“We must not bow to threats over refugees” – commentary by Tony Kevin, The Advertiser ( Adelaide), Opinion Page, 7 April 2006

http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/
0,5936,18733977%255E5000423,00.html 

MOST Australians undoubtedly believe that people fleeing the troubled Indonesian province of West Papua because of well-founded fears of persecution engage Australia's legal obligations under the UN Refugee Convention. That is, Australia should consider their cases for protection fairly, on their merits, without decisions being influenced by good-neighbourly relations with Indonesia.

 

That is not how many Indonesians in government and politics see it. In their view, Australia's obligations not to give offence to a neighbour should override our humanitarian and international legal obligations to give protection to genuine refugees. Worse, Indonesian leaders have laid their personal honour on the line, by pledging publicly that returned West Papuan asylum seekers would not be harmed. They deeply resent that Australian leaders have questioned whether such high-level assurances could be relied on, given the agitated state of West Papua.

 

It is now a large regional security problem for Indonesia and Australia and is likely to get worse. The Indonesian power elite will now look for tangible proof of West Papuan boat people being rebuffed by Australian border protection authorities: not necessarily handed over to Indonesian authorities, but certainly turned back towards West Papuan territory.

 

It would be hard politically and morally for the Howard Government to do this, given the obvious strength of mainstream Australian public sympathy for West Papuan refugees.

 

Yet Indonesia has a nasty ace up its sleeve. There are still more than 300 Middle-Eastern origin asylum seekers held in transit centres in Indonesia, who have not yet found permanent refugee resettlement in Australia or elsewhere. Some of these are survivors of previous failed attempts to reach Australia in the years of major covert people smuggling and people smuggling disruption activity, from 1999 to 2001.

 

There is credible evidence that in those years, elements in Indonesian national security agencies may have encouraged and assisted a sharp upsurge in numbers of Middle-Eastern-origin boat people seeking to reach Australia: perhaps as Indonesian payback for Australia's role in the independence of East Timor in 1999. Some of the biggest people smugglers clearly enjoyed covert Indonesian agency protection.

 

Even if the 300 people now waiting in Indonesia were allowed entry to Australia, Indonesian agencies could encourage a new pipeline from Middle-Eastern centres of refugee outflow.

 

So it is ominous that, in the past few days, Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda both gave clear warnings to Australia that unless it starts turning back West Papuan asylum seekers, it can expect a revival of the Middle-Eastern boat people problem. The warnings came in the form of reminders that over the past three years, Australia has depended on Indonesian government co-operation in halting flows of illegal immigration through Indonesia. The unstated message is: We helped you turn this tap off in 2002 – it can be turned on again.

 

As a humanitarian, my response is: If such covert confrontations over boat people should develop again between Australia and Indonesia, Australia must above all else give priority this time to the preservation of human life. People risking their lives on small, dangerous boats should not again be made pawn to international politics. We must have no more SIEV X tragedies.

 

Tony Kevin is a Visiting Fellow, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, and author of A Certain Maritime Incident: the Sinking of SIEV X.