The reopening of Tony Kevin's website in January 2008

On 17 January 2008, I opened a new archival website www.tonykevin.com.au .

This site replaces the discontinued site www.tonykevin.com , which I opened in late 2003 but allowed to lapse in a moment of moral weakness in late 2007. The domain name was thus lost, but fortunately all the content was retrievable. The content has now been transferred to this new domain name.

If I should have the opportunity to repurchase the domain name www.tonykevin.com at a sensible low price, I will do so, in order to set up a permanent cross-reference from that former domain name to this new site, which I understand can be done quite inexpensively.

If not, people will just have to intuit the existence of this new domain name for my site. It will get onto Google lists in a month or so, after which time so it should not be too difficult to find it.

My opening statement when the site www.tonykevin.com first opened in November 2003 is appended below. It explains what I then hoped to achieve from the site. (New visitors might want to read that section now, to understand better what follows)

Here is a brief resume of what happened to the site and to me, in terms of my objectives in 2003, since my site opened.

The site attracted about 25,000 visits in the four years it ran. It attracted good Google coverage. It was never to my knowledge picked up or commented on in any mainstream media writing on refugee issues or on dissent against the Howard government. For most people prominent in such areas of public dialogue, the SIEV X issue remained too hot a potato to touch, at least in any written or citeable medium. Maybe SIEV X continued to be discussed around dissenting dinner tables, but I was not party to such conversations, and whatever may have flowed from them.

I continued to rock the boat as best I could, tirelessly advocating the cause of SIEV X accountability, using whatever public venues were offered to me. Increasingly as the years went on and as SIEV X faded from public memory as an interesting issue of accountability (and there were so many other, newer, such issues always being generated under Howard) , these venues were smallish dissenting and Christian groups. The doors of mainstream politics and mainstream media were more and more being closed to me and to the SIEV X issue. This website charts some of that history.

At the end of the day, by early 2007, I was pretty much burnt out – there was little petrol left in my tank, to borrow John Faulkner's apt metaphor. (Fortunately, the petrol is back in John's tank now).

My site attracted a few courteous links references from other sites interested in the SIEV X issue, e.g., from the premier site www.sievx.com (Marg Hutton), from www.safecom.org.au ( Jack Smit) , and from the strictly non-partisan www.sievreader.com (Don Maclurcan). The SIEV X National Memorial website, www.sievxmemorial.com , did not carry a Links section.

My site did attract occasional feedback from interested readers, but more and more, it became a backwater. Its value by now was, I now believe, primarily as a retrievable archive for the things I was saying and writing during my years of public activism under the Howard Government, on SIEV X and on other issues of serious public accountability, most particularly on boat people policy generally, but also on the invasion of Iraq, the war on terror, the victimisation of Muslims and the sedition laws, David Hicks, AWB, etc.

As I became more isolated in the years 2004-2006, the site became quieter, both in terms of new material going onto it and visitors to it. The site is, I think, a useful record of what happened to one dissident who had taken on the enormous powers of the Howard government to intimidate, isolate, and silence dissent. A measure of how well they were succeeding is that Clive Hamilton's and Sarah Maddison;s important 2007 book, “Silencing Dissent” mentions neither SIEV X nor my name. Another measure is that I had become pretty much unemployable.

The record offers some interesting lessons, I think, in how dissent can be divided, isolated, worn down and ultimately demoralised under a ruthless government such as we had in Australia until recently. I recently had the pleasure of seeing that brilliant German film, ”The lives of others”, unforgettably portraying what it was like to live in the final years of the GDR. At moments in the film, I felt a frisson of recognition, a chill of familiarity with what life in Australia was becoming under Howard.

Where I was at by early 2007 is set out in the talk I gave at Manning Clark House on 1 April 2007, at the “”Fair Go for Refugees” Weekend of Ideas. The talk can be found on the MCH website at http://www.manningclark.org.au/papers/Tony_Kevin-Media_and_Writing.html

and on this my new website too at

http://www.tonykevin.com.au/MCH.html

It was the hardest talk I have ever written because I was trying to give an honest account of how and why I had failed to achieve the goals I had set myself on SIEV X in 2002. I was trying to explain why I was withdrawing from a public battle that Í knew had not yet been won. I don't know why the talk got a standing ovation, for it gave me no pleasure to deliver it.

