“SIEV X – an author’s postscript”, by Tony Kevin, as published in  Overland  issue 181, Summer 2005,  pages 107-111: 

 

 

I am most grateful to ‘Overland’ editors for publishing in December 2005 this follow-up essay on SIEV X..  This essay broadly completes what I want to say publicly, pending any further public developments or disclosures,  about the public and critical response to my book on SIEV X – a politically  interesting story in itself. 

 

Here are a few updating notes subsequent to the essay itself:  Hannie Rayson’s play ‘Two Brothers” was published by Currency Press in December 2005, including a Foreword by me;  because the Senate  inquiry into the Migration Act (the “Rau/Solon” inquiry) will publish their final report on the first parliamentary sitting day of 2006,  I do not yet know whether they considered the three border protection issues my submission asked them to look into;  several Senators acknowledged the personal gift of my book;   after their brief flirtation with truth, Senators Vanstone and Ellison both issued later official corrections to their statements cited in this essay about where the boat sank – these  corrections reverted to the original government story that it was not known where SIEV X sank (full details are on Marg Hutton’s website); and the Defence Minister who was responsible for the SIEV X Defence cover-up in the Senate in 2003-2005, Robert Hill, is leaving politics to become Australia’s Ambassador to the United Nations .  TK,  22 February 2006.

 

 

 

            “I believe that these negative reviews were essentially written, not with intent to join in any real debate with me on the SIEV X issue, but to lay down clear exclusion markers for senior public service and defence professionals.”

           

 

Many readers of my book A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of SIEV X (Scribe, August 2004, see review in Overland 177, 2004) may have wondered about what happened after the book came out.

 

In talks around Australia organised by my publisher and by local refugee support organisations, I found a generous welcome for the book. No author could ask for more generous or thoughtful public support for an inevitably controversial and political book. Most reviewers of the book thought well of it [1] . But there were unexpected areas of public silence about it. Professional journals of defence, police, public administration, law and politics generally ignored it. And then there were three highly-placed condemnations.

 

First came a hard-hitting negative review by the Anglican Bishop to the ADF, Dr Tom Frame. It appeared soon after the book’s publication, in two prestigious journals: Public Administration Today, the journal of the Canberra branch of the Australian Institute of Public Administration; and Defender, the journal of the Australia Defence Association [2] .  A second lengthy negative review, by Dr Jennifer Clarke of the Law Faculty of the Australian National University, appeared later in the online Journal of Australian Studies Review of Books [3] .  In the general press, one review in the Canberra Times by Professor Patrick Weller AO, Director of the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, would have had particular weight with government and defence professionals [4] . Weller’s review deftly combined authority with ambiguity:

 

So far, given the choice between the extensive sting and ensuing cover-up on the one hand, and a tragic stuff-up on the other, I tend towards Murphy in still being persuaded by the latter.  […]  At times this is a hard book to read; part detailed evidence, part speculation, part condemnation. In the end the message is not clear, because Kevin himself is not clear if, and to what extent, Australia was involved. There are questions, details and suggestions. It is an unfinished prosecution case.

 

Gerard Henderson, Director of the Sydney Institute, reproduced Weller’s review in his Sydney Institute house journal [5] . Henderson himself did not review the book. He initially referred to it briefly in an opinion piece he wrote in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald in early August 2004 (one week after my book came out), criticizing the “Group of 43” open letter protesting at current directions in Australian foreign policy. Henderson used my membership of the signatory group (former senior Australian diplomats and military figures), as an example to damn the group as a whole [6] .

 

Take former diplomat Tony Kevin, for example. Robert Manne’s edited collection The Howard Years contains a chapter by Kevin in which he refers to “the unexplained sinking of the grossly overloaded SIEV-X in international waters patrolled by Australia, during which 353 people drowned, and a dereliction in practice of legally binding protocols for the rescue of all persons in distress at sea”. The clear implication is the Australian Defence Force was complicit in the failure to rescue men, women and children drowning at sea.

 

Later that same day, Prime Minister Howard drew on Henderson’s material in replying to an Opposition question in Parliamentary Question Time about the Group of 43 letter, saying:

 

The 43 people comprise a mixture of people who have over the years been, in some cases, regular critics of this government. They include one person who accused the Royal Australian Navy and the Australian Federal Police of complicity in the drowning of 353 refugees. To expect for a moment that I am going to treat that person with the sort of reverence that is asked of me by the Leader of the Opposition—as far as I am concerned I have dealt with the merits of their arguments [7] .

