Have you ever thought about what it means to be "boat people"?

Wow. I really have a head full tonight. Today, everything in Geneva was closed. Apparently Sundays are a bit of a no-go! So I took my book to a café (ok ok it was Starbucks – but everything else was closed!), and sat there reading for more than 2 hours. As you may recall from recent posts, I’m reading ‘Dark Victory’. I’m almost finished, but it’s a hell of a read and quite detailed, so it’s taking me a while.

Anyway, after posting about the passing of Amal Basri just this morning, I reached the section of ‘DV’ that deals with the SIEV-X tragedy. Of course, her name came up, as did her account of the horror of that vessel sinking, and taking with it 353 people, including many, many children. I was sitting in Starbucks on the Rue de Rive with tears rolling down my cheeks as I read about people losing their entire families in one fell swoop, then the politicking that went on in the wake of that absolutely horrendous tragedy. It’s just so, so sad.

If you don’t know anything about the SIEV-X, there’s a website devoted to it – www.sievx.com - which you should read if you’re curious. There are many conspiracy theories about the SIEV-X, that the Australian government sort of accidentally-on-purpose let it sink, then accidentally-on-purpose forgot to rescue the hundreds of people who were on board the boat. I am not a subscriber to those theories, because I don’t know enough to make an informed judgement call, but if you are interested in that aspect of it, you may want to read a book by Tony Kevin called ‘A Certain Maritime Incident’. The evidence is actually remarkably compelling, particularly in conjunction with Ruddock’s suggestions after Tampa that perhaps the navy could ‘interfere’ with vessels, and the clear, unabashed attitude of the government that deterrence and repulsion, NOT search and rescue, is the objective of Operation Relex and the policies surrounding it.

Anyway, I read about that, but then I got to the account of SIEV-10. As you may be able to guess, the SIEVs (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels) were numbered as they arrived after September 2001. SIEV-10 is the given to the boat on which my good friend (also a friend to many of you who will be reading this), Ali Mullaie. Well, I was not expecting this. Of course, I have heard him tell the story many times. I have heard him talk about his friend, a young 18 year old woman who was 4 months’ pregnant, who drowned. I have heard him talk about the reaction of that woman’s husband when he was told she was dead. But I had never read naval officers’ reports of finding her lifeless body in the water. How her body was kept in the shower block on the HMS Wollongong before the soldiers brought themselves to telling her husband she was dead. The absolute horror of the account, which is not an abstract narrative, but a factual event. An historical incident.

So today I realised that although I have had so much to do with people who arrived on boats – so many of them demonised like hell for the benefit of the 2001 election campaign – I have never really come face to face with the reality of the tag ‘boat people’. I am sort of ‘ok’ with their push factors – whether it’s persecution by the Iranian secret police or the Taliban or the regime of Saddam Hussein – and of course I’m quite familiar with their lives in detention. But the part in between – the terrifying ordeal of selling everything they own to get on a boat they KNOW is unseaworthy, overloaded and unsafe… Watching in terror as their captain panics when the engine fails… The understanding that would dawn as the men started bailing water out of the boat with a bucket… Then watching as the boat sinks, children and adults alike flail in the water because there’s no such thing as learning to swim in Afghanistan… And all of this because it’s better than the alternative. That concept is quite unknown to me.

I remember the night Edriess arrived in Melbourne from the Baxter Detention Centre after almost 6 years in detention. We were talking, and he spoke of how his boat broke down and they were just rolling in the swell somewhere in the Indian Ocean for 9 days when their engine broke down. He said to me, “if you offered me ten million dollars, I would never do that voyage again”. Hearing Amin’s story, or Ali’s, or Khairy and Houda Al-Massaudi’s, or the story of ANYONE who has made that horrific voyage from Indonesia is an absolute shock. I used to get sick on my grandfather’s fishing boat on a river, for heavens sake! It’s unimaginable.

And there is one particularly important thing to remember when thinking about all of this. Remember that the government (and, for that matter, the Opposition) was espousing the wonders of its policy to keep the pesky boat people at bay, and punish those who did arrive with Temporary Protection Visas. Remember that they were purportedly doing this to prevent women and children from getting on leaky boats. Well have a chew on this: almost ALL the women and children on the SIEV-X, and indeed many who arrive on other boats, are doing so by that method because their husbands and fathers are already in Australia. They are in Australia on a Temporary Protection Visa, which allows no right of family reunion. In other words, there is NO other option for these families, if they want to be together, than for the mum and kids to pay some bastard people smuggler and get on that leaky boat.

IF the government introduced a humane visa system for boat arrivals (who are – I repeat – not illegal), allowing family reunion, there would be virtually NO NEED for SIEVs. There would be no need for people smugglers, or Operation Relex, or the multi multi multi multi million dollar Pacific Solution (the name of which, incidentally, was changed to ‘Pacific Strategy’, because they were concerned that it sounded a bit too much like ‘Final Solution’. A cosmetic adjustment at best, wouldn’t you say??)

OK I’m getting worked up. I should go. Breathe deep.

Oh, and I can never listen to Damien Rice’s ‘Cold Water’ without thinking of sinking SIEVs. It’s ruined that song for me, but made it a hundred times more poignant...

Hmmm.

Jess x