owner-sievx-news
Sat, 07 Jun 2003 18:48:39 -0700
SIEVX, KIM BEAZLEY AND SIMON CREAN
by Tony Kevin
Canberra, 7 June 2003
For people who care about establishing truth and accountability for
the deaths of 353 people on SIEVX, the current leadership challenge
in Labor is of profound importance. It is also profoundly important
to all Australians, whether ALP members or not (I am not), because it
will define the political alternative to Howard that we are offered
at the next election. While I am mostly busy writing my SIEVX book, I
have a duty as a concerned citizen to offer some immediate public
analysis of Beazley's and Crean's record on SIEVX as I see it.
Yes, we are a single issue interest group: but we care intensely
about this issue, because it is a major litmus test in defining what
Australia is now and what kind of Australia we will pass on to our
children. If we as a nation and a political culture do not have the
collective guts to face up to our national security authorities'
increasingly probable shared responsibility for the deaths of 353
innocent victims, mostly women and kids, whose only 'crime' was to
seek peacefully a safe refuge and new home in Australia, then there
is little hope for our nation or for its much-vaunted 'values'.
So let's look at the current and past profiles on SIEVX of Kim
Beazley and Simon Crean.
Beazley initially reacted strongly and humanely to the breaking news
of the SIEVX tragedy on 23 October 2001. He condemned it as a policy
failure by the Howard government, in that they had not achieved
effective arrangements with Indonesia to stop such asylum-seeker
boats from leaving Indonesia. He said Labor's regional diplomacy
would have been more effective in stopping the problem at source.
When Howard reacted scathingly, claiming that Beazley was trying to
score political points over a human tragedy, Beazley quickly went
silent on the sinking (Marr and Wilkinson, "Dark Victory", pages 239-
241).
No doubt this was part of Labor's prevailing 'small target' electoral
strategy. Since 18 September, when Labor agreed to pass all the anti-
boat people immigration bills re-presented by Howard to Parliament,
'the fight had gone out of Labor' ('DV', pages 155-156). In a comment
to Marr and Wilkinson ('DV', endnote 32, page 308), Beazley recalls
this phase of border protection: 'Nobody had been killed or beaten up
or hurt in any way .. beyond a bit of jostling there hadn't been
anything of a particularly underworld character.'
This was 15 days into Operation Relex and three weeks after the
tragic drama of the Palapa's rescue by MV Tampa. The 400 people
crowded onto the stricken 'Palapa' had already narrowly escaped
capsizing and drowning in an overnight storm, while Australia's
Coastwatch air surveillance had for 22 hours deliberately ignored
their obvious distress signals. After MV Tampa's rescue, their human
rights had been grossly abused by Australian authorities, under the
appalled gaze of a watching world. The first three SIEVs in Operation
Relex had already been intercepted and the asylum-seekers on board
treated cruelly and abusively by Australian Navy vessels at Ashmore
Reef and on the troopship 'Manoora'.
Of course most of this (except for Tampa) was still being kept secret
from the public at the time. It dribbled out later, over a very long
period. But we know (see Senate CMI Hansards, pages 746 and 801) that
from the time the election was called on October 5, Beazley as Leader
of the Opposition in the caretaker election period was getting
regular defence briefings from the Chief of the Defence Force,
Admiral Chris Barrie. Operation Relex was the ADF's top priority at
the time, so one can assume that Beazley was being kept in the
picture by Navy on how it saw Operation Relex as going. To judge by
his comment quoted above, it was all pretty much OK by him.
Not only this: under normal arrangements for the election period,
Beazley or his security-cleared staff would have been offered a
selection of key national security and defence-related cables each
day. This means he almost certainly was briefed on the crucial 23
October 2001 cable from the Australian Embassy in Jakarta (released
on 4 February 2003) reporting that SIEVX had sunk up to '8 degrees
south latitude', (which a glance at any map would show was far south
of Sunda Strait, and well inside the announced Operation Relex area
of operations), and 'within the Indonesian maritime search and rescue
area' (which extends to south of Christmas Island, i.e., covers the
whole of the Operation Relex zone) .Yet at no stage did Beazley
challenge Howard's blatant public misrepresentations starting on 23
October that the boat had sunk 'in Indonesian waters' and therefore
was not Australia's responsibility. Unless I am wrong on this, there
seems a good chance that Beazley knew from the beginning these were
lies.
According to 'DV' (pages 242-243), Beazley kept silent when Neville
Wran spoke passionately to a Party fundraiser in Sydney on 25 October
on the tragedy of SIEVX. Beazley declined to call on Howard to allow
Sondos Ismail's bereaved husband Ahmed Al-Zalimi to fly from
Australia to Indonesia to comfort her over the loss of their three
little daughters Zhra, Fatima and Eman. He did not want another
front page lost to the drowned children: he said, 'I was not going to
give the government another day's worth of debate on the subject'
(page 243). Robert Manne also wrote tellingly on this incident in
'Eureka Street', Jan-Feb 2002. (extract online at
http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/articles/0201manne.html )
'DV' has many index references to Beazley, but perhaps these words on
the final days of the election campaign best sum up M and W's views,
which concurs with my recollections of the period (pages 274-275):
'Beazley was convinced that every word he spoke about the asylum-
seekers only helped John Howard's election prospects. He was right -
because he had spent the whole campaign locked in step with Howard's
border protection policies.
