by Jim Haynes
Khodadad Sarwari said: ‘There was nothing left for us in this world if the ship goes past.’ Sarwari, a teacher, sat jammed between his wife, their three children and his brother on the boat’s flimsy upper deck. The family was fleeing the Taliban. So were most of the people on the Palapa. By now they were exhausted, ill and thirsty. Most had spent the last few days vomiting. They had faced death the previous night in a violent storm, which they believed they had survived only by a miracle. Now a cargo boat was bearing down on them. ‘We were telling the children there is hope because we didn’t want them to give up, to collapse. We were praying God would save us. Then when it was getting closer we saw it was huge and there was a big sign on it written: Tampa.’
The great hull slid past. ‘All of a sudden people were screaming that they are not going to rescue us,’ said Sarwari. ‘We were extremely hopeless.’ These were the worst moments of their whole ordeal on the ocean. ‘Now we were not thinking about this world, but preparing ourselves for the other world. The most terrifying thing for us was to see our children, at their age, dying. But after ten minutes the boys were saying it’s getting closer and again there was hope.’
The cargo boat had stopped and was edging back towards them, sheltering the Palapa in the lee of its enormous hull. When a long metal stair was lowered, the people on the Palapa finally knew they were saved.
Rajab Ali Merzaee, an Afghan medical student, watched two sailors come down to the foot of the stairs. ‘They were two very strong men. Very lovely, very good persons.’ The sailors called out to them to leave their belongings behind and allow women and children to cross first. Men who tried to disobey the order were thrown back onto the Palapa’s deck. Any luggage they had in their hands was thrown back, too. The Palapa was rising and falling on the swell. Already battered by the storm, the boat began losing chunks of deck and railing as it slammed into the Tampa’s hull. The lines kept breaking. The sailors on the stair timed their moves, reaching over to pluck one or two survivors from the deck each time the Palapa rose on the swell. This went on for two and a half hours.
Sailors carried little children, the sick and terrified up the long metal stair. The rest formed a long, slow queue. When these filthy men and women reached the Tampa’s deck, they were searched very thoroughly, counted twice and had a number written on their arms with a black marker pen. One of the sailors told Rajab Ali Hossaini they had been expecting to take about eighty survivors on board. ‘When people were coming eighty, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, they were wide-eyed looking: what is going on, what sort of boat is this with people just coming up?’ Even the survivors were amazed that so many had been packed onto the boat. ‘That’s bloody smugglers: even the smallest space, they used that one for the sake of profit,’ said Hamid from Kabul, one of the last men to leave the Palapa. ‘They play with human lives. They don’t care about human lives. They care about their money.’
Up on the deck of the Tampa the survivors were praying, crying and laughing. They had a future. They would reach Australia. They would see their children grow up. Several times on the Palapa over the last three days they had given themselves up for dead. ‘Now we were smiling, we were telling stories, we were thanking God we were saved,’ said Merzaee. But there were those among the survivors who wondered why they had been put through the ordeal of the last days. Why were they left to drift? Why were they not saved once those Australian planes saw them? Why were they made to endure that terrible storm? Sarwari asked himself, ‘Why people were so heartless not to rescue us?’
Australia had known for days that the 20-metre Indonesian fishing boat with an ancient engine, a rickety upper deck and an incompetent crew was on its way. The Palapa was bringing the biggest load of asylum seekers ever to set out for Christmas Island, Australia’s tiny territory sitting below Java in the Indian Ocean. The island was crowded with people who had arrived on boats in the weeks before. There had never been such a crush of asylum seekers. More were on the way.
Over on the mainland, Australia’s immigration prisons were full. So when the Palapa got into trouble on the crossing, some ruthless Australian bureaucrats took it as a godsend. Somehow, these people could now be sent back to Indonesia. For over 20 hours, rescue authorities in Australia did nothing effective to help the people on the Palapa except harass the Indonesians to take responsibility for the problem. That delay put the lives of 438 people in terrible danger. In the end, Australian rescue authorities had no choice but to put out a call for the Palapa’s rescue. The Tampa answered. But Australia was still determined these people would go back to Indonesia.
