Interesting commentary by Amanda Hodge
Weekend Australian – Little incentive to stop the asylum-seeker boats
IF the average Australian wonders how hundreds of Sri Lankans have recently managed to reach our waters without detection, there is no mystery on this side of the Indian Ocean.
In furtive conversations across the island nation, the finger is firmly pointed at the Sri Lankan navy, which is said to be at least complicit, if not an enabler, of the flotilla of fishing trawlers now making the perilous crossing.
More courageous- or conspiratorial- types have suggested complicity at far higher levels of bureaucracy, from provincial chief administrators to senior cabinet ministers who see the exodus as a neat solution to the problem of high unemployment and deep disaffection among the country’s Tamils.
While boats in the past decade or more have regularly left the relatively peaceful west coast of Sri Lanka, carting hopeful immigrants across the oceans in search of a better life, it is the recent exodus from the heavily militarised east that has raised eyebrows and diplomatic hackles.
Barely six months after it ended Asia’s longest-running civil war, the Sri Lankan government still holds about 250,000 civilians in barbed-wire detention camps, has effectively sealed off about a third of the country and appears to have heavily armed soldiers patrolling every kilometre of the country on foot.
Until just a few months ago, fishermen in the eastern provinces of Batticaloa and Trincomalee, both former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam-held areas, were banned from overnight trips in deep water.
The prohibition was rigorously enforced by the country’s large, if ageing, naval and coast guard fleet.
So how is it that this fleet, which so recently ruled the waves, is suddenly incapable of detecting suspect trawler after suspect trawler, bobbing offshore as small speedboats ferry midnight passengers from the beach? More
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