The Tampa: some background

Joanna Sheldon cjs10 at cornell.edu
Sat Sep 1 15:14:47 PDT 2001

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"Australia is the only developed country to lock up those who apply for asylum. [...Those who are accorded refugee status] are granted only three-year temporary protection visas. They cannot get access to full benefits, they have no right to English language classes and they cannot bring over the families they have left behind."

From http://www.guardian.co.uk

Hazardous, long and costly: the refugees' lonely odyssey Only the smugglers are certain winners in the escape business Rory McCarthy in Peshawar, John Aglionby in Dili and Patrick Barkham in Sydney Friday August 31 2001 The Guardian

Deep in the maze of teeming bazaars to the north of Peshawar, where they sell stolen televisions, large blocks of hashish and cheap Kalashnikov assault rifles, is a new breed of travel agents. Their business is discreet, effective and illegal, and the profits are enormous.

One young, bearded Afghan agent slips away from his office above a row of paint shops and, sitting nervously in the back of a car, slowly starts to talk about his work as a kachakbar, a refugee smuggler.

Just a few weeks ago the hundreds of Afghan refugees now stranded on the Tampa cargo ship off Christmas Island in Australian waters sat in secret in Peshawar and met smugglers just like him. They borrowed a small fortune from their relatives and signed contracts which promised to whisk them away from the squalid refugee camps of Pakistan's North West Frontier and deposit them in front of an Australian immigration desk.

The smuggler said the going rate was $12,000 (about £8,200) per person. Oh, and two passport-sized photographs. "Then we will sign a contract guaranteeing to get you to Australia. There is almost no risk at all."

The journey begins in Afghanistan, where in the past two decades more than 6m people have left their country to escape war. Hundreds of thousands more have poured out in the last year in a sudden exodus to flee a new burst of fighting, a vicious drought and the ever more brutal Taliban regime. They stream across the border at the Khyber Pass with no passports and in the refugee camps around Peshawar quickly meet the kachakbar agents who fill them with promises of a new life in the west.

"First they need a Pakistani passport and we can get them one very easily," said the smuggler. "Then we get a visa. Sometimes we get a fake British or American visa but these are the expensive routes. Most people now want to go through Thailand or Indonesia and these visas are easy."

The refugee smuggling business is a sophisticated, well-oiled operation. Most smugglers have a travel agent's licence and senior contacts among the Pakistani authorities. Prices vary depending on the destination and the ease of the journey. The smugglers take a handsome 40% profit.

For most Afghan families the cost of escape is crippling. One father, Mohammad, who lives in a camp in Peshawar, has just sent his 15-year-old son through a smuggler to London. It was a cheap ticket, and at £6,000 was all the family could afford. The journey took one year and 14 days.

"I know he went to Iran and then I think he went to Russia but I don't know how he got to London. I don't even know what kind of passport he has now. What kind of journey is that to send a 15-year-old boy on?" he asks in broken English.

"We simply didn't have a choice. The house we had in Kabul for 100 years we sold to send my son to England to study. We sold a house that we didn't want to sell even for a million dollars. If you knew the difficulties of the Afghans you would cry."

The Afghans on board the Tampa would have deposited the fee with a third person, usually a money changer who will only pay the smuggler once the refugee telephones to confirm safe arrival.

For two days the refugees practise their stories. "We tell them to say they come from a part of Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban and that the Taliban have imposed all these laws and created serious problems," said the smuggler. "Most people are genuine cases but some of them are not even Afghans, they are Pakistanis, Kashmiris, even Chechens. People in the west don't know the difference."

At Karachi airport, officials are bribed and refugees bound for Australia board flights to Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. A smuggler's agent flies with them and just before they reach immigration he takes their passports and disappears.

Suddenly the Afghans drop into a foreign world filled with Iraqis, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and refugees from across the globe desperate to reach Australia. Most head to the Indonesian island of Lombok to wait for the final crossing, many get no further.

A year ago Awarli left Iraq with his wife, three children and mother-in-law. They crossed into Pakistan, flew to the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur and were taken to the west coast by a smuggler. They thought they would be travelling alone but when they reached the coast the converted fishing boat was already full.

"There were 17 of us," he said. "We were put on a small boat, only about six metres [16 feet] long. It was dark, the weather was bad. We knew that it was dangerous on the boat but what can we do? We need our freedom."

