Channel 7 news – The new Guantanamo

Watch here about Christmas Island becoming the next Guantanamo Bay

ABC Radio (11/01) – Australia stands by decision to refuse visas to five Tamil refugees Read Transcript here

The Australian – Rudd to blame after bridges burnt

by Paul Maley

THE 255 Sri Lankans moored off the Indonesian port of Merak must rue the decision to book their passage to Australia with Captain Bram, the notorious people-smuggler allegedly behind their ill-fated voyage. Had they travelled on the boat rescued by the Oceanic Viking they might well be in Australia by now.

The Viking passengers have been whisked through the refugee resettlement processes in what must be record time.

Sources close to the negotiations say Kevin Rudd applied enormous pressure to resolve the impasse quickly.

This yielded the desired political result, an end to the stand-off and the involvement of enough third countries for Rudd to claim the deal was unexceptional.

But the policy fallout has been disastrous. Canberra’s relations with Jakarta have been strained over what by any measure is a marginal issue.

The job of refugee resettlement agencies in Indonesia has been made considerably more difficult thanks to the charged political atmosphere generated by Canberra. And the Tamils on Merak have been largely ignored. Any political capital that might have been spent on their behalf has been squandered. And yet the debt owed to the 255 Tamils is at least as great as that owed to the Viking passengers.

The Merak Tamils were prevented from seeking asylum in Australia thanks to the direct intervention of the Prime Minister.

Rudd, the Christian moralist, must surely be aware of the obligation this places on Australia, and on him personally.

Not that it’s likely to make much difference.

Jakarta is in no mood to do Rudd any more favours.

The SMH (22/12) - Christmas denied to island detainees

by Bruce Haigh

There will be no Christmas on Christmas Island this year. Government fear and stubbornness has resulted in the detention centre on the island being over capacity; crowded with desperate, unhappy and traumatised asylum seekers.

All supplies have to be shipped or flown to the island; a considerable logistical exercise and very expensive. There are about 1300 refugees, 300 guards and other detention facility workers on the island and 300 locals; almost two army battle groups.

Asylum seekers are now being accommodated in tents before the arrival of demountable huts.

The Government maintains the previous government’s policy of incarceration of asylum seekers on the island without any publicly argued policy to justify their decision. Together with the Opposition they argue that island incarceration acts as a deterrent to people seeking protection as refugees who arrive by boat. There is absolutely no proof to back this assertion.

Incarceration of asylum seekers on the island is punitive, which is in contravention of the UN Convention Australia has signed relating to the treatment of refugees and which has been incorporated into Australian law. Therefore the Government is acting in contravention of its own laws. More

ABC – Oceanic Viking refugees begin resettlement

Some of the 78 Sri Lankan refugees who spent a month aboard the Oceanic Viking in an Indonesian port will begin the resettlement process today.

The Australian -  Viking Tamils given special treatment, Indonesian and Canadian officials say

KEVIN Rudd’s claim that the 78 Tamils rescued by the Oceanic Viking received no special treatment was in tatters yesterday after officials in Canada and Indonesia described the arrangements made for the refugees as extraordinary.

SMH – Merak Tamils seek same deal as Viking

As the resettlement of 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers who disembarked from the Oceanic Viking is given priority, more than 250 of their compatriots intercepted a week earlier have been unable to get even a first meeting with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

The Age – Forgotten asylum seekers left in squalor

As the 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers who disembarked from the Oceanic Viking have their resettlement fast-tracked, more than 250 of their countrymen, intercepted a week earlier, have been unable to get a meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

ABC The Drum (17/12) – Rudd rushes in

by Bruce Haigh, convener of The Sri Lanka Human Rights Project and adviser to the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice

For 25 years the invasion of East Timor and the murder of five Australian journalists at Balibo by members of the Indonesian armed forces defined the relationship between the two countries.

It is still significant. In November 2007 the NSW Deputy Coroner, Dorelle Pinch found that, “The Balibo Five…were shot and or stabbed deliberately, and not in the heat of battle.” The murders were carried out by Indonesian special force soldiers.

The findings were referred to the AFP for investigation as war crimes. Nothing happened under AFP Commissioner Keelty. It couldn’t. Keelty was caught between a rock and a hard place. He had developed a relationship with the Indonesian police and military to thwart people smuggling. It worked because both either ran or received protection money from the people smugglers. He feared that investigating the military over the Balibo deaths would hazard the finely balanced refugee disruption operation in which the AFP was a player with the Indonesian military and police.

Keelty retired in May 2009 and in August his successor Tony Negus announced that the AFP would begin its investigation into the deaths. In September the Indonesian government said that the case should remain closed. In October refugee boats started to arrive in Australian waters and in November the Indonesian government banned the feature film Balibo which portrays the deaths and the events surrounding them. The film was however screened in Jakarta by the Independent Journalists’ Alliance on 3 December.

