A wristful of wrongs
Safely home; Ali Yasmin and Ibu (Photo Republica)
On
some lists we’re world leaders in shame.
Like locking up and brutalizing children as Four Corners has shown
– and not only our own. We’ve treated Indonesian kiddies just as badly.
Like getting algorithms to retrieve real or imagined
welfare debts, it seemed a good idea at the time. Jail every Indonesian
deckhand to send their ambitious mates a message: Don’t you ever dare work for people
smugglers.
Like Robodebt, some Stop the Boats policies were cruel
and illegal. Now they could be costly.
Back in 2009, a wave of fear was washing over the
electorate. Scores of Indonesian fishing
boats were ferrying asylum seekers – originally from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan
and other dysfunctional regimes – across the Arafura Sea to Australia.
The dread of invasion dictated flawed responses, a
mess of ill-considered laws, displays of cultural ignorance and bad decisions.
Now the wrongs may be redressed.
Around 130 Indonesian men who claim they were
illegally arrested and jailed in Australia want compensation. After years of
denials and delays, the Federal Court has ordered all parties into mediation to determine
damages. The deadline is next March.
Thirteen years ago and way off the Northwest coast
big Australian men in uniforms were questioning small Indonesian boys in ragged
shorts and T-shirts caught on boats laden with asylum seekers. Names,
addresses, jobs – all the usual stuff. But the critical query was age.
The deckhands said they were teens but had no
documents. The solution seemed smart –
wrist X-rays using a 1942 US bone atlas devised for Caucasians. The margin for error was plus-or-minus four
years.
Such was the political panic that it seems no
fearless official unzipped a conscience and said: ‘Hang about, this is all too shonky. We’re Aussies. We do the right thing – and this isn’t it.’
That moment only came in April
2010 when Justice of the Peace Colin Singer was on a routine visit to WA’s
Hakea jail for men. Under 18s are children
and must be held apart from adults under the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights
of the Child. Australia is a signatory. So is Indonesia.
The 1,225-bed prison
‘manages male prisoners who have been remanded in custody while waiting to
appear in court or those who have just been sentenced’. So
murderers, thugs, pedophiles and thieves check in-and-out of the legal
terminal queue together. Around 7,000 a year are processed.
Singer was on duty
for the Office of Custodial Services, an independent statutory authority charged
with checking that inmates get treated decently.
A doctor told Singer the jail was
housing kids. ‘I thought this impossible. I had great faith in the
Australian justice system and believed it to be fair,’ he said at the time. ‘Then I saw them -
they were Indonesians, pre-pubescent frightened children, certainly not
men.’
Singer
knew. He’s a businessman who has worked in the oil and gas industry in
Indonesia since 1989 and is married to an Indonesian.
Among
the kids he spoke to was Ali Yasmin (also known as Jasmin), from a tiny island
east of Flores. ‘He was alone and clinging to a fence, clearly traumatized,’ Singer
recalled.
He
claimed 60 juveniles were in WA’s adult jails. The
government said there were none because Yasmin and
others had been confirmed as adults by the wrist scans.
Two
years later the Australian Human Rights Commission published An Age of
Uncertainty, an inquiry into ‘an inherently flawed
technique’. It said the wrist test had been publicly condemned by specialists
and professional medical societies as ‘unreliable and untrustworthy.’
Singer
said he got the impression that nothing would be done that might disturb
relations with Indonesia, then at a high following a successful address to
the Australian Parliament by former President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono. Then the media got involved.
In
2013 a TV journalist found Yasmin’s family and the boy’s school
records. These showed their son had been born in 1996, meaning he
was 13 when arrested.
The
documents couldn’t be used as evidence because they weren’t legally verified.
The people
smugglers safe in Jakarta had already got their
cash. Undeterred they continued selling high-price passages to
Australia while the beardless youngsters they recruited were doing time to ‘set
an example’ – and show voters the government was tough.
Yasmin
worked in the prison laundry. Regulations were changed to stop the
Indonesians from sending their meagre earnings to their families. (State jails
are used to house federal prisoners.)
Further
petty malice was devised to show Canberra wouldn’t slip into
solicitude. Some repatriated kids were dumped in Bali with no means
of getting back to their remote homes. Only after the International
Organisation for Migration got involved were escorts provided and fares back to
the villages.
In
court proceedings watched by this writer the accused were labelled ‘X’ because
the system doesn’t recognize – or care – that many Indonesians have only one
name. That includes the nation’s first
two presidents.
Proper
legal procedures may have been followed but the rules don’t include common
sense. Why didn’t the Indonesian government scream outrage and fan an
international crisis? And why weren’t there more agitators?
Singer
wouldn’t stop. The doubts about age got too loud to ignore.
Yasmin and 14 others were released ‘on licence’ in 2012. Five years
later the WA Court of Criminal
Appeal quashed his sentence.
Yasmin is now back home, married and a Dad. The class action is
in his name.
The average time spent in detention by the Indonesian kids
was 31.6 months. Egregious errors were eventually recognised but not
righted. Despite all the current legal busyness, there’s no
certainty the Indonesians will be recompensed for their misery, fear and lost
years.
Imagine the outcry if an Australian child had been locked in
an Indonesian slammer. In 2011 then Prime Minister Julia Gillard got involved
in the case of an Australian teen arrested in Bali on drug
charges.
The boy was briefly detained and then
repatriated after a furious media campaign.
‘Yasmin is an
Indonesian hero,’ said Singer. ‘He helped the others settle
in. He calmed things down in jail and acted as an
interpreter. He’s had a horrendous time but his resilience has been
spectacular.
‘In all this I found most prison staff to be
compassionate. My criticism is for the bureaucrats, politicians and
lawyers who turned away from their responsibilities and ignored the rights of
children.’
Next year we should know if the government will front up to its faults. Or will we need a royal commission?
First published in Pearls & Irritations, 20 November 2022: https://johnmenadue.com/would-you-send-a-13-year-old-child-to-adult-prison/
