Kathy Newnam, Darwin
The immigration detention centre at Coonawarra in Darwin will incarcerate Indonesians caught fishing in Australian waters, according to new plans announced by federal fisheries minister Ian Macdonald on January 31. The detention centre was built in 2001 to lock up asylum seekers, but has not been in use as the government's "Pacific solution" has kept asylum seekers off the Australian mainland.
The Coalition government will also build detention centres at Gove in the Northern Territory, Broome in Western Australia and Horn Island in the Torres Strait, Queensland, which will be used as so-called "processing points" before relocating fishers to the Coonawarra detention centre.
This will end the policy of detaining fishing crews on their boats, which has been widely criticised following the death of 21-year-old Mansur La Ibu while detained on his fishing vessel in Darwin Harbour in February 2003.
Mansur, a fisherman from a small village in Sulawesi, Indonesia, had been detained without charge on the cramped boat for over a month. The coronial inquest held in March 2004 heard that, at the time of his death, seven men were being held on the boat. The vessel had no toilet and the cabin, just over 1.8 by 1.5 metres, was the only sleeping quarters or protection from the wet-season storms. Mansur took ill in the early hours of February 26 during massive storms and by the time help arrived it was too late. The autopsy found that he died of "unknown causes".
Mansur was one of hundreds of Indonesians who have faced similar treatment at the hands of the Australian government. Just this year, 12 fishing boats have been caught by Australian authorities and their crews held in Darwin Harbour.
In the same vein as its racist fear-mongering about refugees, the government paints a picture of greedy fishermen who are conniving to steal wealth from Australian waters.
According to Macdonald, "the abundance of sharks in the Australian well-managed waters is very attractive to Indonesian village fishermen. We have seen in recent times, however, that there has been more organised fishing activity with boats with better technology, better navigational aids."
What the government fails to mention is that people from what is now Indonesia have been fishing in these waters for over three centuries, evidenced by the early contact of the Macassans with the Aboriginal people of northern Australia.
The denial of these fishing grounds began in 1906, when the Macassans were banned from trepang (sea slugs) fishing along the north Australian coast. This move also had devastating consequences for the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land, who had a long history of trade with the visiting Macassans.
According to Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific spokesperson Jon Lamb: "The government's treatment of Indonesian fishers over the last century is a continuation of this colonial policy. Many of these people are from some of the poorest regions of Indonesia. Their fishing grounds have been ravaged by multinational fishing companies. It is these same companies that are responsible for the depletion of fishing stocks — not poor villagers who are striving to make a living."
Lamb noted that some of the vessels caught in Australian waters are working for larger operations run by these fishing corporations, but added that "it is still always the poor fishers who are punished".
The Coalition government will continue its policy of burning the boats of poor fishers, thus denying them their entire livelihoods. Under the UN Law of the Sea Convention, the government is obligated to give the fishers a chance to retrieve their vessels. The government skirts this responsibility by offering the vessels under a bond — if the bond is not paid in what Macdonald refers to as "reasonable time", the boats are burnt.
Along with the new detention centres, there are also plans to build new boat-burning facilities in Darwin, Gove and Broome.
Lamb pointed to Macdonald's statement that the Coonawarra facility "will be operated according to the Immigration Detention Standards which are used in existing immigration detention facilities".
"This is a horrifying thought", declared Lamb. "The whole world knows about the horrors of the so-called 'immigration detention standards' that Macdonald is talking about. These include indefinite imprisonment without charge, psychological torture, denial of medical and legal assistance and brutality at the hands of guards.
"It is not poor fishers, like Mansur La Ibu, who are a threat to the resources to Australia's north. The Australian government is creating scapegoats for the environmental and social catastrophes that are created by the profit-driven pillage of their corporate mates — the same profit-driven pillage that has destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of poor villagers like Mansur La Ibu."
From Green Left Weekly, February 9, 2005.
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