A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Over the next six hours, warnings were repeatedly passed to the Iraqis that they should alter course for Indonesia. They were having none of it. At 1.43 a.m., the crew of a RHIB threw a written message taped to a water bottle on to the deck. The Iraqis picked it up, took one look and tossed it overboard. Further warnings were passed on in English, Bahasa and Arabic.

  ‘Some Australian navy people spoke Arabic. I think Lebanese,’ recalls Rashid Kahtany. ‘They spoke to us by speaker from a long distance. They asked me, “Who are you?” I shouted “We are Iraqi refugees!” “You have to return, you can’t come to Australia!”’

  The asylum seekers had made a decision to feign ignorance and continue south whatever the consequences.

  ‘They shouted, “Stop! Stop!” but we didn’t,’ says Karim al Saadi. ‘We were pushing very hard to reach the ocean of Australia, so they couldn’t return us. Everybody was saying to the driver, “Go! Go! Go! Quickly! Fast!”’

  The Iraqis were nearly there, and they knew it. The lights of Australia’s Christmas Island were visible on the horizon. Such was the excitement, though, that, when the Olong passed into the contiguous zone bordering Australia’s territorial waters at 2.30 a.m., the Iraqis remained oblivious. They had no idea what ‘contiguous zone’ meant, either in geographical or political terms.

  According to detractors, the Howard government’s handling of the asylum-seeker issue in general – and the Olong specifically – was cynical, racist and driven by the need for political gain. A perfect example, in fact, of the Government’s use of‘dog-whistle politics’.

  The idea was simple. Just as silent whistles send out high-frequency tones audible only to dogs, the Government set about broadcasting messages audible only to certain parts of the electorate: blue-collar, dissatisfied-with-the-Liberal-Party voters – specifically those that had abandoned the Government for Pauline Hanson’s nationalist One Nation Party. The key message (foreigners = bad, asylum seekers = worse) was designed to resonate with the naturally racist tendencies of this demographic, while going unheard among the general population, and thus avoiding any embarrassing allegations that the administration was playing the race card.

  First, however, voters had to be primed to hear the message. The initial step was to create an atmosphere of fear. This was done by overstating the magnitude of the problem. Through the late 1990s, government spokesmen repeatedly referred to ‘waves’ and ‘armadas’ of asylum-seeker boats en route to Australia, raising the spectre of a ‘national emergency’ and an ‘assault to our borders’. Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock himself cited evidence of‘whole villages in Iran’ on the move. The technique (if that’s what it was) was successful: according to a poll in 1998, the average Australian overestimated the numbers of boat people arriving annually by 7,000 per cent.

  The next stage was a public-relations offensive designed to excise Australians from their sympathies with displaced persons. ‘Refugees’, a word with positive – or at least neutral – connotations, was replaced in public discourse with ‘asylum seekers’, a term which covertly called into question the validity of the arrivals’ claims: they were asking for asylum, certainly. That didn’t necessarily mean they deserved it. Plenty of reasons soon emerged why not.

  Because Australia voluntarily took in 12,000 humanitarian cases each year, it was easy to portray illicit arrivals as ‘queue jumpers’. Why didn’t they wait their turn like everyone else? Boat people were thieves, stealing the places of other, doubtless more needy refugees. Since they were dealing with people traffickers such as Abu Badr, meanwhile, it was also easy to portray asylum seekers as ‘illegals’, lawbreakers and, potentially, criminals. Boat people, said Ruddock, were ‘those who are prepared to break our law, those who are prepared to deal with people smugglers and criminals’. And where did criminals and their associates belong? In jail. The only sensible thing to do was lock them all up once they arrived.

  Even incarcerated they still posed a threat. If asylum seekers in detention camps protested, it was evidence they were ungrateful for their treatment and undeserving of it; the more desperate the protests, the clearer the evidence against them. When asylum seekers rioted in the Woomera detention facility, it was taken as proof that they were organized, militant and violent: the kind of people, in fact, who needed to be safely behind bars. When they stitched their lips shut, this was presented not as evidence of their desperation, but of their alien, foreign customs, antisocial habits and true motives: they were trying to intimidate the authorities.

