The Australian Government and the Coalition must accept some responsibility for the death of a 28-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, identified in news reports as Taqi Nekoyee, inside an Indonesian detention centre last month.
The details are still unfolding but so far we have been told that on 26 February six men escaped from the immigration detention centre in Pontianak (Kalimantan). The men were quickly recaptured and returned to the centre. One man is now dead and UNHCR reports that three others have been hospitalised, two with serious injuries — one is only 17 years old.
The examining doctor found evidence that Naroye had been beaten to death with a blunt object. Reports also note the discovery of wounds resembling cigarette burns and marks on the man's wrists where he had been bound.
Indonesian Detective Puji claimed Nekoyee and two others 'had their mouths sealed with thick tape, were beaten with a piece of wood, whipped with an electrical cord and given electric shocks'. The head of the detention centre, Ageng Pribadi, says the guards 'abused the victim until he died'.
Puji has also noted the involvement of Indonesian immigration department training officers and their cadets in the beatings.
Other incidents have been reported over many years in these centres and Amnesty International has urged Indonesia to enact a new Criminal Code that 'complies with international human rights law and standards and includes provisions explicitly prohibiting and punishing acts of torture'.
Although the attacks happened outside Australia, we are not innocent bystanders. Australian money is involved in funding Indonesian detention centres and both Labor and Coalition governments have supported the incarceration of asylum seekers there to prevent their travel by boat to Australia.
Back in 2001, in the month before the arrival of the Tampa refugees, then-Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock crowed about a stabilisation in the number of boats arriving to Australia.
The actual number of people arriving had reduced by only 34 that year (from 4175 down to 4141) but Ruddock claimed this as proof that his government's deterrence policies 'both in Australia and overseas' were working — including Indonesia's capture and detention of more than a thousand Australia bound asylum seekers. More than 10 years later, little has changed.
Labor governments have continued to prioritise deterrence measures over the development of better support and protection for asylum seekers and refugees in the region. And if the Coalition returns to power, Tony Abbott claims he will bring back the policy of forcing asylum seekers back to Indonesia.
The Coalition should look carefully to Europe before heading down that path. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg concluded recently that in 2009 Italy violated the European Convention of Human Rights by returning a group of Somalis and Eritreans to Libya. It found that the applicants were exposed to the risk of ill-treatment in Libya and of being repatriated to Somalia and Eritrea.
The potential risk of injury or death for any asylum seeker forcibly returned to Indonesia — both during the push back process and inside an Indonesian detention centre — is now well documented.
It is also worth remembering the Howard Government's failed attempt to return a boat carrying 83 Sri Lankan Tamils to Indonesia in 2007. Indonesian officials claimed that the men would quickly be sent back to Sri Lanka, the place of claimed persecution. The reason for Australia not proceeding with the push back was given in cables between Australia's foreign affairs and immigration departments:
The practicalities of Australia's domestic legal set-up, including the implementation of our refugee obligations under the 1951 Refugees Convention, create high thresholds for access to refugee determination processes that the Australian government must meet.
As Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugees Convention or its 1967 Protocol, we recognise that the procedural thresholds for Indonesia may be different. In the light of this, Australia has decided to send the Sri Lankans to Nauru ...
Abbott has never explained how he would ensure that those high thresholds would now be met in the same non-signatory country. In fact he can't. But it hardly matters to a man who is rarely held to account for the empty rhetoric he offers in place of policy.
Indonesian Ambassador to Australia, Primo Alui Joelianto, claims that the Coalition's Julie Bishop has promised Indonesia a say on boat tow backs if the policy was ever enacted. But Indonesia has already made clear its opposition to the policy. The Coalition has so far been unwilling to listen.
Better conditions, processing and resettlement options are vital across the region and Indonesia must be assisted to provide more humane support for every asylum seeker arriving within its borders. NGOS and human rights groups must also be supported to better monitor conditions and treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and work with Indonesia to improve its practices.
Human beings should never be used as a means to a political end. The politically motivated support and encouragement from both of our major parties for the incarceration of innocent people in poorly monitored Indonesian detention centres must be condemned.
Susan Metcalfe is a freelance writer and author of The Pacific Solution.