Sailing into new storm

SRI Lanka’s recent economic migrants test the government’s will.

Sri Lankan asylum seekers sent back by Australia queue to enter the magistrate's court in the southern port district of Galle on July 8, 2014. Sri Lankan authorities plan to charge a group of asylum-seekers with attempting to leave the country illegally after they were returned by Australia following a controversial mid-sea transfer. AFP PHOTO/ LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI

SOME attempted to conceal their faces as they filed into court. They had been aboard a people-smuggling vessel intercepted by Australian authorities, its human cargo handed over mid-sea to the Sri Lankan navy, and on Tuesday they fronted court in the Sri Lankan city of Galle, south of the capital Colombo.

Most were granted bail on charges of illegally leaving the country, breaking the country’s strict immigration laws.

The overwhelming majority of the 41 passengers on board the boat were Sinhalese, from Sri Lanka’s ethnic majority. One of the Sinhalese was offered a chance by Australian authorities to pursue an asylum claim but chose to return with his fellow passengers.

Just four were from the minority Tamil community, who refugee advocates argue face persecution, a lingering casualty of the separatist war that officially ended in 2009.

Despite their complaints — they said they had been treated worse than dogs, handed out-of-date muesli bars and had their ­iPhones, credit cards and even a digital camera confiscated — many of the passengers admitted to reporters outside the court they had left in search of jobs.

Nalini Manatunga, a lawyer representing a young Sinhalese couple with a two-month-old child, tells The Australian her ­clients left Sri Lanka “seeking ­betterment’’.

“The brother-in-law told me they were not seeking asylum but were trying to migrate to New Zealand for a better life.’’

Their quest to improve their lives is all too understandable, but they are the human faces of what both the Coalition and Labor agree is economic migration.

It is not this group of repatriated Sri Lankans but the latest boatload of 153 asylum-seekers — those at the centre of a High Court challenge to the Abbott government’s border security policies — that have reignited the vexed debate over boat arrivals and people-smuggling.

As the 153 remain in limbo on an Australian Customs vessel somewhere on the high seas, after being intercepted outside Australia’s migration zone, the government’s critics are queuing up to test its will.

It is a debate shrouded in hysteria, claim and counter-claim, and politically loaded language. Labor, which repatriated hundreds of Sri Lankans, refuses even the slightest concession that the government’s policies have stopped the flood of boats to Australia. There has not been a single people-smuggling venture to Australia in more than six months, prompting opposition immigration spokesman Richard ­Marles to claim the standoff over 153 people is merely to save political face, to protect the government’s “political scoreboard’’.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young labels it “Tony Abbott’s Tampa”, while former Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser, who long ago stopped playing for his home side, likened the return of Tamils to Sri Lanka to the handing over of Jewish refugees to Nazi Germany.

Lawyers for the asylum-seekers, led by barrister Ron Merkel QC, have told the High Court the boatload of 153 people came from a Tamil refugee camp in Pondi­cherry in southern India.

The legal team for 48 of the asylum-seekers includes Shine Lawyers’ George Newhouse and former US military lawyer Mich­ael (Dan) Mori, who represented convicted terrorism supporter David Hicks and now works for the firm.

Indian authorities, however, have cast doubt on claims the boat left from its waters, and refugee advocates say they have traced 93 passengers back to India’s Sri Lankan Tamil community. A question mark remains over the origins of the other 60 passengers.

Even if those from the minority Tamil community fear persecution in Sri Lanka, they have chosen to place their lives in the hands of people-smugglers to embark on a perilous sea voyage to Australia or New Zealand, bypassing the southeast Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which is geographically and demographically closer than Australia.

It is the closest refuge to Sri Lanka, 53km across the Palk Strait, where more than 60,000 Sri ­Lankan Tamils are registered as refugees.

The resolution of Sri Lanka’s civil war has seen even Tamils lose their appeals for refugee status in Australia. The Immigration Department’s last annual report, released last year, illustrates the peak of the surge of Sri Lankan arrivals — more than 5000 between July and December 2012.

Immigration officials said this “sudden and dramatic rise’’ did not reflect Sri Lankan asylum-seeker movements internationally and was counter-intuitive because circumstances in their home country, once torn by bloodshed, were ­improving.

“Initial interviews with Sri Lankan IMAs (irregular maritime arrivals) at the beginning of this surge suggested that a significant proportion of the cohort was coming to Australia for economic reasons,’’ the officials said, explaining the spike demanded a specific policy response. That led Labor to introduce the process of enhanced screening, which essentially tri­ages asylum claims.

