earle Page Memorial Oration, delivered at Parliament House, Sydney, on June 22 2005)

 

Windshuttle’s historiography is normally worth nothing but disdain. But I think it is important to see what he and Quadrant are doing here with the SIEV X story. This should concern all of us who care about the besieged values of truth and accountability in Australian public life. This article, I suggest, is just another slice in the salami tactics of the Howard Thought Police – I don‘t think this is an extreme term - to discredit those of us who believe in a reality-based public life; to pick us off one by one - and to see off the issues we care about. 

 

Having – as they may think – already effectively discredited and silenced the public voices of Marg Hutton, Hannie Rayson and myself,  for our offence in taking the SIEV X history seriously as a major Australian public issue of truth and accountability, they are now going after Marr and Wilkinson’s treatment of SIEV X  in the 2^nd edition ( November, 2004) of their deservedly acclaimed contemporary historical work Dark Victory  (hereinafter referred to as DV) .

 

It is,  of course,  as Pastor Niemoller famously said about dissidence in Nazi Germany : if we do not stand together for public truth, we are more easily picked off one by one until there will be none of us left standing.

 

Windschuttle quotes disapprovingly this key passage about SIEV X on page 385 of the second edition of DV:

 

“Howard's brilliant untruth the morning those deaths became known is still working its magic... The spin, contradictions, evasions and lies of politicians and government agencies involved in disruption operations in Indonesia before the boat sailed, and the blockade of Christmas Island at the time it sank, have inspired a number of determined Australians to pursue the truth of these terrible events. The story of SIEV X and those who drowned in the midst of Operation Relex continues to unravel.”

 

This is a passage to which Marg Hutton and I have separately previously drawn public attention. It replaces the very different formulation about SIEV X on page 288 of the March, 2003 first edition of DV:

 

“Australia did not kill those who drowned on SIEV X but their deaths cannot be left out of the reckoning entirely”.

 

Ironically, that first edition formulation – which Windschuttle does not mention – would have presumably been acceptable to him had it been left unchanged in the 2004 2^nd edition of DV.  Fortunately, it was not left unchanged.

 

Marr and Wilkinson have not to my knowledge publicly explained the reason for their change of assessment on SIEV X between the time of the first and the second edition. The Windschuttle attack in Quadrant gives them an opportunity to throw more public light on this now, if they so wish.

 

Certainly the public evidence that has accrued since the first edition of DV came out would give them ample scope to do so. This evidence is mostly summarised in my 2004 book “A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of SIEV X” ( Scribe, August 2004), which is still the only published book that focusses in detail on the SIEV X public evidence (much of which has been also analysed in detail by Marg Hutton on her indispensable website www.sievx.com ) .

 

Subsequent important evidentiary developments have included:

 

1          The Khaleed Daoed people smuggling trial evidence strongly reinforces my hypothesis that the Australian disruption program agencies must have known far more about SIEV X at the time when it sank than they have so far admitted.  There was new evidence in the trial regarding voyage itineraries, resources and procedures for the SIEV X and an 11-weeks earlier Quassey vessel,  Yambuk,  that was helped to reach Christmas Island safely .. This evidence was accepted into evidence in the Khaleed Daoed people smuggling trial and used to convict Daoed.  It must have been known to Australian border security agencies from soon after their questioning of passengers on Yambuk after it reached Christmas Island on 4 August 2001, but all this was systematically kept hidden from the Senate CMI and subsequent investigating committees in 2002-2004. One can see why the authorities did not want the damning Yambuk history to become fully known. Now it is known. For a summary of this, see my website transcript of interview with Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast on 9 June 2005. 

 

http://www.tonykevin.com/FranKelly.html

 

and see also Marg  Hutton’s earlier article about Yambuk on her website www.sievx.com

 

“The Yambuk Puzzle” – 2 February 2004

 

http://sievx.com/archives/2004_01-02/20040202.shtml

 

I have a longer journal article in draft setting this new Daoed trial evidence and the questions it raises out in fuller detail, if I can find a journal publisher for it.          

 

2.         Public acknowledgement (but without explanation for the change) by Senators Ellison and Vanstone in June-July 2005 that SIEV X sank in international waters: the authorities have quietly abandoned their three-year lie that it cannot be known where it sank, without saying why they have now made this change.

 

3.         Recent heavy-handed attempts to discredit and bury the proposed SIEV X National Memorial project in Canberra.

 

None of these points have been addressed by mainstream print media.  But it is clear by now to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that something shameful lies at the core of the SIEV X story, and that this has been and is being systematically covered up by national security agencies of the Howard government.

 

Yet most people in Australia – liberals included – remain frightened to use the SIEV X word . Perhaps for good reason, because to use it exposes one to the sort of personal attacks Windschuttle has just made on Rayson, Marr and Wilkinson (and previous attacks by others against Hutton and me).

