Life and death on the high seas
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Sally Neighbour
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Sally Neighbour’s biography and other articles by this writer
ON a sultry mid-December day an Indonesian fishing boat manned only by its skipper chugged out of the port of Muara Angke, in north Jakarta, and headed west along the Javanese coast towards the Sunda Strait, the waterway that separates Indonesia's main island from its larger neighbour, Sumatra. The fishermen and market vendors in the bustling harbour probably noticed nothing unusual about the Janga, except the sound of its engine revving like a tractor. It was a wooden vessel about eight metres wide and thirty-five long, with a blue tarpaulin rigged up on deck for shade. The boat had undergone repairs before it left but the motor remained faulty; perhaps its owner was unwilling to spend more on a boat he knew would be impounded and destroyed when it reached its destination. A close observer might have noticed that all its fishing gear had been removed.
The Janga's first stop that day was a smaller port at the western end of Java, where it recruited three crewmen for the journey. One was a sixty-year-old fisherman, Abdul Rasjid, who had known the skipper for three years. Abdul Rasjid had never sailed this route before, but the down payment of a million rupiah (about A$108) with the promise of a further nineteen million was too good to refuse - more than a year's income for a poor fisherman. The second recruit, a 32-year-old named Supriyadi, was an experienced fisherman but a novice on boats, with no knowledge of engines. Little is known about the third crewman, except that he was twenty-two and his name was Hardi Hans.
After the crew embarked the Janga headed for its next stop, the island of Palau Panaitan off the far south-western tip of Java, a remote World Heritage-listed wilderness inhabited by Javan rhinoceroses and Komodo dragons, fishermen and forest rangers, and Western surfers lured by its famous barrel waves. The skipper cut the rackety engine and moored the boat off the island to await its human cargo.
On shore, a 43-year-old Iraqi man I will call Abbass Hussein, his wife and their ten-year-old daughter clutched their meagre belongings and the food and water they had packed for the journey. Hussein and his family had fled their native Iraq amid the chaos of the first Gulf War and its aftermath, in the early 1990s, but found scant respite under the oppressive theocratic regime in neighbouring Iran. They left for Indonesia, and were joined by his sister-in-law, her husband and their daughter. Hussein, who has since secured refugee status in Australia, paid a people smuggler US$5000 for each adult for the journey. ‘We were all hopeful... I thought about a better future for my children. We were going to a nice country and all had hope for the future.'
Hussein handed his family's savings to a forty-year-old Iranian known as Ali Hamid, who had migrated to Australia and secured citizenship in 2003. Hamid spent much of his time in Indonesia and created a lucrative niche in the people-smuggling trade. He was well known to Indonesian police, who believe he had sent five boatloads of asylum seekers to Australia in the previous two months. Hamid was an associate of Abdul Khadem, a veteran smuggler who spent two years in jail after pleading guilty to bringing 353 asylum seekers to Australia in November 1999. Indonesian police had briefly detained Hamid in 2009 after he was spotted escorting twenty-five Iranians, and both men featured on Four Corners in August 2010, secretly filmed discussing people shipments to Australia. By the end of that year they were still operating with apparent impunity.
Abbass Hussein had met Hamid at the airport in Indonesia, where the smuggler big-noted about being a millionaire and not needing the money, though he didn't hesitate to take it. He assured Hussein the boat was shipshape and the journey would be safe.
On 12 December 2010 Hussein and his family were picked up from their lodgings in Jakarta and driven to West Java, where the Janga was anchored offshore. Eighty-nine passengers - mostly Iranians and Iraqis, fifty-five males and thirty-four females, ranging in age from two months to fifty-four years - were ferried in two small boats across the waves to board the Janga that night. The vessel was basic, overloaded and cramped. There wasn't enough room below, so some had to stay on deck, sheltering from the monsoonal rain under the blue tarp. At the back of the boat a hole served as a toilet.