What followed was a crisis that for a time engaged the attention of the world.
Assadullah Rezaee had hesitated when he arrived at the wharf with his wife and three children at about 2 a.m. on Thursday, 23 August. There were six buses ahead of them and more kept arriving. ‘When I saw the boat and when I looked at the people I thought I better turn back. But other friends told me, it doesn’t matter whether I go now or stay behind and try again, the agents won’t have a better boat for you. It will probably be worse than this.’
Rezaee, a farmer from the Afghan province of Ghazni, had paid US$11,500 to get his family to Australia and had been promised something better than a fishing boat. Rezaee showed his chit and was told to take his family to the crude upper deck. They couldn’t stand: the roof there was only a metre or so above the deck. As people poured onto the Palapa, they couldn’t move at all but sat, squashed together, with their knees under their chins.
Hamid had travelled from Jakarta with two Indonesian soldiers on board his bus. More men in uniform were waiting at the wharf. ‘The smugglers and the police officers or the soldiers were rushing around and trying to offload us as quickly as possible and putting us in those boats because they were saying that the guards or the security that they were dealing with, their shift would change when the sun rises.’ He had watched officials giving the smugglers a hand all the way from Kabul. At Jakarta airport, the smuggler guiding Hamid’s party had not even taken them through immigration. ‘It looked like all the Indonesian police and military were cooperating with him because they took us outside the terminal and there were Datsun vehicles already available for us.’
For a month Hamid had waited with thirty Afghans in a villa in the Jakarta suburbs. Around them were other villas where asylum seekers were waiting, like them, for boats. One night they were moved to a hotel, where the smugglers took the last of his money and put him on a bus with a ticket, a bottle of water and some biscuits. He had no other food. ‘I was told the destination is very close and we would get there very quickly.’
The buses brought them all to Pantau, a little port near the surfing resort of Pelabuhan Ratu, on the southwestern coast of Java. Hamid climbed aboard the first boat he had ever been on in his life. ‘I saw boats on television or in movies but in Afghanistan it’s a landlocked country. It doesn’t have boat or ship.’ Like nearly everyone on the Palapa, Hamid could not swim. By torchlight, he discovered he was on an old, wooden tub. Someone was working on the engine and there was an ominous sound of hammering from beneath the deck. This was not the modern ship with individual cabins he had been told to expect. He assumed the Palapa was taking the people still pouring on board out to the real ship waiting somewhere in deeper water. Then he overheard one of the smugglers talking to the Indonesian captain, who was holding a box—in fact, a compass—in his hand. The smuggler said: ‘You going straight ahead and there’s no other island in front of you; any island comes in front of you, that would be Christmas Island.’
The last buses arrived. As people climbed on board they were handed flimsy life jackets, bottles of water and bags of sliced bread. Many had brought supplies of their own: biscuits, water, dried and fresh fruit. Twenty-one families with 43 children plus luggage were eventually packed onto the temporary upper deck. The youngest child was one. On the main deck below were 350 men travelling alone, many far younger than they pretended to be. A couple of
dozen were only boys. At about 4 a.m. the smugglers drove off in a car, the crew kicked the motor into life and the Palapa headed out to sea. The boat rolled in the chop. The crowded decks filled with diesel fumes. People were soon vomiting.
For as many as 300 of the people on the Palapa, this was a second attempt to reach Christmas Island. They had set out a month earlier from the same port on a voyage that should have taken only 36 hours. Four days later they were still searching for Christmas Island. The captain had only a compass to steer by, and was blind in one eye. The seas were very rough. They gave up and headed north, running aground a couple of days later on a muddy beach at Bandar Lampung on the tip of Sumatra.
