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Melbourne, Australia– In August 2001, an Indonesian fishing boat carrying 433 asylum seekers was on its way to Christmas Island in Australia, and its engine failed in international waters.
The Australian Coast Guard convened a nearby Norwegian freighter for rescue operations.
Many of the people on board the Indonesian ship were Afghans fleeing persecution by the Taliban, including several pregnant women and children. When Arne Rinnan, the captain of MV Tampa, arrived at the scene, he found that the refugees were in a clearly “bad state”.
“10 to 12 of them lost consciousness,” he said Tell SBS Broadcasting Corporation. “Several people have dysentery, and a pregnant woman has abdominal pain.”
The rescue of asylum seekers in Tampa later became the fuse for Australia’s tough attitude towards border protection. At the time, Prime Minister John Howard decided to require asylum seekers arriving by boat to be dealt with in offshore detention centres-a human rights organization has always Stick to Call “Abusive” and “Cruel”.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the Tampa rescue operation.
Once the asylum seekers boarded the container ship, the Australian Coast Guard told Lin Nan to send them back to Indonesia, but some refugees begged the captain to take them to Christmas Island. Some even threatened that if the captain brought them back, they would commit suicide.
For the crew of the Tampa, this issue is an urgent one. The freighter did not have enough rations to feed all the new passengers. For several days, Lin Nan tried to get in touch with the Howard government to obtain permission to dock on Christmas Island. With asylum seekers waiting, the deteriorating situation on the Tampa ship made national headlines, and Australians found themselves dealing with complex immigration issues in an unprecedented way.
Alex Riley, director of the Department of Public Law and Policy Studies at the University of Adelaide, said: “It’s not in the public imagination like it is today.” “But everything changed with Tampa. Suddenly, everything. The cameras are all paying attention to this issue, and the public is aware of all this on the spot.”
On August 29, Lin Nan declared Tampa into a state of emergency and entered Australian territorial waters. The Howard government sent special forces to prevent the ship from approaching Christmas Island and introduced the first of a series of laws to give it the right to deny entry to asylum seekers who arrived by boat.
The legislation was retroactive to give the Australian government the power to retroactively board Tampa.
At the same time, the Howard government negotiated with the authorities on the Pacific island of Nauru to allow refugees’ asylum applications to be processed in the detention center there.
The Australian government calls it the “Pacific Solution.”
‘Integrity Manager’
Philip Ruddock was the Minister of Immigration at the time.
As the number of asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat (many of whom are from the Middle East and Afghanistan) begins to increase, Ruddock’s portfolio is changing. Only 56 ships arrived in the 1980s, but this number began to increase in the 1990s.
Data from the Australian Parliament Library Show A total of 2,939 asylum seekers arrived on the Australian coast in 2000, and this number increased further in 2001, reaching 5,516. The latter is the highest number since the authorities began recording in 1976. Most of them are Afghans.
But compared with the number of people seeking asylum in Iran and Pakistan, the number of Afghans seeking asylum in Australia that year was very small. The two countries bordering Afghanistan each received 1 million refugees that year.
Reilly said the surge in the number of refugees seeking help in Australia made people “feel things changing.” At the time, Australia’s policy at the time was to detain asylum seekers rescued at sea in Australia and to process their protection applications at the same time.
He said: “Most people only stayed there for a short period of time during the processing of their application, and then they quickly obtained refugee status or were deported.”
The Howard administration, facing elections later that year, decided to fundamentally change this policy. In negotiations with the Nauru government, it led to an agreement to build a facility for asylum seekers in Tampa on the Pacific islands and adopted a new dialect to describe its immigration policy-a policy based on Threats to Australia’s national security.
Howard and his ministers promised to “stop the ship” and use new terms to replace the term “asylum seekers”, such as “illegal immigrants” and “queuing people.”
At the time Immigration Minister Ruddock told Al Jazeera that a change in policy was necessary.
Faced with the decline in skilled immigration, the retired politician said that he believes that those who arrive in Australia by boat are using the country’s immigration system to gain the benefits of Australian society.
“I had to implement a smaller immigration system… and make sure that the program runs in Australia’s interests,” Ruddock said. “In the end, you can’t keep people on board forever, but we have to find a way to ensure that Australia is not harmed. To make sure that the Australian people are acceptable, it means the people who voted for you in the elections here in Australia.”
“The jargon used by the prime minister is that we are stopping the ship,” he added. “But I never saw myself as a blocker. I consider myself an integrity manager.”