'Beazley and his staff were angry that the press was once again
dominated by stories from Operation Relex. They deeply resented
church attacks on the party's refugee policy and what they saw as the
"left-wing" moralists in the party criticising their leader.
Beazley's rhetoric had often been as strident as Howard's against
queue jumpers and those "criminals who take advantage of our
generosity". He had tried to neutralise Howard on border protection
while talking about "the real issues" .. jobs, health, education.'
Nineteen months later, it is clear that Beazley and his advisers
still do not get it. Surely anyone seriously aspiring to lead the
Labor Party in 2003 cannot ignore the moral and criminality-related
issues raised by the probability that large numbers of fellow human
beings were killed and brutalised as a result of officially approved
Australian Government clandestine border protection strategies in
Indonesia. The Labor Party knows now that Howard's defence and other
public service officials misled the CMI Senate Committee over many
months, leading to a flawed exoneration of Australian authorities'
conduct over SIEVX (see Senator Cook, 5 February 2003, Senate Hansard
pages 293-294).
Senators Faulkner and Collins have pursued assiduously the
subterfuges and deceptions in Government testimony since that CMI
Report, and started to uncover what was happening in the AFP people
smuggling disruption program. They know there are many very worrying
'smoking guns' here. The Senate opposition parties and independents
passed two major motions on SIEVX on 10 and 11 December 2002.
Yet for 19 months, Beazley has not to my knowledge said a word on any
of these matters. His office never replied to my repeated offers to
brief him on SIEVX. Now, when he again stands for Labor leadership,
his June 6 press conference contains not a single word on such
matters. His press conference strikes me as his 2001 campaign
revisited. He played on the mantra word 'security', apparently
assuming once again that he is talking to the same frightened and
xenophobic Australian public as in October 2001. It is dog-whistle
politics again, based on a strategy: 'I can get us over the line into
government, as long as I don't have to talk about moral issues or
refugees'.
The trouble is that Howard with his now corrupted and compliant
national security apparatus, not to mention a cynically supportive
Murdoch press, has the power to fine-tune the national security
agenda to cook up whatever scare suits him, when it suits him. If
Howard wants to frighten the electorate with another phoney border
protection or terrorism scare campaign, he has the resources to bring
this on. Beazley as a leader still clinging to his small-target
strategy would face his 2001 agony all over again, trying desperately
to get voters to focus on the 'real' issues, while morally principled
voters again deserted a silent Labor in disgust for the smaller
opposition parties, and Howard again seduced confused voters with
siren songs of national security. Beazley would have no defence
against such tactics, having again boxed himself in. In playing by
Howard's rules, Beazley would always be beaten by Howard. Beazley
still naively imagines the next election may be a level playing
field; but with Howard there, it will not be. It is now too late for
Beazley to change course on this, even if he wanted to (and there is
no sign from his June 6 media conference that he does).
Crean is very different. He is morally untainted by the refugee
issue: he was not publicly prominent in this area up to October 2001.
He dropped the unimpressive Con Sciacca and appointed Julia Gillard
as a capable new migration shadow minister. She has proceeded
cautiously but she and Creamn rightly went on the attack over
children in detention (not a word from Beazley over that issue
either, as far as I know). She brilliantly skewered Ruddock in
Parliament last week over corrupted migration processes. Crean has
given free rein to Labor Senators to pursue the truth on SIEVX and to
work with other parties for the crucial December 2002 Senate motions.
He sustained with great courage a principled position on the unlawful
Iraq invasion, and held off heavyhanded US Embassy pressure in a
dignified way. His party has protested the cruel and unlawful
detention without charge or trial of two Australian citizens by the
US military in Cuba. He has in recent days (before the challenge)
sent a moving and appropriate message to the Jannah SIEVX victims'
memorial website, http://www.refugeeaction.org/jannah/survivor.html
He is laying the basis, albeit carefully, for a different kind of
Labor politics - that the electorate will see and appreciate.
Beazley has done none of these things. SIEVX is off his screen. I
don't think he understands why it matters. I think that his view of
Australia's national security may be, at bottom, as limited and
flawed as is Howard's. It is all 'boys with toys' stuff. Neither
Beazley nor Howard seems to understand that national security has to
start with one basic idea - Australians should behave with decency
towards our fellow human beings, whatever their race, religion,
nationality, or present circumstances. Howard's government violates
that idea every day by its actions and rhetoric. Beazley violates it
by his deafening silences. Crean is showing that this is an ideal he
aspires to as Labor's leader. That is why I pray that Crean holds
the Labor leadership, and that he will have a chance after this
challenge to consolidate Labor's alternative views - on moral issues
that matter, as well as on 'the real issues' of jobs health and
education. And I hope his parliamentary party as a whole will get
down finally to supporting him.
[Editor's note: Beazley was interviewed by Laurie Oakes on Sunday
this morning and made it very clear that 'Tampa' and by implication,
SIEVX, were for him very much in the past and had no resonance.
Transcript of this interview will be online on the Sunday site later
today: http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/ ]
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