  ‘We are a humane people,’ reasoned the Prime Minister. ‘Others know that, and they sometimes try and intimidate us with our own decency’

  The asylum seekers were exploiting the nation’s generosity, using Australians’ humanity as a weapon against them.1

  Which was exactly what the Iraqis on board the Olong were about to do.

  At 3 a.m. Banks passed close by the Olong’s port side, illuminating the boat with a signal lamp and ordering the asylum seekers, through a loudhailer, to heave to. The size of the frigate, and its proximity, had the desired effect: the Iraqis were transfixed. But still they refused to turn. It was time to take the threats up a notch.

  Banks now trained the signal lamp on to a gunner on the bridge wing. As the Iraqis watched, the gunner fired a burst of 5.56 mm rounds into the water just ahead of them.

  ‘Stop your vessel!’ instructed Banks. Nothing happened.

  After four further bursts, he selected a larger weapon: a 50-calibre machine gun mounted on the upper deck. At 4.18 Adelaide opened up with the 50-cal. On board the Olongthe asylum seekers panicked, running from one side of the boat to the other and screaming.

  ‘We could see their faces,’ recalled the gunner, Able Seaman Laura Whittle. ‘The screaming was just horrific. They were yelling, “Help us!” and at one point it was more deafening than the 50-calibre machine gun.’

  Still the Iraqis refused to turn.

  Thirty-five minutes later, Banks upped the ante again, manoeuvring the frigate aggressively close to the Olong in an attempt to force the refugees’ vessel off course. If they didn’t stop or turn, there was going to be a collision.

  Finally, the Iraqis flinched.

  ‘The big ship came up to ram us,’ says Saadi, ‘so we had to turn. If we didn’t stop, the ship would have hit us. There was a huge bow wave, and we stopped.’

  The manoeuvre, dramatic though it was, was actually a feint. The moment the asylum seekers’ boat altered course, a nine-man boarding party scaled the stern and made its way to the helm. By 4.45 a.m., the Australian navy was in control of the Olong.

  Banks’ plan was to alter the boat’s course forcibly, to make it return to Indonesia. This proved tricky. No sooner had the sailors made it aboard than the Iraqis ripped out the ship’s compass and its communications equipment and threw them overboard. All over the boat Iraqis – terrified at the thought of being returned to Indonesia – began sabotaging equipment to make it impossible for the Australian Navy to send them back. Some pulled planks out of the boat’s superstructure. Others set to work on the engine, which began to produce dense black smoke.

  Many of the asylum seekers would later blame this on the Adelaide: the Olong s engine had been pushed so hard, they argued, that it was overheating. The truth was less equivocal. Actually, it was sabotaged.

  ‘Some people went down to the engine,’ smirks Rashid Kahtany. ‘They know how to fix it – but they also know how to break it!’

  Coolant lines were slashed, rags and plastic thrown on to the engine casing to create the smoke. At 5.19 a.m., despite the best efforts of the boarding party to prevent the boat from being vandalized, the engine finally stopped, handing the Iraqis their first victory.

  ‘They said, “Go back! Return to Indonesia!”’ says Saadi. ‘We said, “How can we? The engine doesn’t work!”’

  The Iraqis had won the point, but there was a cost. Stalled in the water, the Olong turned across the swell and began to roll heavily. Water st
reamed over the deck. By now the asylum seekers were angry, panicking and potentially violent. Some started to struggle with the boarding party. What other options did they have?

  The first man in the water was not an Iraqi, but an Iranian, Abu Ali.

  ‘He said that he didn’t want to see his kids die and that he was going to jump instead and drown,’ recalls Ali Alsaai.

  When the Iranian was fished out of the water and returned to the Olong, Adelaide’s crew warned the asylum seekers not to copy his actions: there were sharks, they said. Big ones. It made no difference. Others began to leap in, too.

