A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  ‘We turned a lot,’ recalls Karim al Saadi. ‘Sometimes I saw Christmas Island on the left, sometimes it was on the right. We went in circles.’

  On board the Olong, the mood was now calm, the asylum seekers compliant. They thought they were getting what they wanted. But the situation was precarious: in the bilges, the water level was still rising. Banks sent over a number of pumps to empty them, but one after another failed. He then passed over a Peri-jet hose from his flight deck and started pumping the water out until, finally, the bilge-water level dropped to a steady 50 cm. This situation could not last for long, but the fix only had to last until the Government made a decision regarding what Banks was to do with the asylum seekers and an order was relayed down the line. It was an order that never came.

  At three o’clock the next afternoon, for no apparent reason, the water levels suddenly started to rise. Banks ordered women and children to be moved to the upper deck. The women begged to be taken on to the Adelaide, but were refused. According to the sailors, the Government had instructed them not to rescue anyone unless the boat actually sank. At 4 p.m., the boarding party reported that the Olong was taking on a lot more water. An hour later, the boat began to slump. Banks stopped his engines and dispatched his executive officer to take a look. The news was not good.

  ‘I think we’re going to lose this one,’ the XO reported. ‘It’s starting to go.’

  As the Olong slowed to a halt, Karim al Saadi heard a deep groan under his feet. The timbers of the boat’s hull were giving way. Things now happened fast.

  At 5.08, the Olong’s bow dropped and waves started washing over the deck, carrying away the Iraqis’ few personal possessions. The asylum seekers, desperate to avoid the water, scrambled from one side of the boat to the other, causing it to list heavily, first to port, then to starboard. Banks ordered the towline to be cut, turned the Adelaide around to shelter the ailing vessel and addressed his crew over the ship’s intercom.

  ‘The worst – or the most feared – order I would ever expect to give is: “Launch the life rafts!”’ he later recalled. ‘It was not a difficult decision to make. It was clearly evident that I had to make that decision. But the gravity of those orders was significant and will stay in my mind for ever.’

  Doubtless it will stay in the Iraqis’ minds, too.

  ‘The soldiers told us to jump into the water,’ recalls Karim al Saadi. ‘They said, “Jump! If you don’t jump, we can’t help you!”’

  Saadi tried to explain that he and his wife were diabetic, that she was unable to swim, but the response was the same: according to the sailors, they were under orders not to intervene until the boat went down. The asylum seekers would have to jump.

  This answer was not reassuring to those with young children. What if the lifejackets didn’t work? What if they were too big, and the children slipped out?

  Rashid Kahtany was trying to decide whether to leap into the water with his youngest daughter Duha when the deck gave a sudden lurch and they were hurled overboard. It was the first time Kahtany, a non-swimmer, had ever been underwater.

  ‘The ocean was dark!’ he says. ‘I thought a big fish would come and snatch our legs.’

  The moment she saw her husband bob to the surface, Soham assumed he had jumped deliberately, grabbed her older daughter firmly around the waist, took a deep breath and stepped off the boat.

  Saadi and his wife were among the last to go. Shaking with fear, they sat on the deck, holding hands. The boat then tilted and the pair slid into the sea together. As Saadi supported his wife, he looked back at the Olong, which was now disintegrating.

  ‘The weight of the engine pulled the back of the boat under,’ he says. ‘It began to break. The engine went under, leaving the wooden hull out of the water.’

  It was the end of the line for the Olong.

  Two passengers were spared the ordeal of jumping: twenty-three-day-old Mustafa and his mother. Recognizing that this was a special case, Banks ordered both to be lifted into a RHIB, which turned away from the sinking boat and headed towards the Adelaide, leaving behind it 221 Iraqis and all their worldly possessions, floating around them in waterlogged suitcases.

  Although it took the best part of two hours, by 6.45 p.m., the Adelaide’s ship’s company had increased by 223. An awning was rigged over the forecastle, lavatories were set up, food, water, towels and dry clothes were distributed. Sailors who might previously have displayed animosity towards the asylum seekers now showed their true colours, helping wherever possible. The crew all missed their own evening meals, most without even noticing; many stayed awake through the night running a babysitting rota for the exhausted Iraqi mothers.

