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Held hostage by the rush to be tough

MIKE STEKETEE From: The Australian November 07, 2009

KEVIN Rudd's Indonesian solution has proved in short order to be no solution at all. It has done nothing to solve Australia's refugee problem and to the extent that it encourages people to bypass Indonesia and sail directly for Australia, it has made it worse, exemplified by the drowning this week of 12 Sri Lankans in the Indian Ocean.

Far from moving the issue out of sight and out of mind, it has highlighted the Prime Minister's impotence. He has become hostage to the Indonesian Government and the demands of the Sri Lankan asylum-seekers. Indonesia says it will not accept the 78 Sri Lankans aboard the Oceanic Viking if they are forcibly removed. The asylum-seekers have done themselves no favours by refusing to disembark until they are taken to Australia. There is some logic in their position because Australia accepts people it assesses to be refugees, whereas Indonesia does not. But the politics of the situation is something quite different. Having lost control of events, Rudd would look not only indecisive but weak if he now gave in to their demands.

If we are ever to shift the refugee debate on to more rational grounds, it will be by moving it away from the conflict between toughness on border protection and the humane treatment of refugees.

The Howard and Rudd governments have concentrated on combating people smuggling and palming off boats to other countries, on the basis that if boatpeople stopped coming to Australia, it at least would take the issue off the political agenda. Even if we accept the Coalition's argument that the Howard government's policies worked, it was at the unacceptable cost of brutalising innocent men, women and children.

But the evidence is that the periodic surges in boat arrivals always have had more to do with increases in conflict overseas than perceptions about whether our door was more or less open. The whole of the developed world has seen an increase in refugee flows in recent years. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship's annual report, released last week, shows that asylum-seeker claims in Australia rose by 33 per cent in 2008-09 to 5304. As has been the case for many years, most of them came by plane. That increase cannot be attributed to a relaxation in the rules because for plane people they stayed exactly the same.

The panoply of harsh policies, ranging from the Pacific solution to prolonged stays in remote detention centres to temporary protection visas, only ever applied to those who came by boat. These numbered 992 last financial year. As we all know, there have been more since and the department says the figures are not directly comparable because people who fly to Australia may not lodge asylum claims until well after they arrive. But the broad point stands: the increase in boatpeople coincides with a worldwide increase in refugee flows.

The alternative to policing and deterrence to stop the supply of boats is to reduce the demand for places on board. That requires improving the chances of genuine refugees being accepted by Australia and other countries. Jessie Taylor, an Australian lawyer and refugee advocate who visited Indonesia in July and met more than 250 asylum-seekers, says she found to her surprise that 90 per cent of people had come to Indonesia without intending to board a boat. Instead, they were prepared to wait to be processed by staff from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. "However, when weeks stretch to months and months stretch to years, with no apparent action from UNHCR or IOM [the International Organisation for Migration, which helps support them in Indonesia], the boat option begins to look more attractive," she says in a report on her findings released this week.

The UNHCR has a core staff of 20 in Indonesia, with another 20 funded by Australia, including UN volunteers. They deal with the 1683 people registered as asylum-seekers in Indonesia and another 573 who have had their claims as refugees accepted by the agency and are mostly waiting for countries that are willing to take them. Last year, Australia accepted 35 from Indonesia and so far this year it has taken 25. During that same period, Canada, New Zealand and other countries took a grand total of 77. With a resettlement backlog of about five years, it is hardly surprising that some people give up waiting and take their chances on the high seas. That includes some of the 78 aboard the Oceanic Viking who say they have been accepted as refugees by the UNHCR.

Conditions in Indonesia hardly are conducive to waiting patiently. In the 11 locations Taylor visited where asylum-seekers are held, she said the conditions ranged from acceptable to appalling. At the acceptable end of the scale was a compound in Medan with two-room houses accommodating families. At the other extreme, there were snakes and rats in a converted grain warehouse in Lombok. She also encountered 13 to 17-year-old children who had been put in adult jails and 65 adults in what was supposed to be a high-security prison in Jakarta, including four who showed her their injuries from beatings after others had escaped. These and other places where people were locked up included many people whom the UNHCR had assessed as refugees and were waiting for countries to take them.

None of this should come as too great a shock: Indonesia has never agreed to do anything more than tolerate refugees on their way to another country and living conditions for many Indonesians are tough as well. But it does put in context the Rudd government's efforts to funnel asylum-seekers through Indonesia. Immigration Minister Chris Evans says this year's budget includes an extra $1 million over two years to improve Indonesian detention facilities. Clearly it is not enough to bring them up to anywhere near the humane standards the government says it provides in Australia. The government also boasts that it aims to process asylum claims within 90 days in Australia, rather than letting people languish for years, as under the Howard government. Evans says he has committed $2 million over the next two years to allow faster processing by the UNHCR in Indonesia. It will need more than that to reduce a five-year backlog.

If it gave the UNHCR the resources to turn around cases in 90 days and, together with New Zealand and other countries, agreed to take more of those assessed as refugees, it would do more to stop the boats than all the efforts the government puts into disrupting people smugglers. That would require an increase in our humanitarian intake of 13,750 but not a major one.

Would it encourage more people to come? That would depend mainly on the situation in countries such as Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. As history has shown, asylum-seeker numbers will fall if the situation in countries such as these improves. For those who continue to come it will be harder to establish that they were fleeing persecution and more will be sent back.

It also would depend on what else we are prepared to do. UNHCR regional representative in Australia Richard Towle says he would like to see the debate move away from a fixation on the strength and weaknesses of refugee policy and the relationship with Indonesia. "There are precedents for the creative use of alternative immigration channels to ease the burden," he points out.

Many asylum-seekers in Indonesia have relatives in Australia. If, for example, Australia set up a family reunion program that only accepted applications in Sri Lanka, fewer would try to make it to Australia or Indonesia as refugees.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/held-hostage-by-the-rush-to-be-tough/story-e6frg6zo-1225795218655