  As the sun rose at 5.39 a.m., Norman Banks, on the bridge of the Adelaide, was greeted by a scene of some panic. Two RHIBs buzzed around the Olong, plucking asylum seekers from the water. His men were on board, potentially being assaulted. The boat was rolling heavily, her engines stopped. Two hundred and twenty-three asylum seekers, more than half of them women and children, were hysterical.

  It was at this point that the incident reached critical mass. The Iraqis, convinced they were going to be returned to Indonesia or drown, now decided to play their final card – sacrificing their own lives for those of their children. Rashid Kahtany recalls the moment precisely.

  ‘Some people on the boat, they said, “OK, the big people, the adults, leave them! But what about the children? Just take the children and leave us!”’

  Karim al Saadi was one of the first.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he screamed to the sailors in the RHIB below. ‘We don’t have anything, only women and children!’ Saadi turned to the young mother beside him, took twenty-one-day-old Mustafa from her and cradled him in his arms. ‘I see the children!’ he shouted to the sailors in the RHIB. ‘Don’t you see the children?’ Saadi then lifted Mustafa up to show them the boy. ‘Look at the children!’ he shouted.

  Others followed suit. And so, in the grey dawn of 6 October 2001, just before 6 a.m., the Iraqis raised their children up to the sky.

  In what was to prove a supremely bad piece of timing, at this exact moment Norman Banks received a telephone call from his superior, Brigadier Mike Silverstone at Northern Command Headquarters in Darwin. Silverstone, who was gathering information for Peter Reith, the Minister for Defence, requested an update. What did the Minister need to know?

  Disagreements over what was said in the course of this phone call have raged ever since. What is not disputed is that Banks was in the middle of an extremely taxing operation. Civilians were in the water. Iraqis were panicking and threatening his men, and a boat was being vandalized: it was quite possible the situation could deteriorate further and that if it did lives might be lost. Banks needed to be controlling the situation, not telling people about it on the telephone. Nevertheless, the gist of his message was clear. The Olong was seven or eight miles from the contiguous zone. The steering had been disabled. People were in the water. They were wearing lifejackets. Kids were being held up.

  While Banks spoke, Silverstone took notes in a Department of Defence Field Survey notebook. As he listened to the commander, the Brigadier scribbled:

  Vessel disable the steering. Men thrown over side. 5, 6 or 7

  The two officers spoke for about a minute. When the call was over Silverstone hung up the phone and added another, crucial, word:

  Child

  Four hours later, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock made a sombre public statement about SIEV4.

  ‘A number of people have jumped overboard and have had to be rescued,’ he told a press conference in Sydney. Then, at 11.15 a.m. Australian Eastern Time, he added the detail that would propel the story to the top of the news agenda. ‘More disturbingly’ he said, ‘a number of children have been thrown overboard.’

  Quizzed about the incident, the Minister admitted his personal dismay. ‘I regard these as some of the most disturbing practices that I have come across in the time that I have been in public life.’

  The Press immediately clamoured for more information. How many children were thrown overboard? How old were they?

  ‘The sorts of children who would be thrown,’ Ruddock speculated aloud, ‘would be those who could be readily lifted and tossed without any objection from them.’ Not just children, then. Small children. Babies.

  To the Australian government, virtually everything asylum seekers did was evidence of their mendacity. If they had money, they weren’t proper refugees and thus were undeserving of assistance; if they didn’t have money, they were most likely economic refugees – and thus equally undeserving.

  Asylum seekers who made the voyage from Indonesia without life-jackets were risking the lives of their families and thus irresponsible; if they wore lifejackets, however, it was proof that they planned to throw themselves or their children into the sea.

  ‘Clearly planned and premeditated,’ Ruddock told journalists when he broke the news that the passengers on SIEV4 had thrown their children into the water. ‘People would not come wearing lifejackets unless they planned action of this sort.’

  This kind of rhetoric led to a catastrophic reversal of logic. Asylum seekers weren’t innocent victims in need of protection, but perpetrators trying to pull a fast one on Australia. Australians were the ones that needed protection, not refugees; specifically, they needed protection from refugees. Asylum seekers with their ‘prejudices and intolerances’ were a threat. And not just a cultural threat, but a health threat, too. Who knew if they had even been vaccinated?