They were lucky and made it to Medan, a city in north Sumatra. Many others have perished attempting to cross the Malacca Strait on boats that are overcrowded and barely seaworthy. They then went by bus to Jakarta and waited in a backpackers' hotel, eating at the McDonald's restaurant directly opposite the UN building.

"We were then told there was a boat for us so we went to south Java coast," Awarli said. "But we have no luck. The first boat never arrived and the second boat had to turn back." So they moved east, first to the city of Surabaya and then on to Bali. But still no boat.

"Then we were told of possibility on Lombok so we come here and get arrested." The entire journey has cost £14,000 and now the family are holed up in the Nusantara I guesthouse in Lombok along with 126 other illegal migrants waiting to be processed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

"Our money is almost gone and also our hope," Awarli said. "We know not what will happen to us."

Since the people smuggling business took off a year ago, 492 asylum seekers have been caught in Indonesia and classified by the UNHCR as refugees. But only 19 have been found new homes. Another 632 asylum seekers who were arrested did not qualify as refugees and so are given nothing and live in squalid detention centres.

Lombok is an increasingly popular jumping off post for Australia, according to the local police spokeswoman, Assistant Commander Sri Budi Pangistuti. "We have caught 251 people this year," she said, "and most have been in the last few months. The vast majority are from Iraq and Afghanistan."

It is easy to see why so many take the risk. Australia's minister of immigration, Philip Ruddock, said recently that only 14% of the Afghans assessed in Indonesia were given refugee status while the corresponding figure for Australia was more than 80%.

Indonesian police are catching only a fraction of illegal migrants. Awarli said there were about 300 people in his group. "I know not where the others are now," he said, adding with a sudden flash of humour, "and I know not where I will be next month."

From Indonesia a small but steady stream of boats ferries asylum seekers to Australia's beautiful and desolate northern beaches. More than 4,000 made it in the past year alone and more are expected in the coming months as the weather improves.

Most of the vessels are tiny antiquated fishing boats or inter-island ferries like the 20m-long boat from which the 433 asylum seekers were rescued by the Tampa on Sunday night. Two such ships sank when they were caught in the aftermath of Cyclone Sam last December, drowning 167 asylum seekers from the Middle East. Australian authorities believe up to 400 other migrants have drowned this year.

The goal of the refugee smugglers is not to complete the hazardous three-day crossing to mainland Australia undetected, but to be picked up by the authorities at one of the country's remote territorial outposts - either Christmas Island, 970 miles west of the mainland, or Ashmore Reef, a scattering of small sandy atolls 200 miles from Australia's north west coast.

Most of the sailors are young Indonesians, perhaps unaware of the 20-year prison sentences that await them if they are caught. For the asylum seekers, the arduous journey from their homes ends in a hot, remote detention centre in the Australian outback. Australia is the only developed country to lock up those who apply for asylum.

Isolated

Once arrested, asylum seekers are flown to the three most isolated of Australia's six detention centres, Port Hedland, Curtin and Woomera, where they are interviewed and searched. "Unless people start burning buildings, we don't have an idea of what is going on in Curtin or Woomera," said Graham Thom of Amnesty International.

Rahmon, an Afghan, was one of the lucky ones. It took him six months to flee from the Panjsher Valley, in opposition territory in Afghanistan, to Australia, where he was detained for two months at Port Hedland.

Arrested and tortured by the Taliban, he was released from a Kabul prison after paying a bribe. He scraped together US$4,000 and fled to Pakistan. Given a fake passport by smugglers, he took a plane via Singapore to Indonesia, where he waited for 20 days before crossing to Australia.

"I proved that I was a genuine refugee and I proved that I was from the Panjsher Valley," he told ABC radio. "The people who interviewed me were very knowledgeable about the situation in Afghanistan and that's why after two months they have released us."

Most, however, wait many more months in a labyrinthine process of appeals. More than 80% are eventually found to be genuine refugees and yet the government regularly leaves unfilled its humanitarian quotas. Last year 2,040 unfilled places from the resettlement programme were carried over to the next year.

Yet life in the new world is not quite as the Afghans imagined when they sat in Peshawar listening to the gilded promises of the smugglers. Refugees like Rahmon, who now works in a factory in Sydney, are granted only three-year temporary protection visas. They cannot get access to full benefits, they have no right to English language classes and they cannot bring over the families they have left behind. It will take months to pay back their relatives and most simply melt away into the ethnic ghettos of industrial Sydney or Melbourne.

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