 

I have an essay in the forthcoming edition of Overland – profound thanks to its editor  Jeff Sparrow – which sets out to expose the techniques used by supporters of the Howard Thought Police agenda to discredit people, who have tried or are still trying to say that we need to know the truth -  no matter how ugly or cruel it may be  - about how those 353 people on SIEV X lost their lives. No decent society can go on covering this up.

 

So now Quadrant has thrown the ball into David Marr’s and Marian Wilkinson’s court. Are they going to recant, assuring Quadrant readers that their revised wording in the second edition of DV has been misconstrued – that they did not mean to suggest they thought there was any possibility that Australian agencies might share some responsibility for the deaths of 353 people on SIEV X ? Presumably that is what the Howard Thought Police would like them to do.

 

Or will they use this attack as an opportunity to stand up alongside Marg Hutton, Hannie Rayson, Margo Kingston, Frank Brennan, myself and others, arguing the need for independent judicial  inquiry into an event that really matters in our national history?

 

Or will they ignore the Quadrant article and let the slur on them and all of us stand ? 

 

If they adopt the second alternative – which I hope they will – it would be appropriate for them to acknowledge the value of the pathbreaking work Marg Hutton and I did to analyse and publicise the SIEV X story over the past 3  ½ years.  We all need to stand together, I suggest, in this matter. We can be stronger that way.

  

**

 

Finally, I note that in his typically sloppy way, Windschuttle misrepresents the “evidence” he cites about alleged incidents of people on SIEVs throwing their children in the water or trying or threatening to do so:

“However, one thing their book does unwittingly reveal is that the now oft-repeated claim that the government lied about children being thrown overboard, is itself a lie. In canvassing the evidence from several official inquiries into people smuggling from Indonesia, Marr and Wilkinson reveal one case of a three-year old child thrown overboard (page 321), four cases of boat people threatening to or trying to throw children overboard (pages 326, 330), and one case where they deliberately set fire to their boat, putting 100 people who could not swim into the sea, including several children, a twelve-month old and a two-week old baby (page 353). The children overboard business was a scandal alright, but the culprits were not John Howard or Phillip Ruddock”.

All this so-called “evidence” Windschuttle cites from DV is based on untested written statements by naval personnel  on HMAS Warramunga and Bunbury regarding their interceptions of SIEVs 3, 7 and 9. We have no access yet to asylum-seeker memories of these described alleged events. Their memories may be very different. Some of these RAN personnel statements are obviously thrown into question by language indicating racist and xenophobic attitudes. All of this untested material was simply read into the CMI record by Admiral Geoff Smith, as part of a government spin tactic, described in my book,  to bury the facts of the false children overboard allegations in respect of Adelaide’s encounters with SIEV 4.  Smith himself gave false evidence about government knowledge of SIEV X – which he subsequently had to “clarify” under pressure from another senior Defence witness. .

 

None of this contentious material about alleged children overboard incidents got into the agreed Senate CMI report. It appeared only in an Appendix to the Minority Report of the three government Senators Brandis  Mason and Ferguson – a highly political and contentious minority report.  (See “Appendix 1: The pattern of conduct”,  in  CMI Report, pages 477 - end). 

 

Windschuttle misrepresents this highly partisan and untested material as being “evidence from several official inquiries into people smuggling from Indonesia.”.

 

During the CMI enquiry, Senators Faulkner, Cook, Collins and Bartlett made clear what they thought of the admissibility and credibility of this so-called evidence of children being thrown overboard by asylum-seekers.  In the end the only incident they were prepared to give some credence to was one case on SIEV 7 at Ashmore Reef on 24 October 2001,  when it appears from multisource RAN testimony that one child was held over the side and dropped  (not thrown) by his/her mother into the water where 15 adult male passengers had already entered, as part of what seems to have been a general act of protest by passengers fearing their enforced towback to Indonesia (which is what subsequently happened) . One of the men already in the water took care of the child and returned him/her safely to the SIEV 7. And that was all there was to it.  It is all in the Hansard.

 

The other alleged incidents of children bring held up etc are of doubtful credibility and may be equally well understood in context as simply demonstrations to the RAN personnel to say “Look, be merciful - we have our children here and they are at risk from what you are doing to us, too”.

 

Windschuttle here vilifies the asylumseekers as cruel to their children, as he has vilified Tasmanian aboriginal people as having been thieves and killers for the fun of it.    Windschuttle takes his discredited “History Wars” techniques of phoney history to the very recent and easily testable histories of SIEV X and what happened on the other SIEVs.

 

But how, I wonder, will others now respond ?  Will Windschuttle and Quadrant be allowed to get away with these new slanders, because SIEV X is just too hard to deal with ?  Over to David Marr and Marian Wilkinson – good luck, guys.  

 

Tony Kevin, Canberra, 11 September 2005