  ‘I was particularly proud of that shift in attitude,’ Banks told a Senate inquiry later. ‘They performed a miracle.’ The performance of his company, he said, was ‘unparalleled’.

  In the case of the seven sailors who spontaneously jumped into the water to assist the asylum seekers, without lifejackets and from a height of twelve metres (equivalent to leaping from the roof of a four-storey building), there seems little doubt this was the case. So impressed was Banks that when he saw photographs of his crew in the water the next morning he immediately added captions explaining that they had been taken during the rescue on 8 October, and that they showed examples of the ‘immense courage’ of his crew, then e-mailed them to the mainland.

  By now both the Government and the Press were up in arms. Newspaper headlines on the morning of 8 October – ASYLUM SEEKERS THROW CHILDREN OVERBOARD, BOAT PEOPLE THROW CHILDREN INTO OCEAN and CHILDREN OVERBOARD: LATEST TWIST ON THE REFUGEE FRONTLINE – left little room for debate about what had happened. Government spokesmen reiterated, to anyone willing to listen, the implications of the asylum seekers’ antics.

  ‘Any civilized person would not dream of treating their own children in that way,’ said Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. ‘They’re not types of people we want integrated in our community, people who throw children overboard.’

  To the administration, this was another example of asylum seekers trying to manipulate the country in order to get their own way.

  ‘It was clearly their intention to do this,’ Ruddock commented, ‘and it’s clearly their intention to put pressure on us.’

  The only way to handle this sort of behaviour was to stand fast. ‘This kind of emotional blackmail is very distressing,’ agreed the Prime Minister. ‘But we cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated.’

  The Government was keen to point out that the incident raised the issue of Australia’s right to defend itself. It was a line that ran well after 9/11: on 7 October, the same day the refugees had apparently thrown their children overboard, the US-led coalition had started bombing Afghanistan. The world was at war. Didn’t Australia have the right to pre-empt an assault on its territory?

  ‘There are those who wish to breach our borders,’ Downer explained. ‘We’re entitled . . . to do our best to protect our borders.’

  This argument resonated with the electorate. The next day the Herald Sun polled its readers: ‘Should boat people who threw their children overboard be accepted into Australia as refugees?’ More than 95 percent voted NO.

  And yet, in the minds of some of the country’s more astute journalists, there were niggling doubts. The story seemed unlikely: asylum seekers, no matter how perverse, presumably still loved their children. It was one thing to put pressure on a government to take you in; it was quite another to throw your own kids into the sea. Other than the Government’s word for it, there was no evidence whatsoever that this had actually happened.

  Not until the morning of 9 October. At 9.30 a.m., Elizabeth Bowdler, a journalist from Channel 10 TV, dug up the Adelaide’s satellite telephone number and managed to reach Norman Banks.

  Yes, he told her, asylum seekers had been pulled from the water, and, yes, children had been involved. He’d held one himself. What Banks didn’t realize, however, was that they were talking at cross purposes: Bowdler was fis
hing for information about children being thrown overboard two days earlier. He was talking about yesterday’s rescue.

  At the end of the conversation, Bowdler mentioned that she was keen to source some archive pictures of the Adelaide for her news piece. Banks suggested the Internet, then dropped a bombshell: actually, he said, there were photographs of the incident itself. Just a few hours earlier, he had e-mailed some to the mainland. Perhaps she might be interested in those?

  When news broke that there were pictures of children in the water, Australia’s Department of Defence was inundated with calls. Where were they? Could they be released? The next afternoon, with a flourish, they were.

  ‘You may want to question the veracity of reports from the Royal Australian Navy,’ challenged Defence Minister Peter Reith. ‘I don’t.’

  Reith also revealed that the Navy had film of the incident, courtesy of the Adelaide’s electro-optical tracking system.

  ‘Someone has looked at it and it is an absolute fact,’ he concluded. ‘Children were thrown into the water. So do you still question it?’

