PEOPLE SMUGGLERS ADAPTING

 THE X GANG AND A GHOST BOAT           

    

They’re among Australia’s most wanted, but what police call the ‘X gang led by HR’ is unlikely to be caught Down Under. Yet this is the destination for which  the criminal syndicate has been advertising packages on line and risking buyers’ lives.  

The clients - some of them apparently Chinese - are gullible.  They’re, desperate enough to chance drownings and jailings, also ambitious enough to buy the high-price tickets and ignore persistent warnings that they’ll be arrested and never able to settle in Australia.  

Boat people numbers today are minuscule when measured against those  getting to Australia early last decade.  Eventually the dirty trade was crippled by the Coalition government’s military-style Sovereign Borders policy in 2013.

That was the year when numbers peaked with more than 20,000 people on 300 boats.

That wave’s been dumped. Last year there were 74 people on four boats. At the same time about 23,000 arrived by air, applied for asylum and stayed free working  in the community, a racket rarely aired in the scare campaigns.

 They’ve been well dressed mainly from Commonwealth-member Malaysia and didn’t look bedraggled, desperate and consequently threatening. Most claims fail and they eventually get deported sometimes years later

Boat people bad, plane people allowed.

The turn-backs, deportations and jailings seemed to deter sea travel but the cost to our reputation as impartial administrators is a worry..  

The Refugee Council claims Australia’s policies ‘are now among the most punitive in the world’. They’re being used as a model for anti-refugee laws in Britain which got 84,425 asylum applicants last year.

In Australia between 1 May 2022 and  30 March this year, twelve  boats carrying 247 people have been caught and sent to a detention camp in Nauru.  Indonesian crew have usually been deported.

This upturn in arrivals under the present government and the inclusion of a few Chinese has refueled the Opposition's allegation that Labor is soft on security and encouraging boat people. In response the government has hardened the Morrison-era line of ‘we stopped the boats’.

The people smugglers wanted in Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia are most likely skulking in Surabaya, the Republic's second-biggest city and capital of East Java.

That’s the theory of Indonesian police commissioner Aria Sandy (left, below) who claims recent attempted illegal sailings of economic refugees to Australia have been thwarted by local fishers spotting and reporting newcomers to Kupang.

This is the former Portuguese city (population now 445,000), the capital of the Indonesian section of Timor Island.

It’s 950 km east of Bali. Closer is the Kimberly coast of WA, about 800 km south, the destination for the economically desperate.

The ABC has reported that recently caught men, now held on Nauru, have been driven by need having failed at businesses in their homelands.

Aria told Michael West Media that Kupang has become the new hub for people traffickers selling complex package deals to Australia for 30,000 Malaysian ringgits ($9,570).

“The men hear about the trade through messages on TikTok,” he said.

“They transfer their money into an account run by an Indonesian woman called Fika.  She’s the kawin siri (de facto) Indonesian wife of the Mr Big “HR” whose real name is Habibu Rahman.  He’s from Bangladesh.”

 (A man with that name was reportedly held as a suspected asylum seeker in Darwin’s detention centre in 2011 where he was involved in protests.  Although it’s not known if it’s the same person the fact that both are allegedly in the smuggling business is curious.)

"There's also another man involved with HR and Fika called Sahib but we don't know much about him.  

“We’ve gathered the information from some of the people we’ve caught.  We don’t have photos of the smugglers but know how they operate.

“Their customers are illegally in Malaysia and told to get into Indonesia through Medan (a port on the coast of Sumatra close to Malaysia).

"They're moved to Jakarta and then Surabaya using a hotel to hold the men till they have enough for a boat they'd bought in Sulawesi. (MWM has chosen not to name the hotel because the owners may not be involved in any illegality).

“The smugglers have close ties to Indonesian trepang fishers who work the border with Australia and know when they’re not likely to be caught.”  The trade was reported on this website  here.

In April, a boat or boats with ten Chinese men made it to the Kimberley without the Australian Border Force or other agencies being aware.  Last month one man wandered unchallenged onto the unfenced Truscott air base.

Two months earlier 39 Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indian citizens also reached WA with Indonesian people smugglers.

There’s confusion about numbers and nationalities. The term ‘Chinese’ can mean a citizen of the People’s Republic or an ethnic Chinese born and living overseas.

