Sad facts of the Siev X sinking

The memory of those who died should be kept above politics, writes associate editor Cameron Stewart

IT'S five years since 353 men, women and children drowned aboard the doomed refugee boat Siev X, but the tragedy continues to echo across national politics. This week the disaster resurfaced in two unexpected places: in Labor Party policy and, potentially, on school curriculums. This may seem unremarkable if the motivation is simply to honour the memory of those who died, including 146 children, in this most heartbreaking of maritime accidents.

But it is not.

Instead, the Siev X incident has morphed grotesquely into a cause of agenda politics, a vehicle used by refugee advocates, politicians and special interest groups to lend moral weight to their partisan arguments. Such is their zeal to do this that the facts surrounding the sinking are becoming lost amid a shroud of myths, rumours and conspiracy theories.

Siev stands for suspected illegal entry vessel. The small, overcrowded Siev X - a boat arranged by people smugglers - sank on October 19, 2001, on the way from Indonesia to Christmas Island, taking 353 people to their deaths. Forty-one survivors clung to wreckage for 20 hours before being rescued by Indonesian fishing boats.

Labor's immigration spokesman Tony Burke this week recruited the ghosts of Siev X in an attempt to persuade his party to change policy and oppose the Howard Government's tough temporary protection visa laws. He blamed these TPV laws, in part, for the loss of life on Siev X.

"The reason women and children went to a people smuggler and found themselves on Siev X was that Dad wasn't able to be reunited with them," an emotional Burke told Siev X survivors this week. "On a temporary visa he was not allowed to see them. We ended up with a situation of people giving their life savings to evil operators to then put their lives at risk and in this case many did drown."

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone disputes Burke's claims, saying that, on the contrary, the TPV laws have helped deter asylum-seekers from taking dangerous boat trips to Australia.

Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Siev X Case Study Committee is lobbying NSW secondary schools to include a case study on Siev X for Year 11 students. But rather than focusing on the disaster, the case study ventures into politics, asking students if the drownings were the result of federal government policies and even whether Australian officials sabotaged Siev X before it left Indonesia for Australia. Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop has described the case study as "as outrageous attempt to disguise a political agenda as school curriculum".

Recently, the secretary of Labor for Refugees (Victoria), Robin Rothfield, repeated the oft-made claim by refugee groups that the Australian navy chose to ignore the plight of Siev X. "The nearest Australian warship, HMAS Arunta, was 150 nautical miles south and could have been there in five hours," he wrote in The Age newspaper. 'Australia was the best-resourced country to help but did nothing." Rothfield's claim reflects a view shared by many refugee advocates, including some of those who have created the proposed Siev X school case study: that the Australian navy deliberately sat on its hands while the families aboard Siev X were drowning.

It is an extraordinary and malicious claim and one that is completely unsupported by the available evidence. The inability of the navy and other Australian authorities to detect SievX before it was too late was no conspiracy but a mixture of bad luck and poor communication. Siev X had already sunk - and most lives were already lost - by the time Australian authorities even realised it could be at risk.

Australian Federal Police agent Kylie Pratt called Coastwatch at 9.30am on October 20 to alert it of intelligence pointing to Siev X's suspected departure from Indonesia. She did not know Siev X had sunk the previous night and that the survivors were clinging to debris, awaiting rescue.

Pratt's intelligence report said Siev X was "small, with 400 passengers on board" and when she called Coastwatch she added her own warning that it might be "subject to risk" because of overcrowding. Twenty minutes later Coastwatch called the headquarters of Operation Relex, which was responsible for military surveillance of the area, and told it that a small, overcrowded boat was on its way. But Coastwatch neglected to add Pratt's personal warning that this boat might be at risk.

Eleven minutes later the report of Siev X was in the hands of people who controlled the air force and naval surveillance of the area. At 10.02am - 32 minutes after Pratt's first report - the Siev X report arrived at the 92 Wing Detachment at Learmouth in Western Australia, from where air force P3 Orions were making daily surveillance flights over the area. At that moment a P3 was in the air over the ocean but the crew was unaware that Siev X existed, much less that it had sunk.

At the base, commanders read the report saying a small, overcrowded boat was on the way. This did not trigger concern because most of the asylum-seeker boats were small and overcrowded. The report also did not contain Pratt's assessment that Siev X might be at greater risk than most. Therefore the report was treated as routine and it was not considered necessary to alert the P3 crew already in the air.

P3 group commander Philip Byrne later said: "It was a terrible tragedy but unfortunately we had no safety of life at sea indications." By the time the P3 went on its daily patrol the next day, the Siev X survivors had been picked up by Indonesian fishing boats.

This sequence of events shows while communication between the agencies was poor, Australian authorities did not deliberately ignore the plight of Siev X. A parliamentary committee report into the tragedy agreed.

The other Siev X conspiracy theory that continues to thrive without oxygen is the claim that Australian spies, AFP agents or their operatives sabotaged Siev X before it sailed. The alleged aim was to prevent Siev X from sailing, but that the sabotage went wrong and Siev X sailed into deep ocean before sinking.

Australian spies and police did run an aggressive covert campaign inside Indonesia to dismantle the people-smuggling networks responsible for creating voyages such as Siev X. But rumours that this campaign included sinking asylum-seeker boats were denied by the AFP and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. No evidence has ever emerged that Siev X was tampered with before it sailed, yet this rumour persists to such an extent that it appears on the Siev X case study being hawked to NSW schools.

The decision by Labor's Burke to use Siev X to push his belief that the TPV laws must be scrapped is yet another example of the politicisation of the tragedy.

When Siev X sank five years ago, there was fair reason to be suspicious of the Government's claims in relation to it. The ugly politics of the August 2001 Tampa affair, followed by the manipulation of truth in the children overboard controversy, had debased the Government and encouraged scepticism of its claims. When Siev X sank during the election campaign, John Howard initially tried to distance his Government from the tragedy, claiming the boat had sunk in Indonesian waters and was therefore not Australia's responsibility.

It was later revealed the Siev X sank in the zone patrolled daily by Australia's P3 Orion spy planes. But, in contrast to the children overboard scandal, the early whiff of suspicion in relation to Siev X was not supported by the evidence that later emerged.

Yet for many partisan advocates the facts have become irrelevant: they want to believe that the Government somehow was linked to the drowning of the men, women and children of Siev X. Now is the time to remember the tragedy for what it really was: a terrible accident caused by the greed of the people smugglers who put the unseaworthy boat and its 400 passengers to sea.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20616102-5001561,00.html