When distress calls come in from asylum-seeker boats, Australia's current policy is to rescue by choice – in other words, on a case by case basis.
Some of these calls are from areas quite close to the Indonesian shoreline. Some are closer to Christmas Island.
To its credit, Australia’s border protection system usually rescues asylum seekers who have made distress calls from the Indonesian search and rescue zone. This zone includes all the international waters surrounding and north of Christmas Island.
The responsible Australian authorities include the Border Protection Command (BPC), under Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), under Transport Minister Anthony Albanese.
Occasionally, they fail to respond correctly to such distress calls. On these occasions they pass them to the Indonesian search and rescue authority BASARNAS and wait to see what happens. They do this knowing that BASARNAS has neither the maritime rescue capacity, nor the policy inclination, to rescue refugee boats reporting distress in international waters while trying to reach Australia.
When BPC/AMSA and BASARNAS play chicken with people’s lives in this way, boats sink and people die. We now know that this happened both with the Barokah, which foundered near Java in December 2011 with the drowning of up to 200 asylum seekers. It also occurred with the boat that capsized last month, on 21 June. In this case, Australia had known of distress calls for two days but had simply informed BASARNAS and then watched and waited.
Australia took charge of that rescue only after the boat was seen to have capsized on 21 June. An estimated 90 people drowned. These people could have been saved if Australia had mounted its own rescue in response to the distress messages phoned in on 19 and 20 June. We also know there had been a comparable incident in October 2009 (detailed in my new book Reluctant Rescuers).
When such tragedies occur, embarrassed Australian ministers and officials are economical with the facts. They try to blur public understanding of the legal status of the waters in question, obscuring questions of which government was most responsible for the loss of lives.
The public is often told – inaccurately – that such tragedies are happening ‘in Indonesian waters’. Indonesian waters actually extend only 19 kilometres from the Indonesian coast. And, anywhere at sea, response to distress calls is properly the responsibility of the nearest country or ships with capacity to rescue.
The fact that Australian authorities have not always responded to distress calls promptly and correctly should concern us all, regardless of our views on asylum-seeker processing policy. Australia’s rescue-at-sea protocols and practices should have nothing to do with policy debates in Australia about asylum-seeker processing choices. Maritime rescue authorities should simply get on with their job of saving lives in peril at sea.
Focusing in more detail on the December 2011 Barokah foundering, we note that the new Minister for Home Affairs Jason Clare then announced that a boat had capsized the day before, 40 nautical miles off the coast of Java. The search and rescue effort was being coordinated by Indonesia. AMSA was now working with Indonesian authorities. The minister said:
The information about this boat and the information about it capsizing off the coast of Java was provided by Indonesian authorities to Australian authorities.
Yet on 5 July 2012, the Minister disclosed:
We received calls from a vessel in distress last year in December that was very close to the Indonesian shoreline. You might remember that vessel in December just off the coast of Indonesia where two hundred people drowned.
There was worse to come, as Natalie O’Brien reported in yesterday’s Fairfax Sunday papers, on Australia’s refusal to co-ordinate the search and rescue for the Barokah despite pleas for help from Indonesia.
Documents obtained by Fairfax under freedom of information reveal that AMSA told BASARNAS that it was up to them to lead the rescue effort into this major maritime tragedy, which resulted in the biggest loss of life (up to 200) since the SIEV X in 2001 in which 353 people drowned.
A spokeswoman for AMSA said the decision about the Barokah was made because the boat was inside the Indonesian search and rescue zone. She said the agency offered support for planning and drift modelling. The boat broke up in high seas about 40 nautical miles south of Prigi Beach in Java. Most of the fewer than 50 survivors were rescued by a passing fishing boat.
The documents, obtained from the Department of Customs and Border Protection, also reveal that Customs officials provided a different account of the story to Senate estimates briefings in February. Customs did not reveal AMSA's refusal to coordinate the rescue, instead saying that Indonesia's search and rescue agency BASARNAS had 'initially declined an offer from AMSA to assist with the search and rescue effort'.
O’Brien also reported further official responses to her questions about Barokah:
A spokeswoman for the maritime authority denied there had been any direction from government about its response to distressed asylum seeker boats, maintaining its policy is consistent and in accordance with the relevant conventions and international practices. 'The operational circumstances may vary from incident to incident and it is these operational factors that shape the actual response,' a spokeswoman said.
Meanwhile a spokesman for the Federal Minister for Transport, Anthony Albanese, said that where an incident occurs in another country's search and rescue region, AMSA would normally act to provide assistance, rather than lead the response itself. 'The requirement for coordination of effort becomes more compelling with incidents close to the Indonesian coast than it is further offshore towards Christmas Island' he said.
These are disturbingly clear official admissions that Australian decisions on how to respond to distress calls from asylum-seeker boats are taken ad hoc. Australia either chooses to rescue, or not: rescue by choice. Fortunately, most of the time our border protection system chooses to rescue.
With regard to the 21 June incident – in which 110 asylum seekers were rescued and 90 drowned – Marg Hutton documents what occurred in a well-researched lead article at sievx.com titled ‘Australia's Shameful Response to a Boat in Distress’. Michael Bachelard of The Age also deals with this.
The subsequent 27 June incident in which 123 asylum seekers were rescued and one to four were reported missing, had a happier outcome. Significantly the Australian authorities acted promptly and correctly in this second incident.
A further incident on 4 July in which 164 asylum seekers were reported to have been transferred to safety aboard Australian Navy ships just hours after a distress call, due to Navy concerns about the seaworthiness of their boat, is now subject to questions about whether the distress call had been genuine. Asylum-seekers on this boat were accused of using the Navy ‘like the NRMA’.
The Minister responded, properly, that Australian authorities had to treat every distress call as genuine and fully investigate it. I note also that. in this case, a decision was made by the responsible Navy commanders on the spot to rescue the people who had sent the distress call.
That should surely be the end of the matter.
Tony Kevin, author of A Certain Maritime Incident – the sinking of SIEV X (2004) has just published a new book Reluctant Rescuers, available from leading bookshops or from the book website www.reluctantrescuers.com The above article answers questions pondered in Tony's December 2001 article on the Barokah: 'Questions surround latest asylum seeker boat disaster'