From the Archives, 2001: Bound for disaster on a hulk with no name

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald on October 24, 2001

Bound for disaster on a hulk with no name

“Did you see scenes of the Titanic sinking in the movie?” asks Almjib.

“Remember the panic and terror? Well it was worse than that.”

Front page of the SMH, 24 October 2001. Credit: SMH Archives

Almjib, a 19-year-old Iraqi, told yesterday how a 19-metre, rotting, leaking Indonesian fishing boat with no name sank off Java, killing 356 asylum seekers trying to reach Australia’s remote Christmas Island.

“It was horrible. We were being pounded by huge waves. The boat was full of water and then it suddenly turned on its left side,” he said.

“We all ran to the right side of the boat to try to right it but a huge wave splashed across us and it sank within 30 seconds.”

Sitting amid distressed and injured survivors in a cheap hotel in Bogor, near Jakarta, Almjib said many of those who drowned tried in their final seconds to grab their loved ones and started screaming for help from their God.

Most of those on board went down with the boat, including the Indonesian captain, he said.

“Within minutes we counted only 120 people in the water. The rest had already gone.”

One by one over the next 15 hours 76 more people slipped away quietly, too exhausted to speak, from the huddles of men, women and children clinging desperately to pieces of wreckage in the rough sea.

By the time another larger Indonesian fishing boat by chance found them shortly after dawn last Saturday, 52 hours after they had left an Indonesian port near Jakarta, there were only 44 survivors, most of them men.

Sadiq Raza, 25, from Iraq, was lucky he and his family were in one of the first buses, organised by the people smugglers, that pulled up at a wharf early last Thursday as the boat was preparing to leave.

The first 60 people aboard were able to grab lifejackets. There was none for the rest of the passengers, who had paid up to $US4,000 each for the trip, even though the boat started leaking minutes after leaving port.

When the boat went down about 4pm on Friday, Raza clung to his two-year-old daughter, Kauthar Sadiq, who was crying and calling out for her mother, who is believed to have drowned almost immediately.

Throughout the long night, trying to keep his head about the huge waves, Raza kept the baby’s legs wrapped around his neck.

Often he thought she had died. But each time he shook her she woke. “It’s a miracle I managed to keep her alive,” he said, nursing Sadiq on his lap yesterday.

Almjib, whose father is living in Melbourne after making a similar dangerous boat trip two years ago, said that throughout the night, people in the water tried to help each other.

He held grimly on to his 16-year-old cousin Dunia, who, like everybody else, was praying most of time and asking: “Where’s my mother? Where’s my mother?”

“But about 3am we got separated and she slipped away,” he said.

Almjib said at one point he and 24 other people found themselves clinging to the same 2.5-metre piece of wood.

“I saw a body with a lifejacket so I swam over and pulled it off,” he said. “Then I managed to find my mother and give it to her. She survived.”

Zainab, a 12-year-old Iraqi girl who lost her father, mother, two brothers and two sisters her entire immediate family sat dazed among the survivors as she told how a 15-year-old Iraqi boy named Esam, whom she had never met before, held her throughout the night.

“He kept saying, don’t let go. Don’t let go,” she said.

Esam lost his 19-year-old brother. His father Kisam and mother Rejabab, who survived, yesterday adopted Zainab into their family.

“I will not give up even though I have lost a son,” Kisam said.

“What can I do? I have no money and no home. I know it is very dangerous but I will get some money and go on another boat with my family unless the United Nations helps us.”

Najah Dayer, a 26-year-old Iraqi mother, wept as she told how her two-year-old son Karar went blue after swallowing sea water polluted with petrol and oil from the sunken boat.

“I held him up. But then I looked. He was dead,” she said.

“When I came to Indonesia I thought the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees would help my family,” she said.

“But they have done nothing. I don’t have any family, money or clothes. I don’t know what to do.”

Almjib told how the trip was doomed from almost the time it left Indonesia but that most of the asylum seekers refused to turn back.

Only 30 minutes out to sea, he said, the boat started taking water. Only one of two pumps was working.

Almjib said the boat kept taking more and more water. The captain ordered everybody to throw their luggage overboard, which they did.

Then about 9.30 on Friday morning they came across a fishing boat. The captain admitted the asylum seekers’ boat was overloaded. Twenty-one people boarded the fishing boat and were taken to a nearby Indonesian island.

As the bad weather turned into a storm that lashed the boat, the captain continued to steer the asylum seekers in the direction of Christmas Island. But Almjib said the boat started to take more and more water. Then the second pump broke down and everybody started baling water with whatever they could find.

“I was very worried,” Almjib said. “I went to the captain and told him he must turn back, that it was too dangerous. I told him he would kill more than 400 people.”

But Almjib said many of the other asylum seekers became angry with him and called him a coward.

“Some went to the captain and said, if you continue we will pay you more money,” Almjib said. “They collected $US5,000 and gave it him. The captain said, “The boat is safe. We are going on.”

Many of the survivors said that despite the tragedy they intended to pay smugglers to get on another boat as soon as possible.

But yesterday, at the Bogor hotel where they were taken by the International Organisation for Migration, they could only sit in shock, staring at nothing. Many have open wounds that are already starting to fester. Some wailed uncontrollably.

More have been living in Indonesia for several years and have unsuccessfully tried to reach Australia on other boats.

Almost all of those who boarded the boat were Iraqis who had been living for several years in Iran. But there were also Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis and a small group of Algerians.

More than 30 of those on board are believed to have already been assessed by the UNHCR to be genuine refugees with a well-founded fear of persecution if they were to return to their own country.

One of the survivors, a man of about 30 believed to be from Iraq, showed a card proving he had been assessed by the UNHCR to be a genuine refugee.

“Look, many of us have been waiting in Indonesia for years to be resettled in a third country,” said the man, who asked not to be named.

“We have no option but to try to make these dangerous voyages.”

Another of the survivors, Jalah Shohani, 35, from Iraq, wept as he appealed for help.

“You are from Australia. You are a Christian,” he said. “You must write in the newspaper what happened here.

“If 100 people from America die, all the world gets to hear of the news. But now 400 Iraqis have died here and nobody is thinking about us.”