Meanwhile I had written two books: “A Certain Maritime Incident: the Sinking of SIEV X”( Scribe 2004, reprinted 2006; currently out of print, but work is underway in preparation for a new revised edition); and “Walking the Camino” (Scribe, 2007).

Both books have done well in the Australian marketplace and in terms of critical reception – see reviews of the SIEV X book on this site, and see www.scribepublications.com.au

for book descriptions and selected review excerpts.

The SIEV X book has sold around 3500-4000 copies so far and was awarded two prizes: Winner, 2005 NSW Premier's Literary Awards for Multicultural Writing, and Winner, 2005 ACT Book of the Year Award. Some consider the book polemical and unscholarly. Others consider it fearless and compelling. Time will tell whether it has a lasting literary or forensic value. For the moment, it is pretty much sidelined.

“Walking the Camino” – a vastly different and far happier book, a memoir of my 1200 kilometer walk across Spain as a pilgrim to Santiago in 2006 - continues to sell well, up to 4000 copies so far, and is soon to be sold overseas.

I am researching now in preparation for a third book, a philosophical and moral exploration of the ever-fascinating profession of diplomacy to which I used to belong.

SIEV X continues to be an unfinished public issue in Australia. The unexplained deaths of 353 people at sea on their way to Australia's Christmas Island at the height of an Australian Government border protection campaign that was employing major military, police and intelligence surveillance resources, cannot be shrugged off as a dead story of no further public interest now, six years later.

With the election of a Rudd Labor Government committed to good governance and accountability , and with firm undertakings on public record from a senior minister of unquestioned courage and integrity in the Rudd Government, Special Minister of State Senator John Faulkner, that he will pursue issues of public accountability in respect of SIEV X and the Australian Government's people smuggling disruption program, the chances are good now that truth will emerge eventually on what happened to SIEV X.

At least, a lot more of the truth than we have been allowed to know so far.

I most probably will not be part of that further public fact-finding process. I am approaching 65 and have little stomach left for further public activism; we have a decent government now which offers hope for progress; and other worthy people have taken up the SIEV X torch in their own ways, eg the National SIEV X Memorial Project, which against all odds succeeded in its goal of building a national SIEV X permanent memorial at Weston Park, Canberra. Those who last year derided this wonderful memorial as political protest art are now themselves footnotes to history. See www.sievxmemorial.com .

Now that this Memorial is in the ground, permanently one assumes now, I hope that the many thousands of good people around Australia who contributed to it will turn their enormous idealism and organisational skills to pursuing the related goal of demanding of government to know what really happened. Was it just a tragic Act of God, another Dunbar or Geelong-Portland coast migrant ship tragedy, or was the hand of man involved?

Surely if one is going to memorialise a major human tragedy like SIEV X, and that of itself took a lot of courage to do in Howard's Australia, one should have some public curiosity to go the next step now, to try to find out how it happened and what lessons might be learned from it, so that such tragedies can never happen again in Australia's northern maritime approaches. At least, that is my hope.

I put my greatest faith in Marg Hutton, whose site www.sievx.com – the senior and most authoritative public voice on SIEV X – continues to record facts and speak the truth with uncompromising honesty, vigour and clarity. Unlike myself who has experienced real moments of weakness and despair especially over the past year, Marg Hutton has never wavered. I urge readers to read her latest keynote essay on www.sievx.com , “”Now Labor Can Get to the Truth”, 1 January 2008, for a magisterial statement of where things stand on SIEV X.

At the end of her essay Marg Hutton makes an important public announcement:

“I am working on a doctoral thesis on SIEVX under the supervision of Professor Robert Manne at La Trobe University which will draw together what is known about the SIEVX tragedy including the role of the Howard Government's border protection policy; it will highlight the obfuscation and contradictions in the public record. ”

**

I will keep my reopened archival website www.tonykevin.com.au going for a few years yet, depending on developments. Eventually I may ask the National Library to archive it electronically in the Pandora archive for future historians. I will not close it down again without ensuring that its contents are protected and available to researchers.

In ensuing months I may tidy up the site a little, make some amendments or amending annotations to old files, add a few pieces I wrote in the final months of the Howard government. There is no great urgency now to do this, and I do not expect the site to be particularly newsworthy or busy from now on. The important thing was to retrieve the site for researchers, and this I have now done.

I will accept with pleasure any financial donations (acknowledgeable or silent, as donors prefer) for the continued maintenance of this site, which will cost me several 100's of $ to reopen now and to maintain for the next few years.