  ‘These people are criminals,’ wrote Senator Ross Lightfoot in a letter to the Australian. ‘If they bring with them communicable, pandemic, epidemic or parasitic diseases (and they are from areas where contagious diseases are rampant), then innocent Australians could suffer.’

  Immigrants rife with prejudice and disease. Criminals. States of emergency. Transportation of ethnic minorities. Mass detention. Epidemics. Parasites. The Howard administration was dredging up some toxic parallels. Then, in September 2001, three weeks before the Olongs departure, Australians turned on their television sets and watched the World Trade Center collapse. One final ingredient was added to an already volatile brew.

  Although the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization later conceded that there was no evidence any terrorist had ever made it to Australia by boat, the notion that the boat people had terrorist links took root immediately. On 12 September 2001, Solicitor-General David Bennett, fighting an asylum-seeker case, reminded the court of the importance of protecting Australia from the sort of people ‘who did what happened in New York yesterday’. The distinction between friendly and enemy aliens, he said, had been rendered ‘old fashioned’ and ‘quaint’ by the events of the day before.

  Talkback radio propagated the message. ‘How many of these . . . people are sleepers?’ presenter Alan Jones wondered aloud that same day.

  On 3AK Radio, Defence Minister Peter Reith was asked whether Bin Laden’s associates might be hiding among the boat people.

  ‘We shouldn’t make assumptions,’ he cautioned, before making one himself: the boats might provide ‘a pipeline for terrorists to come in and use your country as a staging-post for terrorist activities’.

  Prime Minister John Howard agreed. ‘There is a possibility some people having links with organizations that we don’t want in this country might use the path of an asylum seeker to get here.’

  Here was an opportunity. The Australian government had a new weapon in the battle against asylum seekers. With the Olong the Government had a story that trumped even 9/11.

  ‘There’s something to me incompatible between somebody who claims to be a refugee and somebody who would throw their own child into the sea,’ Howard explained on 8 October. ‘It offends the natural instinct of protection, and of delivering safety and security to your children.’ The Prime Minister’s verdict on the Olongs passengers was unequivocal: ‘I don’t want in Australia people who would throw their own children into the sea. I don’t.’

  Given the facts of the case as they had
been reported, most Australians found it hard to disagree.

  By 10.30 a.m., sailors from the Adelaide had persuaded the Iraqis to put their children down. They had repaired the Olongs engine and steering gear and had turned the boat back towards Indonesia. The boarding party then departed, passing control of the boat to the asylum seekers. For good measure, they handed over a navigational chart and an orienteering compass scrounged from one of the ship’s company: it seemed a bit harsh to put the boat back into international waters without one.

  But Banks and his crew guessed that this would not be the end of the story. Repairs to the steering gear might not last, and the weather was worsening. Adelaide steamed just over the horizon, out of sight of the Iraqis, but within range so that she was capable of monitoring them – and waited. After a matter of minutes, the Olong stopped again.

  At 1.30 p.m., the Iraqis hoisted a square white flag and, below it, a black ball, and started signalling, raising and lowering their arms. The Olong, dead in the water, was now officially in distress; Banks and his crew were obliged to offer assistance.

  The vessel was reboarded and examined for seaworthiness. This time the verdict was damning. The starter motor had been broken and the diesel-rocker case removed. The fuel tank had been filled up with seawater. Moreover, since the engine had stopped, there was no power to the bilge pumps and the vessel was slowly taking on water.

  ‘Most likely unrepairable,’ concluded Adelaide’s engineers.

  Banks passed a line to the Olong and began slowly towing the vessel towards Christmas Island. There was no hurry: he had been instructed not to take the asylum seekers ashore or on board the Adelaide. Until the Prime Minster decided what he wanted to do next, there was time to kill. The two vessels steamed for twenty-four hours, awaiting instructions.