The men have been sent by the ABF to Nauru for processing.  The agency which could clarify the situation has not given information to the media claiming its "long-standing policy" is to keep quiet.

Consequently taxpayers stay ignorant of how and where their money is being spent.  State police forces are far more open about their criminal investigations.

Despite a paucity of leads, Aria is confident HR and his gang will be caught because so many countries and agencies are looking for them - though not all with the same enthusiasm.

A search of this gravity requires cooperation and coordination - not always present when national and departmental rivalries are rife and the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.

A few dozen asylum seekers, economic refugees aka boat people may set Australian electors trembling and politics aflame, though not elsewhere.

The NGO Human Rights Watch  estimates 180,000 refugees and asylum seekers—including 100,000 Rohingya - are in Malaysia: “Unofficial estimates of undocumented migrants range from 1.2 to 3.5 million, and none of them have status.”

Refugees caught in the Republic and its waters can’t be sent to Nauru.  That’s Ozzie business.

Indonesia hasn’t signed the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, nor does it have a system to determine their status. So the national government has flipped problems to the UN High Commission for Refugees, which is supposed to ‘identify solutions for refugees in the country.’

This usually means they live on handouts as working is illegal.  About 14,000 refugees are languishing in Indonesia hoping for resettlement in another country.  Some have been waiting for more than ten years.

Aria said that the latest group of illegal venturers (some reports claim they are Chinese, others that they’re from Bangladesh) were held in Immigration detention and getting care from the UNHCR.

However, the detention centre said it hadn't seen any boat people. Another UN body, the International Organisation for Migration which does have an office in Kupang, confirmed the UNHCR is no longer in the province.

Aria referred inquiries to see the boat used by the HR syndicate to the Fisheries Department because their staff arrested the crew.  He said the police were not involved.

Yet the craft is held by the water police about 20 km outside Kupang.

The smugglers' land operation may have been sophisticated, but its on-water plan was not. They used a 12-metre dark  ghost boat elusive at night and carrying no name or numbers.

The local fleet flaunts gaudy colours, lights, high masts,flags and names, so  a standout, rapidly attracting attention.  It’s tied  up on an isolated rocky shore below a police ecumenical church. The low-profile craft has been fitted with powerful new motors making it ideal to drop passengers, flee and outrun pursuit.

Much like its owners, the X syndicate.

First published in Michael West Media, 26 May 2024: https://michaelwest.com.au/boats-asylum-seekers-few-but-people-smugglers-active/

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THE LAND OF THE UNFAIR GO

 WATCH OUT AUSTRALIA - THE KIDS ARE COMING

In February 2012 X Riyan and X Hadi were led into the Perth District Courtroom 7.1 by uniformed security guards.

From their curious titles it seemed the defendants were protected informants in an East Timor spy scandal so given codenames; the reality was more mundane.  Many Indonesians have only one name – a fact Australian bureaucracy can’t accept.  So both men were labelled X.

Riyan was 28.  Hadi said he was 14 and the beardless lad looked like a frightened early adolescent.  However the prosecution said he was an adult. 

We now know he wasn’t so Hadi is on the list of 122 claimants for compensation from the Federal government. They say they were sent to adult prisons when authorities should have known they were children.

The cases are listed for a management hearing in the Federal Court on 21 February.

Back in the Perth court nine years ago, Riyan and Hadi pleaded not guilty to the charge of unlawfully transporting aliens into Australia.  Facing them across the almost empty room (an Indonesian diplomat occasionally looked in) sat the jury of 12 Australian citizens. 

Hadi said in May 2010 he crewed a boat carrying coconuts from Java to Flores. Heading back they stopped at Probolinggo on East Java’s north coast.  The boat collected 54 Afghan men and headed to sea. On 3 June they were boarded by an Australian naval patrol boat.

Hadi says he didn’t get paid and hadn’t negotiated a salary. The prosecutor thought this incredible. Through an interpreter Hadi explained Indonesians don’t quibble and that he didn’t know where they were going.

There was no suggestion they were the Mr Bigs who’d recruited the passengers and hired the boat.

When sentencing Riyan and Hadi to the mandatory five-year minimum, Judge Richard Keen said jailing would ‘bring home the message’ that Australia treats people smuggling seriously.  