Hussein's main concern was that there were only twenty or thirty life jackets aboard. Some passengers were annoyed; they had offered to buy their own life vests but were assured that wouldn't be necessary. They were given no safety instructions, and the skipper showed little interest in the maritime law that makes the master of a vessel responsible for the safety of his craft and passengers at sea. Still, Hussein was optimistic as the boat set sail: ‘From the beginning I didn't think it was going to be a dangerous trip.'
It was slow going as the Janga headed south through the darkness into the Indian Ocean. The engine seemed to struggle through the heaving seas, roiled by the north-west monsoon that bears down from November to March, when more prudent sailors avoid the trip. They saw no other boats, except for a small vessel that had trailed the Janga from the beginning. Hussein was glad his family had brought food and water as there wasn't much aboard, despite the assurances they had been given.
The next day the seas became very rough, and towards evening the engine suddenly stopped. The engine room was half a metre deep in water and the pump wasn't working. Passengers and crew formed a chain and began bailing water with a plastic bucket, handing it upstairs to be thrown overboard. This went on for almost an hour until the captain started the engine again. The voyage usually takes twenty-four to thirty-six hours, but they spent the better part of three nights and two days on the ocean.
THE JANGA'S DESTINATION the Australian territory of Christmas Island, just ten degrees below the equator and more than a thousand miles north-west of the mainland, lay only three hundred nautical miles to the south. The island is a rocky outcrop, the flat summit of an ancient submarine volcano that rises 4500 metres from the ocean floor, fringed by a narrow reef and surrounded by deep, partly uncharted waters. Much of its coastline is sheer limestone cliffs, which ascend to a central plateau swathed in tropical rainforest. Before the influx of asylum seekers the island's most famous inhabitants were its millions of red crabs, which stage a spectacular annual wet-season migration from burrows in the forest to the sea, to mate and spawn.
To outsiders Christmas Island may seem inhospitable, but its residents - fifteen hundred people of predominantly Chinese, European and Malay descent - pride themselves on offering sanctuary to newcomers. ‘Christmas Island is a place where displaced persons, people made homeless by terrifying and horrific acts of inhumanity, can find safety and care,' the island's administrator, Brian Lacy, said in 2010. ‘We are in that unique part of the world that can provide safe harbour to people who, driven from their homeland, want to be Australian... I am proud to [say that we] are members of a community that receives and cares for the asylum seekers who choose to come to our shore.'
The Australian government and mainland voters have been far less welcoming to the eighteen thousand asylum seekers who have arrived on Christmas Island in the past decade. The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (CBP), whose task is to ‘protect Australia's national interests in [its] maritime domain', identifies ‘irregular maritime arrivals' as one of eight security threats it is obliged to ‘mitigate or eliminate'. The service places such arrivals third on its list of threats, while the Defence Department lists them first: ahead of terrorists, pirates, illegal fishing boats, marine pollution, prohibited imports and other illicit activity.
The Defence component of border protection is known as Operation Resolute, which took over in 2006 from Operation Relex, the Howard government's military-led campaign to get tough on ‘queue jumpers' by stopping boats from landing in Australia. The current policy, which has softened somewhat, is to intercept all known irregular arrivals and divert them to Christmas Island: ‘The operational priority with regards to irregular maritime arrivals [IMAs] was and remains the prevention of mainland arrivals.' Half of the Navy's fourteen Armidale class patrol boats and four hundred Defence personnel are assigned to Operation Resolute. Between July 2009 and May 2010 they stopped and boarded more than 270 boats suspected of illegal fishing or people smuggling, and apprehended more than a hundred suspects. Defence and CBP work jointly under the control of Border Protection Command, headed by Navy Rear Admiral Timothy Barrett.
On Tuesday, 14 December 2010, as the Janga ploughed on towards its destination, two border-protection vessels were on duty at Christmas Island. The naval ship HMAS Pirie, an Armidale class patrol boat, had been deployed from Darwin in early December in response to the ‘perceived threat of future IMAs'. There had been a huge surge in arrivals over the previous two years: 195 boats brought almost ten thousand people in 2009-10, compared with just twelve boats carrying 309 people in the preceding two years.