Tired and sick, they were taken by ferry across the Sunda Strait— as it happens through the port of Merak—and by bus back to cheap hotels in Jakarta. Many had picked up scabies on the boat. Some gave up at this point and disappeared. The rest had returned in the curtained buses guarded by uniformed Indonesians to take a second chance on an even more crowded boat, the Palapa.
Captain Bastian Disun stayed at the wheel all day. The weather was good. They expected to arrive at Christmas Island the following afternoon. Few had much of an idea of what to find when they got there. They knew Australia was a prosperous Western democracy. ‘I also knew about the Queen,’ said Khodadad Sarwari. ‘And that most people were from a European background and the language they spoke was English.’
They could not be blamed for having a vague idea that Australia was deeply committed to human rights. Years of hard diplomatic effort had gone into selling that message to the world. For decades, Australia had positioned itself as a leader of United Nations campaigns against racism, poverty and oppression. ‘They were telling the world they are helping the humanitarian work and helping the refugees and accepting the refugees and that a lot of refugees and migrants they are coming to Australia,’ said Wahidullah Akbari, the son of a Kandahar shopkeeper, who set out alone at the age of sixteen to make his way to this safe haven. ‘We thought we would receive the same treatment.’
Some were already on the road when smugglers sold them the idea of Australia, a more reliable and less expensive destination than Europe or North America. They could, of course, have stayed in Indonesia or the camps of Pakistan and been safe from the Taliban. But in Australia they could begin new lives. So trucks, shops, fields, gold and carpets were sold to raise the US$5000 or so to deliver these farmers, teachers, students and labourers to Australia. Little children were cheaper. The smugglers extorted what they could— the last few dollars—to give children a place on the boats.
At the end of the journey they knew there was a camp where they would be held for a time. The smugglers had told them this, but the prospect of three or four months detention was no deterrent for those who believed Australia would accept them as refugees. Even if that process stretched into years, it would be worth it in the end.
‘Our future would be secure, would be better. It doesn’t matter how bad it is, it would be better than the war in Afghanistan,’ said Rajab Ali Merzaee. He had the high cheekbones and oriental eyes of the Hazara people, the underdogs of every Afghan regime. The province of Ghazni was his home, but he had studied medicine for four years in the more peaceful north. He spoke a little English. His family had a small shop which barely made them a living, but his father had a patch of land he sold to pay the smugglers. Merzaee said that had he known what his father was planning, he would have refused to go. But the deal was done before he knew of it. Merzaee and his wife crossed the border, waited in Karachi for about a month, then flew to Jakarta. By the time they boarded the Palapa, they had been travelling for two months.
Everyone on board the Palapa claimed to be Afghan, apart from six Sri Lankans and three men who admitted they were Pakistani. As many as a hundred of the passengers may also have been Pakistanis posing as Afghans. This was a common problem in the refugee world: they speak almost the same language and look very much alike, but Pakistanis have very little claim to be accepted as refugees. They were trying to rort the system in order to emigrate. But the 300 or so genuine Afghans on the Palapa had every reason to believe that at the end of this journey Australia would welcome them. They were on the run from one of the world’s worst regimes.
As that overloaded fishing boat chugged south, there was no end in sight to the Taliban. The World Trade Center was still standing; the war against terror was months away. These people were, indeed, refugees who had, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’.
At about 9 p.m., Captain Disun handed the wheel to one of the three crew and went to sleep on the floor of the wheelhouse. Merzaee noticed the boat was being pushed harder. ‘He tried to move the boat faster and he wasn’t controlling it. The sea was rough and he wasn’t taking that into account.’ Twice before dawn the engine stopped, but the crew got it going again. ‘Everyone was asleep when they heard a big noise, a banging, then after that the engine stopped.’ When the crew went to look, they found the engine had worked loose on its mounting and, falling sideways, sheared the gears inside their casing.