 

The political signal Howard sent by this condemnation of me would have registered with those whose professions require them to keep abreast of the Prime Minister’s views. His message to them: give any currency or credence to Tony Kevin’s questions about SIEV X and I will publicly denounce you along with him.

 

At around this same time, the BBC World Service invited me to give a four–minute radio interview, setting out the book’s main case. After a couple of days’ delay, in which the BBC invited Senator Brandis to respond on behalf of the Australian government, both interviews aired on the BBCWS news and current affairs program The World Today on 24 August 2004. But strangely, they only ran for two early-morning broadcasts. They were removed from the program before its third daily edition, rebroadcast in Australia on ABC Radio National. It took me eight weeks of repeated requests to finally obtain from the BBC tapes of these two interviews that were never heard in Australia [8] .

 

Months later, after the book’s initial sales impetus had passed, Henderson published in his Institute journal a lengthy argument he and I had had by emails in August-September 2004 following his misleading allegations (quoted above) about my book [9] .  He declined to debate SIEV X with me or to offer a speaking forum in the Sydney Institute. But in finally deciding to publish our full correspondence (I had not asked him to do this), he was to his credit prepared to expose some of the public issues for his readers.

 

For Henderson, as for Frame and Clarke, it seemed difficult to understand the simple proposition on which my case rested: that in any decent society that places a proper value on protecting human life, there is an unarguable public-interest coronial obligation on government to explore these unexplained deaths of 353 people in Australia’s Operation Relex maritime zone, at the time of an admitted Australian people-smuggling disruption program in Indonesia aimed at stopping such voyages, and an active intelligence-based maritime surveillance and interception military operation being conducted in that zone. Nor did any of these three critics mention the public history of the Senate’s repeated motions over three years 2002-2004,  demanding a judicial enquiry into SIEV X and the disruption program.

 

Henderson, Frame and Clarke all skilfully misrepresented my case for a judicial inquiry, as nothing more than a series of speculative allegations against the ADF and AFP.  Frame argued that my sources of evidence were suspect and that other, more innocuous explanations were equally plausible, though he did not volunteer what these might be. Clarke found my book “not a great read”, a book that was either excessively personal or that “plods through minutiae like a public service memorandum”. Frame wrote that its speculations had cruelly distressed loyal and decent ADF professionals, many of whom were his own acquaintances. Clarke wrote that my under-researched, over-analysed attempts to explain the sinking of SIEV X could have harmed rather than helped traumatised survivors and bereaved families. She concluded: “While it appears that Kevin was justified in pursuing his concerns before the Senate inquiry, without better evidence he is not (yet) justified in turning them into a book”. Frame’s hostile review was likely to be read and respected by senior defence and public service professionals, given his moral authority as Anglican Bishop to the ADF. It become, in effect, the “authorised version” of the SIEV X story.

 

Now, as far as Australia’s national security and governance establishment is concerned, it is as if my SIEV X book does not exist. It has effectively been escorted out of the official frame of reference, like a badly behaved guest at an official function. I believe that these negative reviews were essentially written, not with intent to join in any real debate with me on the SIEV X issue, but to lay down clear exclusion markers for senior public service and defence professionals. The merits of my argument, or even its basic facts, were really irrelevant. As Howard had effectively made clear in Parliament, for senior government servants this was a forbidden book. The reviews by Frame and Clarke had substantiated that message.

 

Phillip Adams gracefully discussed the book with me on the ABC Radio National’s flagship public issues commentary program Late Night Live [10] . A wide range of ABC regional radio stations gave generous air-time as I travelled around the country introducing the book. But major print-media luminaries – people like Paul Kelly, Laurie Oakes, Michelle Grattan – did not refer to SIEV X, even as they continued to refer occasionally to Tampa, children overboard, children in immigration detention, and the Rau and Solon detention abuses.

 

For leading commentators, to cite the words “SIEV X” in any political commentary – even more so, to devote any serious analysis to it – might be seen as acts of defiance of the Howard Government, that would be remembered. Most people who rely on regular working access to the apparatus of government were too prudent to indulge in unnecessary heroics in the cause of throwing more public light on what by that stage may have seemed to them a minor – albeit regrettable – historical incident. Most people who mattered played it safe: they conveniently forgot SIEV X.