  The Government had a cast-iron case. The only problem was, it wasn’t true. No children had been thrown overboard. None of the sailors had seen any children being thrown overboard. None of the photographs showed children being thrown overboard or children who had been thrown overboard. Neither, as it eventually became clear, did the ship’s electro-optical tracking system film.

  Close examination of the photographs would have demonstrated this fact. When he e-mailed the pictures on 9 October, Norman Banks had carefully inserted captions stating that they showed Iraqis being rescued the day before. The Children Overboard allegations related to incidents that had taken place twenty-four hours prior to that. The photographs were of the wrong incident, on the wrong day.

  But by the time they were released to the Press, the captions and the dates had mysteriously gone missing.

  From the outset, there were two groups of people who recognized that the Children Overboard story was untrue. The first was the crew of the Adelaide.

  Once the asylum seekers had been disembarked at Christmas Island on 10 October, some of the sailors went ashore, where barroom gossip revolved around the media event of the moment: how the Iraqis had thrown their children into the sea. Annoyed at the way that the truth was being stretched to fit a political agenda, the sailors spilled the beans.

  Banks had realized ‘there was a clear misrepresentation going on’ the moment he saw the front page of the Herald Sun on 8 October, at which point he had informed his superiors that something was very wrong. When an ABC TV News report two days later displayed his photographs as evidence that the Iraqis had thrown their children overboard, he lost his temper: that very same day he had forwarded statements from crew members who had participated in the incident. None had reported any children thrown into the sea.

  ‘The whole show was wrong,’ he told the Christmas Island harbour-master.

  That night on the mainland, the same news report also shocked Banks’ superiors, who began frantically telephoning each other to discuss what to do next.

  The second group that could have put the media right was the Iraqis themselves. But they were being held, incommunicado, in a basketball court on Christmas Island. For a group largely composed of Muslims, conditions were far from ideal: men and women sleeping in the same room, no clean clothes and food of questionable quality. Such was their relief to be back on dry land, however, that most were content. What they really wanted to know was what would become of them now? They had made it to Australian territory. What next?

  After nearly two weeks in the basketball court, community leaders were taken aside and informed that they were to be transported to the mainland.

  ‘An interpreter came in and said, “You’re going to Australia,”’ recalls Karim al Saadi. ‘Everyone had to sit down and he called out our names. After that they put numbers on our backs. He said that the aeroplanes were coming.’

  Their destination, apparently, was Sydney. Not everyone was convinced.

  ‘Some Iraqi people said, “Don’t go! Don’t fly!”’ says Soham Kahtany. ‘“They’ll take you somewhere else.” We didn’t believe them.’

  ‘They were right,’ Rashid chimes in. ‘It was a trick.’

  When he arrived at the aerodrome, Ali Alsaai recognized his plane immediately: during his conscription in Iraq, he had parachuted from a C-130 Hercules a number of times.

  ‘It was a cargo plane,’ he jokes, ‘but the cargo was us.’

  Inside, seats had been installed, alongside a makeshift lavatory with a blanket rigged around it for privacy, but a cargo plane was a cargo plane. The asylum seekers were moved in groups of forty or fifty at a time.

  Karim al Saadi also recognized the aircraft. He knew right away that it was military. That didn’t concern him. He just wanted to know where it was headed – but, whenever he asked, he was told to shut up. Not all of the aircrew were as uncommunicative. In Ali Alsaai’s plane the crew announced they were on their way to Sydney, and that the journey would take about six hours. Once airborne the Iraqis became suspicious. The Australian mainland should have been quite close. Why was the flight taking so long? Alsaai, who had been given a specific journey time, soon knew that something was wrong.

  ‘Six hours later I asked, “Where are we?” The officer told me to be quiet. At seven hours, again, I asked, “Why are we still flying?” The same at eight, nine, ten, eleven hours.’

  After thirteen hours in the air, the planes finally landed and the refugees disembarked. Those still expecting to see the Sydney Opera House were in for a shock.

  ‘We were in the middle of a jungle!’ exclaims Saadi. ‘And there were all these soldiers, people with very black faces.’ Saadi turned to a friend. ‘Where are we?’ he asked. ‘Is this Africa?’

