Deporting Kurdish Boat PeopleArouses Protests
The Indonesian National Police are now detaining the men in the port town of Saumlaki on Yamdena Island, approximately 500 kilometres north of the Australian mainland. Representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees and the International Organisation of Migration are scheduled to be in contact with the men in the next few days.
''The problem with our refugee policy is that we don't face reality.Nine out of ten boat people in the last three years have proven refugee claims and yet they are treated worse than criminals,'' said Howard Glenn, national director of A Just Australia, the national umbrella group for refugee advocacy groups.
On Sunday afternoon, Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer gloated at the success of the Australian government's military operation. ''We've demonstrated a very clear point - that if you are strong in standing up to the people smugglers, people smugglers won't be able to make money out of Australia and out of our goodwill,'' he said.
Downer claimed that even though the men had probably paid a people smuggler to transport them to Australia on a potentially hazardous ocean voyage on a small boat, they had not requested asylum. ''They didn't apply for asylum when they were in contact with Australian authorities, or with the Australians themselves on Melville Island,'' Downer said.
Nor would Downer concede that the men may have been fleeing persecution and could be legally entitled to apply for asylum. ''They came from Turkey. They didn't come from some battle zone. But they - of course there is conflict between the Turkish government and Kurdish minority. But why they came, I don't know,'' he said.
Refugee activists dispute the claim. ''Everywhere in the world recognises the persecution the Kurds face,'' Glenn said.
In 2002, Amnesty International reported that ''many prisoners of conscience continued to face trial or imprisonment, particularly for expressing opinions on the Kurdish question or the high-security 'F-type' prisons, or for expressing Islamist views''.
''Torture in police custody remained widespread and was practiced systematically in the anti-terror branches of police stations in the south-east à dozens of killings by security officers were reported; some may have been extrajudicial executions,'' it added.
On Sunday, Downer sidestepped questions on whether the men had been denied legal assistance or informed of their rights. ''I've been advised that they haven't made an application à Whatever the media knew or didn't know, I'm telling you what I know,'' he said.
However, last week the Australian government took extraordinary steps to prevent media and legal support to the asylum seekers.
After the boat's occupants were reported to have landed on Melville Island last Tuesday, the government initially imposed a 10-kilometre exclusion zone around their boat while they were awaiting the arrival of government officials.
Hours later, the government proclaimed a new regulation retrospectively excising approximately 4,000 islands around Australia's coast from the provisions of the Migration Act. In the middle of Wednesday night an Australian navy ship, HMAS Geelong, began to tow the 12-metre long Indonesian fishing boat back to international waters.
The president of the Refugee Council of Australia, David Bitel, said the excision of the islands to prevent the men from applying for asylum is ''a breach of our obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention''.
Under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Australia and other signatory nations ''may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty''.
Late Friday evening, the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory rejected an urgent application by a group of lawyers seeking to prevent the government from removing the 14 men from Australia. The court has yet to publish the reasons for its decision.
Earlier in the day, Australian Greens Sen Bob Brown sought to overturn the regulation exempting the islands from Australia's Migration Act. ''This is (an) à opportunity for us to put things right in this place and for us to insist that à the Senate is the backstop when the government loses decency (and) when the government divides this country,'' he told the Senate.
The move was defeated when the Labor Opposition - which has pledged to back the repeal of the regulations - joined with the government in arguing that dealing with them immediately was a matter of urgency.
''The harsh reality for à (the) 14 people currently affected by this government regulation is that disallowance on any date - today or in the future - will not affect their individual claims,'' Faulkner told the Senate.
Despite the setback, Glenn is confident the regulations will be overturned at the next Senate sitting later this month. He also senses widespread public disbelief of the government claims. ''All the talkback is completely different à people just do not believe the government,'' Glenn said.
''The figures that came out last week from the Department of Immigration that nine out of ten of all the boat people have proven refugee claims just makes it clear to people how the government has tried to con us,'' he said. (END/IPS/AP/IP/HD/EU/BB/JS/03)
* The story has been wired by Inter Press Service (IPS) on Nov. 10.