Tony Kevin, Canberra 17 January 2008

***

My opening statement when the site www.tonykevin.com first opened in November 2003:

About me and my work

My name is Tony Kevin and I live in Canberra with my wife and three young children . I have two grown-up sons. I am an Australian citizen of mixed Australian (fifth generation of Irish Catholic origin; my forebears mostly lived in the central west of NSW,) and European (Central European "reform" Jewish) parentage. My father was an Australian naval lieutenant and intelligence officer in WW2, and later had a distinguished Australian diplomatic career 1945-1968. My mother, who grew up comfortably in the Viennese middle class, had to flee as a refugee when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. My parents married in Britain in 1939, then came to Australia, and I was born in Sydney in 1943.

I retired from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 1998, after a thirty year public service career involving posts in DFAT and Prime Minister's Department. My last postings were as Australia's ambassador to Poland (1991-94) and Cambodia (1994-97).

I have been an honorary Visiting Fellow at ANU Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies since 1998. I have also since 2001 given a seminar course on UN peacekeeping at Melbourne University Institute of Asian Languages and Societies. In the past five years I have written extensively, from a standpoint increasingly critical of the present government, on a range of Australian foreign, national security and refugee policies.

Since February 2002, assisting in the public investigation of the sinking south of Java on 19 October 2001 of the asylum-seeker boat that took 353 lives, and which I named SIEV X ( i.e., "Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel, Unknown"), has become my main research activity. I see SIEV X as a major human tragedy that happened on Australia's border protection military watch, and that raises disturbing unresolved questions about the Australian government's cover-up of suspected criminality.

I am now firmly of the view, on the basis of substantial, albeit as yet incomplete, public evidence, that the sinking of SIEV X was the result of planned acts of sabotage in Indonesia, involving use of undercover agents under a people smuggling disruption program that was being conducted by elements of the Indonesian police, who had been trained and funded by Australian police; and that Australian government agencies have much more knowledge of this suspected crime against humanity than they have so far admitted to the Australian Senate or people.

Starting in February 2002, I began to raise questions with the Senate opposition party leaders about SIEV X. I lodged two written submission to the Senate "children overboard" enquiry in March and April 2002, and I testified in person on 1 May 2002.

I have since spoken in various public conferences and meetings around Australia, progressively updating my critique on SIEV X, in Canberra, Newcastle, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Albury, Sydney and Braidwood. I have also made a number of radio and television appearances to talk about SIEV X. I have written numerous articles in Australia's national print media, including Eureka Street, Canberra Times, Melbourne Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, and Australian Financial Review .

I continue to try to raise public consciousness of the SIEV X issue, and thereby to increase public pressure on government in support of Senate motions calling on the Commonwealth Government "to immediately establish a comprehensive, independent judicial inquiry into all aspects of the People Smuggling Disruption Program operated by the Commonwealth Government and agencies from 2000 to date, including Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels, and in particular the boat known as SIEV X".

Such Senate demands, first made in an agreed Opposition parties' motion in December 2002, were renewed in October 2003 in the Senate in an agreed motion sponsored by Senator Andrew Bartlett. I believe that such an enquiry is obligatory, both in the national security interest and in the interests of equal justice for all people in Australia, including asylum seekers and their families for whom our Government has a moral duty of care.

When the Senate passes such serious motions (or as Senator Brown called them, "Orders"), it is not just whistling in the wind. If the Prime Minister continues to ignore the Senate's well-based and annually repeated demands for him to commission a comprehensive independent judicial enquiry into the full circumstances of the sinking of SIEV X, there will then be a legal basis I believe for a referral of the matter in 2004 to the International Criminal Court, as a suspected crime against humanity that is not being properly addressed by national judicial processes in Australia.

To explain this novel proposition: The passengers of SIEV X were an identifiable cohort of people against whom a suspected crime against humanity was carried out, with possible prior knowledge held by Australian government agencies. My thanks to Julian Burnside for helping me to perceive the idea of an approach to the ICC as a possible avenue for the pursuit of justice, subject to legal advice on the specific SIEV X issue which I have not to this point sought from him or any other lawyer. But I am confident that if the government continues irresponsibly to ignore these Senate Orders, high-quality legal advice will be forthcoming to examine this possible legal avenue in 2004.

Of course, the issue of where SIEV X sank and the lies that the Australian Government continues to offer about this (in Senate Estimates Committees) will be a crucial element in the evidence.