  Not only were the soldiers black, but, more worrying for the Iraqis, they all had mouths the colour of pomegranates; occasionally they would spit out a jet of red liquid that the asylum seekers – never having encountered betel-nut juice – assumed was blood.

  ‘Soldiers,’ recalls Widad Alsaai. ‘Tall black men. With guns. And red teeth. We just looked at them.’ She turned to her husband. ‘Where is Sydney?’ she asked him. ‘Is this Sydney?’

  Hawraa, the couple’s eldest daughter, burst into tears. ‘Mummy,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to die here! Let’s go back!’

  At that moment, there was a roar behind them as the Hercules they had travelled in lifted off again.

  Plucking up his courage, Saadi turned to one of the guards.

  ‘Mister,’ he said, ‘where are we?’

  ‘Manus Island,’ the soldier replied.

  ‘Where is Manus Island?’ the Iraqi enquired.

  ‘Papua New Guinea.’

  Saadi thought for a moment. ‘Well, where is Papua New Guinea?’

  The soldier shook his head and wandered off.

  For the Iraqis anything other than Sydney was going to be a disappointment, but Lombrum Naval Patrol Base was beyond all expectations.

  ‘There was nothing there,’ says Saadi. ‘It was an old World War Two camp. They put in beds and chairs and used plastic sheeting to make rooms. And it was very hot.’

  ‘Very hot’ was about right: Manus is two degrees south of the equator.

  Soham Kahtany took one look at her new family home and burst into tears.

  ‘We’re going to live here?’ she asked her husband. ‘They’re putting us here? It’s a jungle!’

  Rashid didn’t know what to say: he was still trying to work out what country they were in. Like many of the Iraqis, he assumed he was in Africa, because of the ferocious heat and the fact that most of the inhabitants were black.

  ‘There was just this big, big forest,’ he says, ‘and all these people with no shoes and red mouths.’

  Soham was inconsolable: ‘I couldn’t stop my eyes. I just cried and cried and cried.’

  Living conditions were not good. The food was
bad, the water was bad, the power was intermittent and it was too hot to move. The accommodation – battered Nissen huts and converted shipping containers – was full of local wildlife, including spiders and scorpions. For those with children this was a serious concern: many of them were sleeping on the floor. Almost immediately, the Iraqi men took to hunting snakes.

  ‘Every day we killed maybe five,’ says Rashid Kahtany.

  Perhaps they should have left them alone: they might have kept the other pests down. One night Hawraa Alsaai woke up to discover rats scampering over her sleeping parents. From that point on the twelve-yearold cried herself to sleep.

  But the most worrisome of all the fauna was the smallest. Falciparum malaria, a chloroquine-resistant strain of the parasite, is endemic to Manus. Since there were no mosquito nets or repellents, the results were predictable.

  ‘Everyone got sick,’ says Saadi. ‘Typhoid or malaria, I don’t know. Nobody would eat. Everyone was sweating and throwing up their food. My wife was so sick she couldn’t move.’

  The Department of Immigration would later state that anti-malarial drugs had been administered from the moment the Iraqis arrived. This has been disputed. Either way, three months after their arrival at Lombrum, doctors at the local hospital confirmed fifteen cases of malaria among the asylum seekers.

  Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock denied they had been infected in Manus. One of his spokeswomen commented that boat people often arrived with diseases anyway: they’d probably brought the contagion themselves.

  With a daughter who couldn’t sleep for fear of rats, a wife who couldn’t stop crying, and surrounded by friends who were dropping like flies, Ali Alsaai was now furious. After two days on Manus, he trooped into the reception office and demanded to know what country he was in and how long he was going to remain there. What was going on here?

  What was going on was that the Australian government was making a stand. In the face of intolerable levels of asylum-seeker arrivals, it had become clear to Philip Ruddock that something had to be done. If Australia came to be seen as a ‘soft touch’, more boats would show up and the numbers would increase. That, in turn, had further consequences: either he would lose his job or the Government would lose the election – or both.