The crew could do nothing. Two mechanics among the refugees climbed down into the bilge to look at the problem. The engine still turned over—that would keep the pumps running to the end—but there was no power to the propeller. It was hopeless. ‘The engine was from the time of Hitler,’ said Hamid, and there were no tools on board to do repairs.
At dawn on 24 August, after travelling for a little over 24 hours, the Palapa was dead in the water.
Everyone was now awake. There was pandemonium on the boat. ‘Everybody was crying and shouting and yelling.’ The captain burst into tears. ‘We all were crying. The rest of the people worried and we would expect that death would come any minute.’
After a time they calmed down. They prayed. When a ship appeared a few hours later, it seemed their ordeal was over. ‘We were screaming and whistling,’ said Khodadad Sarwari. They climbed onto the Palapa’s flimsy roof to wave their orange life jackets in the air and hold up their children so the sailors on the ship could see there were families on board. There was no doubt the Palapa had been seen: the cargo boat flashed a light as it passed, but it kept on sailing. The master of that ship had left hundreds of human beings to their fate, but saved himself and his shipping line an awful lot of trouble.
The Palapa’s captain assured them they were already in Australian waters, so they tore planks from the flooring of the upper deck and began to paddle. Four teams of five or six people paddled all afternoon. ‘I knew it was not moving the boat anywhere, but simply to give people a bit of hope,’ said Sarwari. Soon after dark they heard a plane overhead. They flashed the lights of the boat but the plane flew on.
In the morning, a couple of teams started paddling again. Then a few minutes before 10 a.m., a plane appeared. ‘We took all the children and women to the top of the boat and then we were waving for the plane,’ said Rajab Ali Hossaini. The plane flew into the distance, then turned and passed low over the Palapa.
By this time, the roof was jammed with people waving their life jackets in the air and shouting for help.
Barry Spencer, commander of the Surveillance Australia mission, ordered the de Havilland Dash 8 to make several ‘overflies’ of the little boat, which he assessed to be a Suspected Irregular Entry Vessel (SIEV). Spencer ‘had a look at it both visually and with the television camera and took photography of it—still photography. There were approximately eighty people on the deck, waving their hands and waving bits of material. The vessel was dead in the water, not moving at all, no mode of power.’ He radioed a report to the Canberra headquarters of Coastwatch, the civil agency that coordinates surveillance of the seas around Australia.
Though it was a Saturday afternoon in the national capital, the information flowed deep into the bureaucracy. The sighting of every fresh SIEV was also reported directly to Jenny Bryant, a senior bureaucrat in the De
partment of Prime Minister and Cabinet and to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA). The news came as no surprise to DIMA: the department had known the Palapa was on its way for almost 24 hours. Immigration was extremely concerned that there would be nowhere to put these people when they arrived at Christmas Island.
‘On 22 August we had the largest arrival ever of 359,’ said Minister for Immigration Phillip Ruddock. ‘That had followed closely behind a boat that had arrived on Christmas Island with 345 . . . We were moving people off as quickly as possible, but we were looking at possibly as many as 900 people. And the occupation levels at immigration detention centres were close to full capacity. We had 3600 people in detention at that time . . .’
News of the Palapa did not reach the Rescue Control Centre at the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) for two hours. ‘Coastwatch advised sighting of vessel 55 nautical miles west northwest of Christmas Island. Vessel appeared to have in excess of 80 people on board and seemed to be “dead in the water”.’
A boat dead in the water does not necessarily need rescue. Perhaps the engines are being repaired. Perhaps the boat will soon be under way again. Calling on all shipping to go to the aid of a stricken vessel is a dramatic gesture. It’s not done lightly. Were this an Australian fishing boat being paddled by its crew, or a lone round-the-world yachtswoman with an oar over the side, an immediate rescue might well have been called. But in the bureaucratic world of sea rescue, waiting to see what happened to the Palapa that afternoon was a justifiable response.