Hi kidz, sorry I could not write for a while – I was busy
winning a couple of cases at UK Immigration Upper Tribunal. Anyways the Home
Office man did not want to contest at the last minute and everything ended nice
and rosy. Now that would be service for you.
Lets hit a new topic today as this UK visa thing
is getting a bit trite - how about a lovely boat trip to Australia? Australian High Commission here in Colombo
is busy publishing billboard sized newspaper adverts explaining the perils of
taking a boat trip to Australia.
This means Boat People, OK. This is a fast growing “industry” here – hiring a deep
sea trawler and stacking about 50 people with food & water supplies and
then navigate it to Australian seas. Obviously the plan is to have them handed
over to Oz authorities who would then house them in some god forsaken place till
their asylum applications are considered, and so on. The trade has now gone critical
mass and “entrepreneurs” are finding cost cutting methods – let us say such as
hijacking fishing trawlers in high seas… A recent incident left at least two
fishermen dead as the traffickers teamed with ship’s skipper boarded the vessel
and dumped the crew overboard. Of course there is a deeper story out there, but
this would suffice you to understand what turns the trade has taken.
Sometime ago I had a stint in Australia and a friend I made then asked me to give them some details on how these things are operated from
heavily guarded Sri Lanka fishing ports. So I got an in-between to help me out
with it. Now, before you go too far, please don't ask me for details of this guy so you could also board a shark trawler to Australia. I got him through a person who himself departed on a recent boat. So both the primary contact AND the in-between are no longer reachable unless you want to wait for them at the other end - an island preferably inhabited with cannibals... Sorry. On a particular night this contact called me and told me that a vessel
will be launched in a few hours and if I would like to be there to see how it
is done. Unfortunately the weather was not favourable for me to drive that long
into hostile shores in such a short notice, so instead I asked him to use his
advanced mobile phone to give me live updates of turn of things.
The operation was watertight in its brutal simplicity –
where a more complex one would have screwed it up for everyone. Unlike what you
seen in the movies, the whole boat and the gangplank etc. were well lit; the
“passengers” were kept in a safe house and were only informed the very, very
last minute of their impending departure. All mobile phones, any type of
electronic device, anything that could be used as a weapon, were all removed
from boarding passengers as they came down from hired HiAce vans to board the
vessel. The van operators may not have been informed either (a guess, as I did
not see anyone clearly). I could clearly see two little children among them.
Although the video was not clear, they all looked a destitute bunch from the
looks of it. The operation was over in less than an hour and off they went,
taking advantage of timing and cover of rain to avoid detection.
I was told that the skipper and his assistant were the only
crew that knew of the operation and the others (though I do not know how many
there were) were only informed the last minute. Perhaps this is what leads to
violence in high seas as some crew do not volunteer to take part in such
perilous operations and protest… My contact interviewed two passengers for me and
to my utter surprise one of them turned out to be a government servant! A
government post being a dream coming true in this country and I still wonder if it
is all worth it for him.
As much as I understand the illegality of this operation and
the risk these people are taking, including life and limb and the very real
possibility of being held for ransom, 30 seconds interview my
contact had with them convinced me the strength of their case: Absolute
disillusionment with “The Wonder of Asia” and having no other recourse in the
face of oppression and lawlessness of their daily life.
What I am saying is not that this is the Sri Lanka reality for everyone here or that
every boat man from Sri
Lanka has a strong case for seeking asylum.
Nor am I saying that Australian authorities should take a more sympathetic view
on asylum seekers from Sri Lanka because they are oppressed or disillusioned or
something – for an example, a recent world happiness indexing survey had put
Sri Lanka on high ranking and all. Nope, I am not even worried about the
moralities associated with the so called “Human Trafficking Business”, oh, and
I care not a penny about the white shark lurking the Australian waters even.
My case rests on a rather simpler tenet: Publishing
expensive paper advertisements is not going to dissuade anyone from taking a
rather adventurous boat trip to Australia.
That money and effort is better spent on remedying the underlining causes that
push people to the ends of their tether – such as accountability and rule of
law – or rather lack of them.
.