I am now well advanced towards completing a book on the sinking of SIEV X, for which I hope to find a publisher. For nearly two years now, I have laid my personal reputation on the line and have taken some damage, in order to make public my disturbing analysis of SIEV X evidence. I believe the public questions I ask, that are based on my reading of the public evidence, are conscientious, objective, and in the public interest. I do not seek to defame any individual or agency; I do not look for "revenge" or for someone to blame; I seek only truth and justice for the victims, and a recognition of the terrible harm that was done to them.

I successfully sought redress from the Senate Privileges Committee against adverse and injurious statements about me in the Senate in September 2002. I was awarded "International Whistleblower of the Year" by the prestigious London-based "Index on Censorship" non-governmental organisation in March 2003, and a "Just Australian of the Year 2003" award by the "A Just Australia" organisation in July 2003. I do not hold any Australian government honours, and I do not expect any anytime soon.

I thank and pay tribute to the many people who have worked with me on the quest for justice for the victims of SIEV X, in particular: Marg Hutton, Mary Dagmar Davies, Marilyn Shepherd, Claire Bruhns, Phil Griffiths, Colin Penter, Sue Hoffman, Peter Reid, Phillip Adams, Jack Waterford and Margo Kingston. I could never have got this far without their help and the help of many others I do not here mention.

Why this site?

My site will reflect my public and personal perspective on SIEV X. More broadly, it will offer my philosophy and my advocacy work on SIEV X, and on other issues of public concern where my former career expertise gives me a basis for making useful contributions to public debate. Its name is intuitively easy to search and easy to remember once found. I hope a lot of people will start to check it out regularly, as it builds and as word gets around.

It will be a "contrarian" site, but I hope people of all political orientations will find it interesting to read. I am not affiliated to any political party, and nor is this new site. Its philosophical basis will simply be:

that Australia needs to return to a morally accountable basis for our foreign and national security policies;

that national security policies that undermine any person's human security are wrong policies;

that, as SIEV X and Bali have so tragically proved, "what goes around comes around".

The disgraceful history of the SIEV X issue including especially its studied official cover-up to date symbolises much of what I see as going wrong in the Australian national security area under our present national government. This led me to feel finally that I need a website of my own to allow space for free expression of all that I want to say on these matters.

The Australian Government is coming under increased scrutiny on all matters relating to the treatment of asylum seekers and the unexplained events of SIEV X

This site will provide ready access to both published and unpublished material, by or about me, that has something useful to say on SIEV X .

My website will also be an accessible archive for things that I have written and had published in the past five years on other matters as well as SIEV X – that might be of interest to readers and might otherwise lie buried in newspaper and magazine archives. or have been unpublished. I want to challenge the proposition that, because I have risked my public reputation to advocate the rights of the SIEV X victims to dignity and justice, that this has somehow disqualified me from writing on other political issues of concern to thoughtful Australians and where I have some expertise. It shouldn't, and it doesn't.

From early in my work on SIEV X, the independent work of another person who cares as deeply about SIEV X as I do played a key role – Marg Hutton, a trained historian, who created and operates her independent archival and commentary site www.sievx.com . This is without doubt, as many have already said, the best public interest informational website in Australia today and is the indispensable historical archive for SIEV X record material. Like many others I refer to www.sievx.com frequently in my daily work on SIEV X.

I hope my site will be a valuable contribution to the reach and continuing impact of the SIEV X message, which is already being projected in Australia by an increasing number of concerned people in many individual and different ways: not only on sievx.com, but also in JANNAH THE SIEV X MEMORIAL, in the upcoming Memorial Project to Drowned SIEV X Asylum Seekers (Steve Biddulph and others), in novels, poems, plays, film documentaries, art, music, dance …. My new site joins this group of public activities based on the shame and outrage that so many thoughtful Australians feel at the SIEV X scandal, and based on our determination to honour the dignity of the victims.

NOTE: I will continue to use my SIEV X "blind" email list occasionally when there is something I want to say that I think is important and that is not being said elsewhere, e.g., on sievx.com or on Margo Kingston's Webdiary SIEV X archive. I will use the Press Release format in such cases and keep it short, referring where necessary back to longer commentaries on the website.There is a tendency to regard multiple-addressee emails as "spam", no matter how carefully the addressee list is reviewed for reader interest. This website will give people the chance to decide whether they want to visit from time to time to check out what is new. It is less intrusive than bulk emails.

Tony Kevin, November 2003