It was first used in October 2012 and by the end of June last year there were 748 Sri Lankans involuntarily removed from Australia while 23 chose to return voluntarily. In financial year 2012-13, of the 1140 asylum-seekers assessed as “not engaging Australia’s international obligations’’, the vast majority — 1055 — were Sri Lankan nationals.

Ian Rintoul, the Refugee Action Coalition’s spokesman and a man who is seemingly on speed-dial for many seeking asylum, makes the point that the legal action before the High Court happened only “because refugee advocates and Tamil community members managed to get the names and details of asylum-seekers on the boat’’.

Rintoul remains outraged at the use of enhanced screening, saying “hundreds of Tamils and other asylum-seekers have been sent back to danger under this shocking practice’’.

Tamil refugee advocates argue that despite the end of the Sri Lankan civil conflict, Tamils remain at risk from Sri Lankan security ­forces, and fresh efforts to drive out Tamil separatists and those still loyal to the Tamil terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are behind the flight of asylum-seekers to India.

Refugee Council of Australia president Phil Glendenning argues Australia’s special relationship with President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime has clouded its judgment on human rights and potentially endangers the lives of asylum-seekers being returned to Sri Lanka.

“If the government is wondering why the boats are still coming, (Immigration) Minister (Scott) Morrison only needs to look at the ongoing persecution of Tamils and opponents of the Rajapaksa regime in Sri Lanka,’’ he says.

Glendenning joins Rintoul in his condemnation of enhanced screening, describing it as an ­Orwellian concept that hampers the ability of decision-makers to assess thoroughly claims for ­protection.

“The government is trying to reduce a complex set of inter­national issues, a matter of life and death for asylum-seekers who ask Australia for refugee protection, to a mindless three-word slogan.’’

Last week Abbott articulated Australia’s position on Sri Lanka, saying while it wasn’t everyone’s idea of the ideal society, it was at peace.

“It is a peaceful country. I don’t say it’s a perfect country, not even Australia is that, but it is a peaceful country and all of us should be grateful that the horrific civil war is well and truly over,” he said. “That is to the benefit of every single Sri Lankan, Tamil, Sinhalese; everyone in Sri Lanka is infinitely better off as a result of the cessation of the civil war.’’

Across the political divide, it is a view shared by Labor’s last foreign affairs minister, Bob Carr, who last year disassembled many of the arguments of refugee advocates by pointing out that on some boats it was “clear that 100 per cent are motivated by economic factors and are not fleeing persecution’’.

Carr’s views have only intensified since leaving parliament, branding as “nonsense’’ and “extraordinary urban mythology’’ the arguments used by refugee advocates to claim endemic persecution of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

“The things I’ve been hearing from the refugee lobby are simply unsustainable,’’ he told ABC’s Radio National this week, saying the previous government “couldn’t find a single case’’ of returned asylum-seekers being ­abused by authorities. “I remember repeatedly our high commission in Colombo saying there is no evidence of mistreatment of those we are returning.’’

Carr says “the idea that there is some sort of entrenched apartheid in the country like old South Africa or the West Bank just can’t be sustained when you’ve got 30 per cent of the population of Colombo Tamil, when you’ve got 68 per cent of Tamils in the country living in the centre in the south next to Sinhalese, and a high level of co-operation between the racial groups.

“There’s a great danger in this that we accept one side in this narrative … It’s not just a Tamil Tigers narrative; it’s a narrative about a complex society rebuilding itself after 35 years of vicious violence and not doing badly,’’ Carr says.

Sri Lanka’s high commissioner to Australia, Thisara Samara­singhe, who was with Morrison in Colombo on Wednesday as Australia handed over two retired Bay Class patrol boats to help the nation fight people-smuggling, says his country’s reputation is being “bashed’’ by its critics and “100 per cent’’ of those leaving Sri Lanka are economic migrants.

The Abbott government maintains not only that its resolve is to “decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they come’’, a continuation of John Howard’s 2001 Tampa declaration, but that its policies stop deaths at sea, and also that the capped humanitarian places should be filled by those languishing in camps, not those with the means to pay people-smugglers.

In the May budget the government announced its humanitarian program would welcome 13,750 people in 2014-15, including at least 4000 places under the special humanitarian program for families of offshore humanitarian entrants; the program under Labor had fallen to just 500 places.

Michaelia Cash, Assistant Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, says “under the former government at least 14,500 places were denied to people languishing in refugee camps from countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia, Jordan, Somalia, South Sudan, the Congo and Uganda.

“They were denied a place of a new life in Australia because those who supported the former gov­ernment’s policies deliberately ­ignored their legitimate claim for asylum.’’

ADDITIONAL REPORTING: Amanda Hodge and Jared Owens