BY SARAH STEPHEN
On July 11, more evidence about the October 19 sinking of the boat SIEV-X (which stands for Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel — unknown) was presented to the Senate committee investigating the incident. The evidence strengthens claims that a high-level cover-up surrounds the boat sinking, in which 353 people died, in particular that the Australian Navy did not notify the crews of Australian Air Force planes monitoring the waters between Indonesia and Australia that SIEV-X existed.
Details of the October 19 and 20 flight paths of these planes submitted to the committee confirmed that pilots did not diverge from their standard surveillance patterns. No special effort was made to search for the boat, to which survivors clung for more than 24 hours.
Many senior government and navy personnel who have given evidence to the senate inquiry during the past five months have testified that they did not know about the existence of SIEV-X until it was too late to rescue its passengers, or that intelligence was too contradictory and inconclusive.
Yet information provided by Colonel Patrick Gallagher has blown this testimony out of the water. The commanding officer of the Australian Theatre Joint Intelligence Centre (ATJIC), Gallagher was offered up to the senate inquiry by defence minister Robert Hill as a substitute for Admiral Raydon Gates, who the minister continues to ban from testifying.
Gallagher told the inquiry that on the morning of October 20, Kylie Pratt, an Australian Federal Police officer in Jakarta, phoned a warning to Coastwatch that the AFP had heard that a dangerously overcrowded boat was headed for Australia. She emphasised that it was "a confirmed departure". Pratt phoned rather than sending a paper report, because she believed it warranted urgent action.
Gallagher told the inquiry that the ATJIC issued an urgent intelligence report which was passed on to those who could order a search and rescue.
An article by Russell Skelton in the July 13 Age noted: "After Officer Pratt's phone call, made on October 20, a puzzling indifference seems to have prevailed in the ranks of the border protection guards."
Skelton further noted that, 24 hours after the boat had sunk, the defence force's Northern Command made an assessment that SIEV-X had "returned to the Java coast because of the unfavourable weather and overcrowding".
In other evidence, Australian Maritime Safety Authority CEO Clive Davidson confirmed that Coastwatch had issued an overdue notice on SIEV-X on October 22. He told the inquiry that he only passed on the alert to Indonesian search and rescue authorities because the defence force phoned him to advise that "we already have a large search for this vessel for surveillance matters". Davidson took that to mean they were specifically looking for that vessel.
SBS's Dateline program aired a report on SIEV-X on July 17. Reporter Geoff Parish interviewed Allan Behm, a former senior defence official, who told Dateline: "If they could find that yachtsman [Tony] Bullimore 1000 nautical miles to the south-west of Australia, then I think they could have found a few hundred people floating in the water, but the fact is that they weren't tasked to do it." Behm estimated that they would have had a better-than-90% chance of finding them.
Behm raised a concern that the "key performance indicator" for the success of the navy's role is "the exclusion of these people from Australia". Speaking to Dateline, defence minister Senator Robert Hill admitted, "the driving force is not care and compassion, that's true. We do our job with a sensitivity, but basically our job is to protect Australian borders."
According to Parish, "under the current structure of Operation Relex, another SIEV-X-style disaster can't be ruled out". This is a chilling reminder to those of us who aim to change the government's brutal exclusion that many hundreds of lives may rely on our success.
From Green Left Weekly, July 24, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.