It was at this time that commercial litigation lawyer Julian Burnside began to question the legitimacy of the government’s immigration policy. Burnside was angry at the situation of the rescued passengers and agreed to serve as a senior advisor to asylum seekers in the Tampa incident.
Burnside said: “I don’t know anything about refugees, laws or policies, but I agree to take action for asylum seekers because I think it’s sad for those poor guys to sit in the tropical sun.” “That’s the light. The moment I started, I could see that the human rights of refugees were severely violated, which made me decide to participate.”
When Howard tried to pass strict immigration laws, the asylum-seekers on the Tampa were taken to an Australian Naval Force aircraft carrier. Burnside and his accomplices filed a lawsuit in the court, demanding that the asylum-seekers be removed from custody Release it.
Their bid was initially successful, but the ruling in their favor was later overturned by all judges of the Federal Court of Australia.
The Federal Court’s ruling was made on September 11, when Al-Qaida militants hijacked the planes and flew them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, USA.
“John Howard, his perpetual disgrace, seized that moment and started calling the boat people illegal,” Burnside said.
In October, the Australian Navy brought asylum seekers from Tampa to Nauru. Approximately 131 people were sent to New Zealand, while applications for the rest were processed in Nauru.
This issue will become the primary issue of the election campaign that year.
On October 28, Howard gave a speech defining his platform for maintaining national security.
“We will decide who comes to this country and the environment in which they come,” he said.
Two weeks later, Howard’s Liberal Party-National Alliance won the majority and he returned as prime minister.
Tampa’s legacy
Although Rudd’s Labor government closed the detention center in 2007, as the number of ships arriving before the 2013 general election increased, the prime minister backtracked on this position. In language echoing Howard’s sentiment, Rudd declared that “any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will not have the opportunity to settle in Australia as a refugee.”
Later that year, Tony Abbott, the new leader of the Liberal Party/National Alliance, doubled his bet on Howard’s tough policy and reiterated the alliance’s commitment to “stop the ship” and erased Rudd’s re-election. Chance.
Today, despite increasing international condemnation, Australia’s offshore detention system has bipartisan support in the country’s Federal Parliament.
In the United Nations Human Rights Council review held in Geneva earlier this year, more than 40 countries expressed concern about the offshore detention system, which Human Rights Watch said “caused great harm.”
Since 2001, Australian authorities have sent 4,183 people to detention centers in Nauru or Papua New Guinea.
According to the Australian Human Rights Law Centre, 14 people have died in offshore detention in the past eight years. Suicides and attempts to self-harm are not uncommon.
In Australia, criticism of the economic costs of offshore processing arrangements is also increasing.
The Australian government expects to spend US$811 million next year to maintain maritime detention at locations in Nauru and Papua New Guinea to accommodate 233 people.
Australians are divided on this issue. A 2017 poll conducted by the Lowy Institute think tank found that 48% of Australians support immigration policies that deny any asylum seekers arriving by boat.
“All the cracks of tyranny”
Kon Karapanagiotidis, the founder of the Asylum Seeker Resource Center (ASRC), said: “Raddock and Howard are the creators of human suffering and suffering for two decades.” He said that the consequences of their decision still haunt asylum-seekers’ discussions. .
He said: “They can fool the public into not understanding that there is a compassionate way forward and frame innocent people as criminals.” “They understand the power of fear and use it to tell the public that these people are a threat. .”
But Karapanagiotidis stated that he believes that public perceptions of asylum seekers may change. He pointed to a recent case of a Sri Lankan Tamil family-Murugapan people were detained on Christmas Island for more than two years before public outcry in June forced the government to take action. Grant Temporary visa for families working and studying in Western Australia.
Priya and Nadesalingam Murugappan met and married in Australia in 2014 after sailing to Australia in 2012 and 2013 respectively. The couple fled after a bloody conflict in Sri Lanka and obtained a temporary protection visa when they asked for a temporary protection visa. Asylum is processed. They live in the rural town of Biloela in Queensland and have two children, but were arrested when the bridging visa granted to Priya in early 2018 expired.
Residents of the town united in support of the Murugapan people, and more than 500,000 people signed a petition urging their family to return to Biloela after their youngest child fell ill during immigration detention.
“The government has [previously] Being able to take advantage of this idea of seeing Australia as a besieged island, so as advocates, we have been working hard to promote a narrative of compassionate values,” Karapanagiotidis said.
“The story of the Biloela family is already known to the public because when people learn about refugees and welcome them into their communities, they can see themselves in them,” he said.
“This shows that there are cracks in all tyranny and cruelty. People are angry and call for change.”
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