 

The Howard Government used its agenda-setting power to sanitise Australia’s border protection history in 2000-2001, to “disremember” the disturbing history of SIEV X, and to recontextualise its own recorded border protection abuses within the convenient new reality of Islamist-jihadist terrorism. In spite of all the Senate’s specific questions and motions, a soft critique of Australia’s 2000-2001 border protection operations took public hold. This story admitted a few vaguely discomfiting memories of Tampa and children overboard, but both stories were only partially told, excluding harsh facts: e.g., as to how Australian Coastwatch deliberately ignored for 24 hours the Palapa passengers’ need of rescue, and as to how Operation Relex criminally ordered HMAS Adelaide to risk for twenty-two hours the lives of the Olong passengers. Senators Collins and Bartlett had brought such shaming facts to light in 2002, and David Marr and Marian Wilkinson had helped publicise them, but they were soon forgotten. In the same way, the facts of SIEV X that briefly surfaced in mid-2002 soon largely ceased to exist outside refugee rights circles. The Howard Government had sold to Australia at large its own sanitised reality of its war on boat people: that it had stopped the boat people coming, using legal means, and that this was a good outcome.

 

My questions about the sinking of SIEV X did gain stronger credibility in 2004 and 2005, as a result of a large body of survivor testimonies in a SIEV X-related criminal trial in Brisbane, in which Khaleed Daoed was sentenced to nine years in an Australian prison as a people smuggler. Daoed’s defence team adopted a conservative defence strategy, trying simply (and without success) to discredit the reliability of Crown witnesses’ memories. It is clear that the jury found the SIEV X survivors credible witnesses. Apart from Daoed who had asked to testify, the defence called no witnesses. They were aware of my book from previous correspondence and a meeting, but they did not go down the riskier path of seeking to call Australian witnesses (eg AFP Commissioner Keelty, or Kevin Enniss) who might have testified on the Australian government’s people-smuggling disruption program and what contacts it might have had with Daoed’s associate Abu Quassey (now serving a seven-year sentence in Egypt for accidental homicide and people smuggling in respect of SIEV X) or with those senior Indonesian police who helped him. The disruption program was never mentioned in the court. Perhaps it would not have helped Daoed if it had been; but to me, this further emphasised the wasted opportunity of the whole proceedings.

 

Importantly, in their separate public statements around this time, Immigration Minister Senator Vanstone and Justice Minister Senator Ellison each referred to the sinking of SIEV X as having taken place “in international waters”. Senator Vanstone in answer to Senate question no 431, “SIEV X”, by Senator Brown , recorded in Senate Hansard 14 June 2005, referred to SIEV X as “an illegal venture out of another country with the tragedy occurring in international waters”. Senator Ellison stated, in his Media Release E070/05 of 8 June 2005, “Government welcomes SIEV X People Smuggler Conviction”: “In October 2001, the vessel known as Siev-X (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel-Unknown) sank en-route to Australia from Indonesia in international waters, resulting in the death of 353 people”.

 

This was the first time the government had accepted the truth of what Marg Hutton and I had been claiming for years. But neither Minister explained on what basis the government had changed its previous stance,  that it was impossible to know where SIEV X had sunk.

 

Other things happened to re-ignite the SIEV X issue in 2005. Hannie Rayson’s controversial play Two Brothers, a political thriller, aroused a storm of mainstream media criticism when it opened in Melbourne and Sydney in prestige city theatres. This was not fringe theatre that could be safely ignored: it had to be discredited.

 

The attack opened with two extraordinarily nasty personal diatribes against the play and against its author by Andrew Bolt in the Melbourne tabloid Herald-Sun. The hostile critics could not forgive Rayson for a key fictional plot element – that an Australian navy ship had come on the scene of the sinking but had been instructed by a government minister in Canberra to take no action to save survivors. They rebuked Rayson for slandering the ADF by not “sticking to the facts” which were, they claimed, that the Senate had fully exonerated the ADF from any role in the failure to save the lives of SIEV X passengers. Once again, mainstream media conveniently ignored the whole history of Senate demands for a judicial inquiry. They did not want readers to be reminded of how uncomfortably close to truth Rayson’s play was, so they took refuge in the government’s constructed “reality” that it had been exonerated.

