The Guardian 26 April, 2006
Refugees pay price of appeasement
Bob Briton
There are tragedies in the making as the Howard Government rushes to placate Indonesia over the Immigration Department’s decision to grant temporary visas to 42 West Papuan refugees. A high-level Foreign Affairs Department delegation has been dispatched to Jakarta to sell the "virtues" of legislation coming before the Australian Parliament that effectively excludes the Australian mainland from Australia’s migration zone! Vulnerable people seeking refuge in Australia will pay the price for this latest act of appeasement to our northern neighbour.
Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone has admitted that the revamped Pacific Solution is being put in place as a deterrent to would-be asylum seekers from West Papua or anywhere else. Under the new regime, all asylum seekers will be processed at facilities on Christmas Island, Manus Island or Nauru whether they are intercepted at sea, on an off-shore island or on the Australian mainland. Much is being made of the claim that these are to be "open centres" where the detainees are only locked up at night. The fact is that, along with the other asylum seekers, children will once again be detained in odious conditions that have proven to be so damaging to previous intakes of refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The refugees will have less access to lawyers and migration agents on these island locations. Their cases will be dealt with by one public servant and only have the possibility of one internal review if the application for asylum is rejected. There will be no access to the Australian courts. The Government will try to resettle asylum seekers in a third country and do all it can to prevent them reaching the mainland. The Australian Navy will cooperate with its Indonesian counterpart to prevent further attempts by West Papuans to flee oppression in their homeland.
Vanstone took the opportunity of an interview on the ABC’s 7.30 Report to chastise the recently arrived West Papuans for drawing attention to the appalling conditions in their country: "… we will not allow, to the best of our ability, people to use Australia as a staging point of protest against one of our neighbours and to seek to use Australian law to protest and interfere in the domestic politics of another country. That’s just not in our interests."
You could be forgiven for thinking that the Government had found the West Papuans who landed their canoe on Cape York in January to be of doubtful character and with dubious claims for asylum. On the contrary! The Immigration Department subjected their applications and the moving accounts of their experiences to rigorous examination and granted three-year Temporary Protection Visas to 42 out of the 43 arrivals relatively quickly.
The claim for protection by the last of the group, who is still on Christmas Island, is still being considered by the Department. A recent report in The Australian revealed that this detainee is David Wainggai, son of a prominent founder of the West Papuan independence movement, the late Dr Thomas Wainggai.
Dr Wainggai died in prison in Jakarta in 1996, about eight years after he and his Japanese-born wife were condemned to long jail terms for their involvement in a demonstration where the West Papuan Morning Star flag was raised. Free West Papua Campaign spokesman Nick Chesterfield is disturbed at the delay in the processing of Mr Wainggai’s application and the possibility that he could be handed over to Indonesian authorities
"This man is at huge risk", Mr Chesterfield said. "It’s like handing back Jews to the Nazis in World War II … We don’t want the Government playing games. We are worried it is in the too-hard basket."
Unfortunately, the Federal Opposition is doing nothing to help the plight of the West Papuans. It agrees with the Government that West Papua should remain part of Indonesia despite the ethnic and cultural differences of its people and the illegitimate means Indonesia used to incorporate its territory into the Republic in 1969.
Kim Beazley maintains that "good fences make good neighbours". He further maintains that if his pet project, an Australian Coast Guard, had been in operation that the Government would not have the current situation on its hands — where 43 asylum seekers had arrived in Australia. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from these comments is that the Coast Guard would have turned these people back and into the hands of their tormentors.
Beazley has also called the Prime Minister a coward for not going to Jakarta himself to patch things up with the government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. He is not at all happy that the job has been left to Foreign Affairs chief Michael L’Estrange.
Meanwhile, a recent Newspoll has found that 77 per cent of Australians support independence for West Papua.
In a tragic footnote to the stories of the Howard Government’s diplomatic manoeuvring, Indonesian police have confirmed that a boat carrying 21 Papuans suspected of being asylum seekers has sunk with one confirmed dead and 18 more missing. Police said they believed some passengers were student supporters of independence for West Papua. Two passengers were saved by fishermen after the boat was swamped by large waves several kilometres north of the West Papuan capital of Jayapura.