Now the message is heading in another direction:  Australia must treat those it arrests lawfully.

The lead plaintiff in next month’s Federal Court compensation action is Ali Yasmin  from the island of Lembata east of Flores. His story only came to light in 2010 when JP Colin Singer was on an official visit to Perth’s Hakea Prison.

 

The 1,225-bed jail is no place for the immature and vulnerable.  It’s for men remanded in custody or who’ve just been sentenced.  Every year around 7,000 murderers, thugs, paedophiles and thieves check in and out of the legal system’s terminal.

 

Under 18s must be held apart under the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Australia is a signatory.  So is Indonesia.

 

As I reported for Indonesia’s Strategic Review, a doctor told Singer there were kids in Hakea:  ‘I thought this impossible. I had great faith in the Australian justice system and believed it to be fair.

 

‘Then I saw them - they were Indonesians, pre-pubescent frightened children, certainly not men.’  Among the kids he spoke to was Yasmin who had no paperwork to prove his claim to be 14. ‘He was alone and clinging to a fence, clearly traumatized’.

 

It was fortuitous Singer was on visitor duty at the jail, and not just because he sounded the alert. He’s worked in the oil and gas industry in Indonesia since 1989, is married to an Indonesian, has a home in West Java and could communicate with the prisoners.

 

Singer claimed 60 juveniles were in WA’s adult jails. The government said there were none because they’d been confirmed as adults by the AFP using wrist X-rays.  They referenced a 1942 US bone atlas devised for Caucasians and with a four-year plus-or-minus margin of error. On these grounds it was decided Yasmin was 19. 

The Australian Human Rights Commission got involved and concluded Australia had breached international human rights law by giving ‘little weight to the rights of this cohort of young Indonesians’ as prosecutors and police faced pressure to ‘take people smuggling seriously’.

In 2013 TV journalist Hamish Macdonald was the first Australian to visit Yasmin’s family in Indonesia and see school records showing the teen had been born in 1996. The documents were faxed to the Indonesian Consul General in Perth.  They weren’t legally verified so weren’t presented as evidence. 

 

Had the papers been accepted by the court Yasmin would have been whisked out of the country. Instead he was convicted and sent to icy Albany, latitude 35 degrees. His island is just below the equator.

 

Yasmin was put to work in the laundry.  Under demands from the Australian Government, WA prison regulations were changed to prevent the Indonesians sending their meagre earnings back to their families. (State jails are used to house federal prisoners.)

 

Further petty malice showed an anxious electorate the government would stay hard and mean.  Some repatriated kids were allegedly dumped in Bali with no means of reaching their remote homes.  Only after the International Organisation for Migration got involved were escorts provided and fares back to the villages.

 

The doubts about ages eventually 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 Yasmin’s sentence. 

 

The judges wrote they were ‘satisfied that a miscarriage of justice … has occurred.  If the appellant was aged under 18 years when he allegedly committed the offence, the mandatory minimum penalty … for an adult, did not apply to him.’

 

Imagine the outrage if Aussie kids had suffered the same fate in Indonesia.  In 2011 the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard got involved in the case of a boy arrested in Bali on alleged drug charges. He was briefly detained then repatriated after a furious media campaign.

The average time spent in detention by the Indonesian kids was 31.6 months.  A wrong had eventually been 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.

 

Yasmin is now 25, married and has a daughter.  He speaks confidently on the phone in excellent English learned in prison and said he bears no animosity - except towards the defence lawyers who didn’t tell the court they had papers confirming he was a child.

 

‘Yasmin is an Indonesian hero,’ Singer told this writer last year.  “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.’

 

The Guardian has reported the Australian government rejecting most of the plaintiffs’ allegations as ‘scandalous and embarrassing’, and claims of alleged negligence are to circumvent time limitations on the court process.

 First published in Pearls and Irritations, 15 January 2021: 

https://johnmenadue.com/children-in-prison-shame-australia-shame/

STRUGGLING, DYING TO REACH AUSTRALIA

Australian politicians have blood on their hands. So do their Indonesian counterparts.

It’s the blood of hundreds of asylum seekers who have perished in the Killing Seas trying to get from the Archipelago to Australia. They lost their lives because the politicians have failed to find a humane solution to the people smuggling curse.

