Tamil refugees being transferred from their vessel to an Australian Customs ship.
Tamil refugees being transferred from their vessel to an Australian Customs ship. Photo: Yuli Seperi


Last night I saw upon the sea,



A little boat that wasn't there,




It wasn't there again today,



Oh, how I wish it would go away* 




All week, Scott Morrison had been wishing away the little
boat from India. The Immigration Minister steadfastly refused to
acknowledge its existence or that of its human cargo, 153 Tamil asylum
seekers; or that of another boat carrying 50 Tamils, which had come from
Sri Lanka. By week's end, it seemed Morrison's wish had come true.



In a high-stakes, high seas operation – which Morrison never
confirmed, preferring to call it speculation – Australia set out to
deliver these boat people back into the hands of Sri Lanka, the regime
they had fled, a country the United Nations suspects of systematic
abductions, torture, rape, extrajudicial killings and the "disappearing"
of its citizens. Now Australia had "disappeared" their boats. It was as
if their odyssey had never happened.



They seemed real enough last Saturday, when Fairfax Media and
other news organisations reached a satellite phone on the first vessel,
a 25-metre fishing trawler, and spoke to its passengers.



"The wind is increasing and there are huge waves," said a Tamil who called himself Duke. "We are all at threat."



They reported they were 175 nautical miles west of Christmas
Island, having left Puducherry in southern India 15 days earlier, on
June 13. The boat's phone was cut off that day.



Even as Morrison and Prime Minister Tony Abbott held fast to
their policy of never discussing "on-water matters", they seized the
opportunity to remind Australians that they had stopped the boats. Not a
single asylum boat had landed in Australia for six months. 



These two boats, though, would have been different. They had not taken the usual route, via Indonesia.



By Wednesday, it emerged that the Australian navy had boarded
both vessels and transferred their passengers to Customs boats. The
Tamils from the second boat at least, near the Cocos Islands, and likely
all of them, were subjected to "screening" that amounted to four
questions – name, country of origin, place of disembarkation and why
they had left – which was a big cull from the usual 19 questions.



Then, it appears, Customs shipped them towards an undisclosed
rendezvous point in international waters to be transferred to the Sri
Lankan navy. Sri Lanka's officials both confirmed and denied the planned
transfer. The UN refugee agency expressed "profound concern".



"Australia's moral, ethical and legal compass has been lost at sea," said Trevor Grant, from Australia's Tamil Refugee Council.



The council said at least 11 people on the fishing trawler
had been jailed and tortured in Sri Lanka, according to a relative of
several of the passengers.



But the swift operation fulfilled Morrison's pledge last
September, when he declared that "people who may seek to come from Sri
Lanka would be intercepted outside of our sea border and returned
directly – and all of them"; and again in October, when he said "anyone
who may have come from Sri Lanka should know that they will go back to
Sri Lanka. We have an arrangement with the Sri Lankan government and …
and, preferably, they will all go back."



The Abbott government has singled out Sri Lankans for special
treatment, or mistreatment, if the conclusions of successive
international reports on the country's human rights abuses are accepted.
Australia subjects only Sri Lankans to "enhanced", or expedited,
screening. Australia's "arrangement" with Sri Lanka is all about
stopping the boats carrying its nationals. 



The Tamil boat exodus to Australia did not happen during Sri
Lanka’s 26-year civil war, in which atrocities on both sides – the
Sinhalese majority and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam – were well
documented. Rather, the flood of boats erupted almost three years after
the official end to the war in 2009. Between January 2012 and late last
year, Australia received more than 8300 Sri Lankans by boat. 



Why? Other destination countries are asking the same
question. In the foreword to a 2014 report that documents the testimony
of 40 Tamils who fled to Britain, South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu
writes: "It shows how anyone remotely connected with the losing side in
the civil war is being hunted down, tortured and raped, five years
after the guns fell silent. Shockingly, more than half of the abductions
in the report took place as recently as 2013-14 ... The sheer
viciousness and brutality of the sexual violence is staggering ...
Thirty-five of the witnesses were forced to sign confessions in Sinhala,
a language they do not understand."



Even at the height of the influx of Sri Lankan boat people to
Australia last year, the Department of Immigration and Border
Protection reported that 52 per cent of these asylum seekers were
granted protection visas. Traditionally, 90 per cent were found to be
genuine refugees, says Emily Howie, director of advocacy and research at
the Human Rights Law Centre. And yet the government now wants "all"
returned.



While Abbott said this week that Sri Lanka was not
"everyone's idea of the ideal society", he claimed it was a country "at
peace". His analysis contradicted the Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade, which continues to warn Australians to exercise a "high degree of
caution" due to the unpredictable security environment. Still, on the
question of sending Sri Lankans home, Abbott was "absolutely confident
that no harm would come to anyone who has been in our charge".