The arrival of the refugee boats could be co-incidental because events in the source countries of Afghanistan and Sri Lanka saw conditions favouring the exit of persecuted individuals and families. Nonetheless the Indonesian military does have the capacity to turn on and off the flow of boats. More

The Australian – Labor MP slates Rudd’s asylum solution

The above was on the front page of the Weekend Australian (21/11)

AAP – PM’s bungles ‘kill chance of UNSC seat’

Australia has no chance of scoring a UN Security Council seat thanks to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s diplomatic bungling, a former Australian diplomat and Indonesia expert says.

Mr Rudd’s “ambition outweighing ability” has eroded Australia’s credibility in the region, especially with his recent failed plan to have Indonesia deal with 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers, former diplomat Bruce Haigh says.

“Rudd’s cooked his goose as far as getting meaningful votes at the Security Council,” said Mr Haigh, who served with the Department of Foreign Affairs from 1972 to 1994 and wrote on Indonesia in The Great Australian Blight and Pillars of Fear. More

ABC Video – Chris Evans – ‘no special deals’ offered to Oceanic Viking

Herald Sun – Don’t dump your boat people on us

Sydney Morning Herald – Share asylum burden, Indonesians plead

Voice of America – Amnesty International Chief Blasts Australia’s ‘Panic’ Over Asylum Seekers

NineMSN – Authorities find 44th boat off Australia

Australian Financial Review : Where are we at?
Bruce Haigh, 23 October, 2009

Kevin Rudd’s Indonesia solution is craven. It is an abrogation of the ideals which built this nation. It is mean spirited. If we cannot offer protection to desperate people within the terms of International Treaties to which we are a signatory and which have been incorporated into Australian Law, we have fallen a long way.

Rudd’s decision will come to haunt him. He led us to believe that we could expect better, that this nation could be better. He has disappointed the people whose support he needs most – decent, fair-minded and balanced Australians.

He and the rest of us will rue the day he handed our near neighbour a club with which to beat us over the head when the relationship descends into one of its periodic lows.

As a young Australian officer serving in Greece in 1941, Jo Gullett observed, “Next morning Greek civilian refugees began to pass through our lines, heading south. Refugees is an impersonal word. These were people. It was the first time we had seen the direct effect of war on a civilian population. We had heard and read about it but that is not the same thing at all…Almost without exception they were exhausted…and we could not help wondering how they would survive away from their few olive and fruit trees, their goats, and their vegetable patches, on all of which they depended for subsistence. Yet they never reproached us…”

Jo Gullett went on to win the Military Cross in 1943. He became a member of The House of Representatives in 1946 and Ambassador to Greece in 1965. His father Sir Henry Gullett, former AIF Gunner and war correspondent became Minister for External Affairs in 1939 and was killed in an air crash in 1940.

Could we not see with Gullett’s eyes when we look upon Tamil’s, Afghans and other refugees seeking our compassion, understanding and support. They are appealing to our better nature or is it lost, have we become too selfish to notice, as Gullett did, their plight?

Bruce Haigh is a retired diplomat who has served in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. He was a Member of the RRT.
02 63 733455

Dug out from the archives -
ABC Unleashed : The need to be popular saps courage and compassion

As a former diplomat Kevin Rudd should know better. People smugglers fulfill a desperate need. If the need was not there people smugglers would have to turn their hand to some other trade. By slamming the people smugglers, Rudd is denying that need. By implication he is saying that the people smugglers tout for business and that without their active spruiking, refugees and their needs would fade away.

Malcolm Turnbull jumped on the bandwagon, looking for a few cheap political points and seeking to please and appease the unelectable troglodytes of his right wing. Pulled into line by the more mature members of his backbench and party, his thoughtless foray into populism has only served to highlight the opposition’s lack of a refugee policy.

Thoughtful and informed swinging voters must be appalled at this crude appeal to populism. The silliness of Rudd’s statement that, ”People smugglers are the vilest form of human life, they trade on the tragedy of others, and that is why they should rot in jail and, in my own view, rot in hell,” puts the lie to any understanding of the role of people smugglers. Rudd has compounded the impression of a hollow man, by more recently stating that, “The reality is we are facing huge additional numbers across the archipelago, coming off global factors. The question of calibrating the country’s response to the assets that we need in the air-sea gap to our north – that is where the critical business lies.”

Where does Rudd place the role people smugglers had in helping the Jews of Europe to escape from the terror of the Nazi’s? More

Bruce Haigh is a retired diplomat who has worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran and Saudi Arabia. When on posting in South Africa during the apartheid years (1976/79) he helped a number of people, in fear of the authorities, escape the country.