HMAS Pirie was the designated ‘operational response vessel' on duty, expected to undertake surveillance and to investigate and intercept any illegal vessel. The second boat on duty was the Australian Customs vessel ACV Triton, a 98-metre diesel-fuelled trimaran, operated for Customs by the marine contractors Gardline Australia. ACV Triton had arrived at Christmas Island the day before, ferrying 108 asylum seekers picked up from two illegal boats seized near Ashmore Reef on 9 December. The Triton had transported its human consignment to Ethel Beach, on the protected lee side of the island's east, where it hoped to unload them. But the prevailing conditions were judged unsafe, so the people remained aboard. The ship had obtained an exemption from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, allowing it to carry more than twice the number of people it was authorised to hold.
The weather had been deteriorating for days, as a monsoonal trough drifted south over Christmas Island. Around lunchtime on 14 December the Pirie's captain, Lieutenant Commander Mitchell Livingstone, reported a four-metre swell and winds gusting up to forty knots; rain squalls and thunderstorms were forecast, and conditions expected to worsen.
The Pirie and the Triton were stretched already. While patrolling north of the island, the Pirie's crew had discovered an engineering defect that needed checking, but it was so rough they retreated to the calmer waters at Ethel Beach. The Triton was there too, figuring how to offload its 108 seasick asylum seekers in the foul conditions.
There was more trouble brewing. Border Patrol Command had been advised that morning that two more Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels (SIEVs) were en route; one was expected at Ashmore, the other at Christmas Island. The advice had come from the People Smuggling Intelligence Analysis Team inside Customs, who provide a daily ‘threat picture' based on material from open-source to highly classified information. The politics surrounding asylum seekers has become so charged that the classified assessment is distributed to the prime minister's office, some ministers, agency heads and designated overseas missions.
Predicting SIEV arrivals ‘is not a science', the deputy chief executive of Customs and Border Protection, Marion Grant, told federal parliament's Joint Select Committee on the Christmas Island Tragedy in May 2011. Much of the information fed into the intelligence team is unreliable. ‘We have to make assessments as to whether it is disinformation [or] marketing material by the people smugglers. So even though we get a piece of information it does not actually indicate that that is a fact.'
As it turned out, the intelligence that day was spot-on. At 10.22 am Defence headquarters instructed HMAS Pirie to head off a SIEV spotted near Flying Fish Cove with eleven passengers and crew. The Pirie intercepted the vessel and escorted it to Ethel Beach. The boat, designated SIEV 220, was later identified as the first of the two illegal craft whose arrival had been predicted that morning.
The seas at Ethel Beach were calmer, but still too rough to transfer the eleven detained passengers and crew from SIEV 220 to land. But there was pressure to do so.
A senior officer from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Sonia Radovanovic, later testified to the Western Australian Coroner that Customs officials at Ethel Beach told her that the Pirie needed to offload the people from SIEV 220 because another boat was on its way. Immigration staff considered it dangerous to attempt disembarkation, and argued against it. Radovanovic said that when she questioned the urgency of the transfer Customs officers told her the Navy was expecting another boat. Eventually Customs prevailed and the eleven detainees were safely transferred to land. Radovanovic said she then directed her team on the island to prepare for the next arrival.
At the inquest headed by Coroner Alastair Hope seven months later in Perth, counsel for the Commonwealth, which has repeatedly insisted it had no forewarning of the Janga's arrival, objected to Radovanovic's account and said it contradicted previous statements on the official position. This denial is at odds with the advice from the government's people-smuggling intelligence analysts, who had indicated that a second boat was expected.
It is also at odds with Lieutenant Commander Livingstone's evidence to the Coroner that, after SIEV 220 arrived on 14 December, the ‘threat level' for the island increased from medium to high. According to an internal review by Customs in January 2011, a ‘high' threat level equates to ‘imminent departures where both passengers and the vessel are ready and when the venture is believed to be within seventy-two hours of departure (or has already departed).' The Janga was only hours away.