"That is an utterly erroneous presumption," says Ben Saul,
professor of international law at the University of Sydney. Saul warns
that Australia is at grave risk of being found guilty under
international law of refoulement – returning people to a country where
their life or freedom would be threatened because of their race,
religion, nationality, political opinions or membership of a social
group.



When Sri Lanka hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government
Meeting last November, Canada's conservative Prime Minister, Stephen
Harper, boycotted the event to protest against Sri Lanka's failure to
investigate its troops over alleged war crimes and the slaughter of as
many as 40,000 civilians in the final stages of the civil war. Britain's
Prime Minister, David Cameron, attended but spoke out on human rights.
Abbott went bearing a gift of two patrol boats, worth $2 million, so Sri
Lanka could help stop the "curse" of people smuggling. 



Abbott said while his government "deplores the use of
torture, we accept that sometimes, in difficult circumstances, difficult
things happen".  



Sri Lanka is refusing to co-operate with a UN investigation
into its alleged war crimes, arguing it is being treated in an
"unforgiving manner" for defeating a ruthless terrorist group in the
Tamil Tigers. Australia chose not to co-sponsor the push for the
investigation.



Of course, no boat arrivals – from Sri Lanka or anywhere else
– have had any prospect gaining asylum in Australia since then Labor
prime minister Kevin Rudd shut that door last July. But some passengers
on board the latest Tamil boats thought they were bound for New Zealand.
They were acutely aware they would be sent to Manus Island or Nauru if
they reached Australia.



"I thought maybe it was to Italy, or France, or Tunisia,"
said Ragajini, the 32-year-old wife of one of the men on the fishing
trawler. "I did not know where he was going and he did not know,
either."



Ragajini, who has their two children with her, sobbed as she
spoke from the Aliyar camp for Tamil refugees in the Coimbatore district
in the far west of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Her husband had
crippling debts and had needed to escape to a country where he could
earn money, she said.



Australia – under Labor and Coalition governments – has
forced more than 1100 asylum seekers to return to Sri Lanka since
October 2012. Sureh, a 35-year-old Tamil on a bridging visa in
Melbourne, says he fears Australia will soon send him back to certain
torture. A former aid worker who cared for displaced people in northern
Sri Lanka, he was arrested and accused of being a Tamil Tiger. 



"I was not subject to extreme torture like my friends," he
says. "They would take us into a room. They tortured us there. They
asked my friend to remove his clothes. They inserted an S-Lon [PVC] pipe
through his anus. He was screaming."



Emily Howie spent more than five months in Sri Lanka while preparing a report published in March, Can't Flee, Can't Stay – Australia's Interception and Return of Sri Lankan Asylum Seekers.
She interviewed people who alleged they were beaten or witnessed
assaults after the Sri Lankan navy intercepted their boats. She believes
Australia, by helping to stop their escape, is denying their human
right to free movement and risks being accused of "aiding and assisting"
in their torture and mistreatment.



Australia claims there is no evidence of mistreatment of its
returnees. But Howie's report describes how the Australian Federal
Police, with a base in Colombo, failed to investigate a complaint of
"severe torture" against Sri Lanka's police. Howie obtained a cable,
under freedom-of-information laws, that revealed the Sri Lankans denied
the claim but invited the AFP to visit the alleged victim in custody.
The AFP had reported: "In the interests of keeping our distance from the
Sri Lankan investigations, we do not intend to take up the offer to
meet with him." Rather, it had "sighted the suspect, who appears in good
health".



"This incident reveals a wilful blindness to the ongoing real
risk of ill-treatment or harm of returnees at the hands of Australia's
Sri Lankan partners," Howie wrote. 



The expectation of a forced return led to the death of
29-year-old Leo Seemanpillai, who set himself ablaze in Geelong in May,
Grant says. Another Tamil asylum seeker on a bridging visa attempted
self-immolation in Melbourne last month but was saved by his flatmates.
Grant says the 40-year-old man had been tortured in 2007 for providing
food to the Tamil Tigers. He recently learnt that his brother had been
"disappeared" within Sri Lanka's prison system.



Morrison, defending the secrecy around the operation this
week, said: "Public curiosity is not the same as the public interest ...
and what is in the national interest is that we maintain the integrity
of an operation that is saving lives at sea and protecting the integrity
of our borders."



Stopping boats may well have stopped mass drownings, but is
Australia endangering the people it returns? In a June 25 statement, the
Asian Human Rights Commission reported "a pandemic of abuse by state
agents" in Sri Lanka. It published a book last year on 400 cases of
torture, taken from about 1500 cases it had studied. Common methods of
torture ranged from "beatings, sometimes with the victim hung upside
down, to the use of chili powder applied to the eyes and genitals".



Abbott told radio 3AW on Thursday: "It is a peaceful country. I don't say it's a perfect country. Not even Australia is that."



* With apologies to Hughes Mearns