Ben Doherty Thursday 12 March 2015
The message in an Indonesian minister’s ‘human tsunami’ threat is clear: ‘We owe you nothing; you were repaid when you enlisted our help on turn backs’
‘Australia’s commitment to enforcing its offshore asylum seeker regime has weakened its diplomatic and moral authority.’ Photograph: AAP
Once more, asylum seekers are reduced to a political abstraction, a dehumanised collective to be used as a bargaining chip, a threat, or a weapon with which to attack an opponent, across a parliamentary divide, or across the Timor Sea.
Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, Tedjo Edhy Purdijatno, has told Australia to stop agitating for the clemency of the death row pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, warning that, if it does not, Indonesian cooperation could be withdrawn for Australia’s “stop the boats” asylum seeker policy.
“If Canberra keeps things that displease Indonesia, Jakarta will surely let the illegal immigrants go to Australia,” he said. “There are more than 10,000 [asylum seekers] in Indonesia today. If they are let go to Australia, it will be like a human tsunami.”
The statement is deplorable, not only for the conflation of the completely unrelated issues of seeking asylum and a specific death penalty case.
The statement is wrong because it disregards that these are people, some of the most vulnerable in the world – mothers and fathers seeking sanctuary for their families, children missing crucial years of education, young men and women wasting the most productive years of their lives in limbo.
It is wrong because it treats asylum seekers as a political inconvenience to be foisted on to another country, apparently at will, and seemingly in retaliation for an unrelated slight.
But this demeaning and destructive discourse is no accident. It is the environment that has been created around asylum seekers, and it is an environment Australia has created.
The language used by the minister is deliberate and instructive.
A “human tsunami” is a curious construction to use, except in the context of counselling Abbott that he saw fit to remind Indonesia three weeks ago that Australia had been generous in its assistance during Indonesia’s hour of need in the wake of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
Diplomacy, particularly of the megaphone kind, is all about the unspoken words in between.
The message from Abbott then was: “We helped you out a decade ago, and now we expect this [clemency consideration] in return.”
The message that has now come back, deafeningly, from Jakarta, is: “We owe you nothing; that favour was repaid when you enlisted our help on boats.”
(All of this ignores the fact that, fundamentally, countries like Australia do not give aid in expectation of some quid pro quo, but rather in their own national interest: this has been lost in the bellicosity of the two countries’ recent exchanges).
But the Indonesian minister’s comments are demonstration of a broader, systemic issue: that Australia’s diplomatic strength is weakened because of its commitment to its suite of “offshore” asylum policies – boat tow backs, offshore processing and regional resettlement.
And the ramifications for Australia are far broader than simply in its desperate negotiations on behalf of Chan and Sukumaran.
Australia’s commitment to enforcing its offshore asylum seeker regime has damaged its reputation and relations across all of the Asia-Pacific.
It has weakened Australia’s diplomatic and moral authority in the region, hampered its ability to speak frankly with its neighbours on matters of concern, and undermined its international status as a regional leader on issues such as human rights and democratic governance.
And it is the countries most directly affected by Australia’s offshore asylum seeker policies – those to whom asylum seekers are returned, sent for processing, or resettled – that have experienced the greatest distortion to relations with Australia.
The effect on Australia’s relationship with Indonesia is starkly apparent in Jakarta’s intransigence in the face of pleas for consideration of Chan and Sukumaran, and in its fierce rhetoric against boat tow backs and naval incursions.
In Sri Lanka, Australia saw fit to provide a navy run by Mahinda Rajapaksa – the Sri Lankan president accused of war crimes by the UN – with patrol boats with which to intercept asylum seekers’ boats.
When Rajapaksa’s rule was abruptly ended at the ballot box this year, the new prime minister of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, said Australia was compromised by its closeness to the former regime.
“This deal was done between Australia and the Rajapaksa government, where you looked the other way [on human rights abuses], then the secretary of defence got the navy to patrol,” Wickremesinghe said in an interview with the Australian, adding: “When human rights were being trampled, and democracy was at bay, these countries [like Australia] were silent.”
To Cambodia, Australia has promised an extra $40m in aid to Hun Sen’s deeply corrupt government in return for that country agreeing to accept refugees sent from Australia via Nauru.
In Papua New Guinea, Australia is wedded to the controversial administration of Peter O’Neill because of the prime minister’s support for the Manus Island detention centre.
Australia has been unable to speak out against allegations of embezzlement and fraud against O’Neill (O’Neill sacked the attorney general and police chief who served an arrest warrant on him), or the rorting of Australian-sponsored health funding, education reform and mining development.
And on Nauru, Australia was silent when the country’s Australian chief justice and magistrate were unilaterally sacked and deported by the president, in what was widely seen as a politically motivated action.
In its regional dealings, the Australian government is reaping what it – and previous administrations – have sown.
Australia remains a powerful player in the region, for reasons of history, economy, governance and diplomatic state practice. And it retains a prominence in global affairs, a middle power that “punches above its weight”, thanks to influence, or “soft power”.
But asylum seeker policy is the dominant lens through which key regional relationships are now viewed, to the detriment of other policy considerations, which are sacrificed, distorted or abandoned in favour of desperate efforts to cajole cooperation on boats.
Australia should not think its asylum seeker policies come without consequence – to the desperate people caught up by them or to its own reputation.
It is diminished in the eyes of its neighbours, and its weakness is all its own fault.