UYSD Center for Peace and Conflict Studies – Sri Lanka Human Rights Project

Previous links to the Sri Lanka Human Rights Project

Article by co-convener of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Project, Jake Lynch

Article by patron of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Project, Bruce Haigh

Blog post by co-convener of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Project, Gobie Rajalingam

Lowy Interpreter Blog -  Boat people a symptom of Sri Lanka’s dark side

Gobie Rajalingam is co-convenor for the University of Sydney’s Sri Lanka Human Rights Project and an intern at the Lowy Institute.

In the months following the Sri Lankan Government’s declaration that the 26-year civil war was officially over, footage of alleged extra-judicial killings by Sri Lankan soldiers* trickled out. The living conditions of some 280,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), forcibly held without justification in the country’s northern provinces, also rapidly deteriorated.

It therefore comes as no surprise that the 260 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers who were intercepted en route to Christmas Island last night showed preference for suicide rather than return to a country that has no regard for justice.

With the imminent monsoon season threatening to worsen the spread of infectious disease among IDPs, with forced disappearances and rape in the internment camps continuing unabated, and with the Sri Lankan Government showing little interest in releasing civilians, the urgency surrounding the humanitarian and political fate of Sri Lanka’s Tamil refugees remains heightened.

Although Sri Lanka continues to censor its human rights emergency, holding its rank in the bottom ten countries for press freedom, the Australian Foreign Minister has previously raised concerns over Sri Lanka’s human rights situation. But Kevin Rudd’s latest offer of ‘micro-loans, free volleyball nets and fishing nets’ to quell the number of asylum seekers does little more than add insult to injury for Sri Lanka’s marginalised population.

The increase in asylum seekers does not indicate a weakness in Australia’s immigration policies, but is instead a creation of Sri Lanka’s unacceptable human rights record and lack of protection for refugees. Australia must accommodate human rights in its national interest if it is to uphold its responsibility to protect.

* Ed. note: the link takes you to a UK Channel 4 story about the footage. The footage itself contains extremely disturbing images.

Photo, of a Sri Lankan IDP camp, by Flickr user Foreign and Commonwealth Office, used under a Creative Commons license.

Previous links to the USYD Sri Lanka Human Rights Project

Article by co-convener of the USYD Sri Lanka Human Rights Project, Jake Lynch

Article by patron of the USYD Sri Lanka Human Rights Project, Bruce Haigh

Unnecessary suffering

Kevin Rudd has prevented 255 Sri Lankan asylum seekers coming to Australia from Indonesia. The asylum seekers were already at sea when Kevin Rudd put in an urgent call to the Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, requesting that the Indonesian Navy intercept the vessel and escort it back to Indonesia.

The people on the vessel are from Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankans are ethnic Tamils, suffering at the hands of the majority Sinhalese following the defeat of Tamil resistance in a civil war which has waxed and waned tragically for the past 26 years.

Read full article here

Bruce Haigh is a political commentator and former diplomat who served in Sri Lanka.

He is a patron for the CPACS Sri Lanka Human Rights Project and is also on the advisory council for the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice

Australian Financial Review : Uneven Policy
by Bruce Haigh
Monday, 5 October 2009,

The Government is quick to look after the welfare and interests of Australians overseas caught in natural disasters or accidents, most recently in PNG, Sumatra and Samoa; it is to be applauded for so doing.

However it has not been so quick to look after the interests of Australian nationals caught in Sri Lankan internment camps following the end of military action against the Tamil Tigers (LTTE).

Three hundred thousand men, women and children are trapped in these camps, without access to proper sanitation, water, medical supplies and sufficient food. Old people and children are dying; they have been detained in these camps for close to five months.

The Sri Lankan Government has denied access to all NGO’s who are likely to criticise conditions in the camps and media access is denied for the same reason. The camps are guarded and controlled by the military which deals harshly with critics and suspected former members of the LTTE.

The Sri Lankan Government claims that Tamils are being held while supporters and sympathisers of the LTTE are identified and removed from the camps (where have they been taken?). Essentially all persons detained are under suspicion by the Sri Lankan Government. It is an untenable situation for those people.

Recently an Australian citizen managed to flee the camps after bribing members of the military. She is now in Australia.

The Government has not sought to identify, seek consular access nor provide assistance to Australian citizens detained in these camps. Why not?

If the Australian Government agrees with the position of the Sri Lankan Government, i.e, that all those in the camps are suspected of being LTTE supporters, it should seek legal assistance for Australians caught in this nightmare.

If the Australian Government agrees with the actions of the Sri Lankan Government it has placed itself in an awkward position in terms of UN Conventions relating to prisoners of war and internally displaced persons. It has not formally protested to the Sri Lankan Government over the abuse of human rights in these camps and it has not sought access and the provision of vital aid and assistance by NGO’s to the camps.

Bruce Haigh is a political commentator and former diplomat who served in Sri Lanka.
02 63 733455