 

Few spoke up for Rayson’s play. She had written on a forbidden theme and thus had to undergo exemplary societal punishment. No one defended her play in print except Hilary McPhee and I in The Age letters page. I later wrote a longer review essay for Margo Kingston’s Webdiary [11] .  The play ran long seasons to full houses in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. It succeeded by word of mouth. But as far as mainstream media critics were concerned, it was an artistic failure. It will be interesting to see if it will be published as a play text, or if it will ever play again in Australia.

 

Over the past three years, I have seen two opposing trends in public response to the SIEV X issue. On the positive side, the reality of many ordinary people in Australia coming into sustained human contact with boat people (mainly Afghan and Iraqi), both those thousands out in the community on Temporary Protection or Bridging Visas, and through visiting people in detention, humanised the faces of these victims of Australian bureaucratic cruelty. Protests at the inhumane treatment of refugees swelled, especially in Liberal Party and National Party ranks.

 

After huge publicity regarding the Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon detention/deportation “bungles” (actually, sustained processes of official cruelty and cover-up involving large numbers of officials), a newly-rediscovered Australian liberalism found political expression at last in the moral revolt in 2005 of seven Liberal Party backbenchers, ably led by Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan, that finally forced John Howard to accept the need for real changes in DIMIA immigration control philosophy and practice. One embarrassing DIMIA detention or deportation scandal followed another into the public arena on an almost daily basis. It was as if a dam had broken: a whole range of pent-up horror stories came to light. The whole nasty political-bureaucratic culture of deterrent detention of boat people – aptly condemned by Julian Burnside as a disreputable doctrine of hostage-taking – now came under sustained attack.

 

I hoped that in the current furore of exposures of DIMIA detention and deportation abuses, some Senators might also remember DIMIA’s suspect border protection record. I sent as gifts to all the members of the new 2005 Senate (to incoming and “old” members) a copy of my book. I also lodged a submission with the newly-set-up Senate Committee Inquiry into DIMIA’s administration and operation of the Migration Act. In this, I asked the Committee to do three things: first, to review the activities of the Border Control and Compliance Division, with a view to preventing possible SIEV X-type tragedies in any future Australian government people-smuggling disruption operations (an activity for which DIMIA together with AFP was still by its own admission responsible). Second, I asked the Committee to reaffirm the Senate’s demand that the AFP and DIMIA publicly release their lists of the SIEV X dead. Third, I asked the Committee to renew the Senate’s calls in 2002-4 for a judicial enquiry into the sinking of SIEV X and the disruption program. These seemed to me to be modest and achievable objectives. I was pleased when my submission was accepted and published by the Senate.

 

On the negative side, the series of terrorist attacks on Western targets that followed 11 September 2001 – the Bali, Madrid, Australian Embassy in Jakarta, and London transport bombings, and the way those events were framed in the Australian media – accentuated public fear in Australia of the Muslim religion and of Muslim people.  SIEV X survivors and bereaved – mostly Muslims from Iraq – are in Australia living in this now far harsher, more suspicious public climate. It is not a climate congenial to demands for SIEV X accountability. The victims here of SIEV X will, prudently, keep their heads down as most of them have done for the past four years. No political party seriously interested in wresting power from John Howard, no Liberal alternative leader even, will touch the SIEV X issue. Certainly the Labor Party under Kim Beazley will not touch it. It is, for the major parties, irrelevant history now.

 

Perhaps, we may one day see a brave whistleblower begin to open up official secrets about the sinking of SIEV X. Until then, my book has laid down an historical marker. It has helped SIEV X survivors and bereaved in Australia to understand the context of what might have happened to their families. It will be a reference point for them.  I am reasonably confident that the memory of SIEV X is firmly lodged in Australian public history. It may take time for academic specialists in Australian governance and defence to pick up the ball, but enough members of the public now knows that something very big and sad happened here – and that Australia has to own it. It rather reminds me of the way in which local people in the countryside know exactly where the big settler killings of aboriginal people took place: information that doesn’t always get into the officially approved histories, but that people still know. The strenuous efforts of Howard supporters to discredit and expunge from Australian memory the very name of SIEV X have, I believe, failed. When John Howard’s career as Prime Minister is written about, by any Australian historians worth their salt, the sinking of SIEV X will be in the index – because it was on Howard’s watch that these 353 innocent people died. John Howard has his own black armband to wear now.