Maybe 200 women, children and men drowned last weekend when a grossly overloaded boat capsized in heavy seas, 30 kilometers off the south coast of East Java. Eight died last month in a similar sinking.

The latest tragedy comes a year after 50 people perished when their flimsy wooden boat smashed into the cliffs of Christmas Island. This Australian territory is just 360 kilometers south of Jakarta. It’s used to process asylum seekers.

Is there anyone more base than a human trafficker motivated by greed, indifferent to care and devoid of responsibility? They pack their customers into rickety craft like 18^th century slave traders. The boats’ engines frequently fail. Few carry lifesaving equipment. The crews are often incompetent kids.

Last year’s Christmas Island sinking involved SIEV (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel) 221. When it came within sight of land the captain reportedly sailed back to Indonesia on another ship.

Equally culpable are the officials who help get the Afghans, Iranians and others through Indonesia and onto floating coffins knowing the awful dangers.

When I last visited Prigi in the East Java regency of Trenggalek where the latest victims apparently set sail, I was called out by the local police chief asking who I was and what I was doing.

Prigi is a small tourist resort known for its white beach. I was there on a quiet holiday with Indonesians. We were behaving properly and bothering no one. Several locals had alerted the police to the presence of an outsider.

Survivors of this week’s sinking told reporters they were taken to the coast from Jakarta in four buses. The arrival of so many foreigners could not have gone unnoticed by the police, the army, the harbormaster, local government officials and the general public.

Either human trafficking has become so blatant it no longer warrants attention, or money is changing wallets for men in uniform to study their bootlaces.

Press accounts in Australia allege that corrupt officials in Soekarno-Hatta were charging $US500 (Rp 4.5 million) to let individuals without visas through airport controls.

In March last year Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told the Australian Parliament that laws to criminalize people smuggling were being given top priority in the Republic.

But the laws were not passed till May this year and it’s clear they are not being policed. Australian journalists based in Jakarta have written of seeing notorious people smugglers doing business in the capital under the noses of the police.

The issue is huge in Australia though of less importance in Indonesia, which hasn’t signed the UN convention on refugees. But authorities still have to uphold local laws

In Australia Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott have spent the past year squabbling over solutions to the problem, each accusing the other on being soft on border protection.

Canberra tried to do a deal with Kuala Lumpur for asylum seekers to be processed in Malaysia. The plan foundered when refugee advocates successfully appealed to the Australian High Court.

The Liberal opposition wants a return to processing on the Micronesian island of Nauru. This was the so called Pacific Solution used when John Howard was PM, but scrapped when Labor took office in 2007.

The impasse has encouraged people smugglers to boost their nefarious trade; Australian immigration is now forecasting 600 arrivals a month. Though small by international standards the facts aren’t damming fears of a flood.

Despite the terrible loss it’s unlikely the risks will deter. In 2001 SIEV X sank killing 353. The Great South Land’s democracy, fairness, welfare systems, free health and education, high wages and legal aid are powerful magnets to the persecuted and those seeking better futures.

Although there’s great public anger in Australia towards the boat people – including from penniless refugees who waited years in overseas camps for invitations to resettle – there’s also significant support. A report by the respected think tank Centre for Policy Development said Australia’s refugee and asylum policies were “inhumane, ineffective and expensive.”

Australia, a nation built by migrants, has an annual quota of 13,750 refugees. The uninvited, dubbed ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ by opponents, pay traffickers up to $US 5,000 for one-way tickets.

Australia has harsh laws against people smugglers, but these seldom snare the czars. Instead the cowards get poor Indonesian fishermen to do the dirty work, favoring teenagers who are sent home if under 17.

George Newhouse is an Australian lawyer acting for survivors of the SIEV 221 disaster. He’s been quoted saying 1000 people had drowned while politicians used asylum seekers as political footballs.

''This disgraceful state of affairs is the result of both political parties being unable to come to a bipartisan agreement and to develop an offshore processing policy to deal with asylum seekers,'' he told The Age newspaper.

''If our leaders had an ounce of decency - both of them - they would get together and formulate a serious policy to deal with the issue.''

(First published in The Jakarta Post 20 December 2011. Re-run in On-Line Opinion 23 Dec.)