Review: Tampa: The Turning Point

Dr Eve Lester, human rights scholar and oral historian, reviews the new ABC documentary series on the Tampa Affair

In 2001, UNHCR was in the midst of a series of Global Consultations on International Protection to mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees.   As part of the Global Consultations process, States parties, including Australia, were preparing to adopt an international Declaration in which they would ‘solemnly reaffirm’ their commitment to implement their obligations under international refugee law ‘fully and effectively’. It was Australia’s signature to the Refugee Convention, in 1954, that had brought that instrument into force. Yet, while Australia was engaging with UNHCR and other states parties to honour and strengthen their commitment to international protection obligations, Australia was actively undermining them. Harsh asylum policies, including arbitrary detention, were not new to Australia, but they took a turn for the worse on 24 August 2001.

On that fateful day, as the outstanding three-part documentary series Tampa: The Turning Point reminds us, an Indonesian fishing boat, the MV Palapa, got into trouble in the Indian Ocean close to Christmas Island.  Those on board were 433 Hazara asylum seekers and five Indonesian crew.  Rescued by a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, so began a notorious standoff with the Australian Government.  For domestic political ends ahead of a crucial federal election in November 2001, the refugees would be detained on the Tampa, then on the HMAS Manoora and ultimately in an offshore detention and processing centre on the tiny Republic of Nauru. At 21 kilometres squared, Nauru is smaller than Melbourne Airport.  The number of people by then on board the Tampa rendered the freighter unsafe and unseaworthy.  By blocking the Tampa from landing their rescuees at the nearest place of safety (Christmas Island) and directing the ship’s captain to take the asylum seekers to Merak, Indonesia, Australia was determined to ensure that its protection obligations were not engaged.  Australia was effectively, and I would say recklessly, thumbing its nose at its obligations under both international refugee law and international maritime law. It was also subjecting refugees to detention that would later be found to be arbitrary and in breach of international human rights law.  This new documentary series makes that as clear as it has ever been.

Tampa: The Turning Point went live to air last week and is available now on ABC iView. It provides a compelling account of the dramatic rescue operation.  Fleeing the brutal Taliban regime, and as members of a persecuted minority, there was no doubt the Hazaras on board had valid grounds to seek asylum.  And the Australian Government knew it.

Spearheaded by Prime Minister John Howard, Australia’s response in blocking their entry to the country was unprecedented.  Met with condemnation from UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and other governments, Australia’s response remained single-minded in its obstinacy.  This extraordinary documentary series reminds us of the enduring and unapologetic propensity of some key figures in Australia’s political class for opportunism and unthinkable cruelty, at any cost.  Twenty-five years later, what we now know about this incident may even make it more shocking and shameful than it seemed to be at the time.

Running over three episodes of around 45 minutes each, Tampa: The Turning Point is both slow moving and riveting.  We are stepped through the chaos and human suffering of a rescue at sea.  As it unfolds, we feel the drama of the extraordinary standoff between the Australian Government, on the one hand, and Captain Arne Rinnan, backed by his crew, his shipping company and the Norwegian Government, on the other.  We are taken into the incident and its aftermath.  Sightings.  Planes.  Hope.  Uncertainty.  Rescue.  Denial.  Orders.  Panic.  Fear.  Protest.  Medical emergency.  Hunger.  Insanitation.  Denial.  Aggressive diplomacy.  Phone tapping.  Heavily armed SAS troops.  Unarmed asylum seekers.  Injunctions.  Threats of bankruptcy.  Court orders for their release on 11 September 2001.  The 9/11 attacks.  Appeals.  Lies.  Populism.  And, always and everywhere, politics.

The series draws on a rich archive of old footage.  We see the survivors as, at most, distant images, faceless and voiceless.  This footage is masterfully juxtaposed with the contemporary recollections of some of the Hazara refugees who survived this ordeal. Theirs are the voices and faces we were not allowed to hear or see at the time.  To a person, they are dignified, articulate, and reflective; not the national security risk they were depicted to be by the politicians whose voices, faces and perspectives monopolised the airwaves and manipulated the narrative.  Powerful as this series is in so many ways, it is these contemporary recollections from the survivors of this ordeal that are the most crucial piece in this telling.  They provide perspectives that were never allowed to complicate the harsh political narrative and agenda of a government intent upon harbouring fear in the electorate for its own political advantage.

We also hear in more detail than we have before from their rescuers.  They too have powerful and shocking stories of their own to tell.  Their voices were also stymied at the time.

The series includes recent interviews with politicians and their functionaries.  They are, for the most part, strikingly unreflective.  Howard, snuffing the battle with delight, recalls with a wry smile being able to secure bipartisan support for a raft of draconian legislation.  Why?  Because, he says, almost amused, the Labor Party had introduced mandatory immigration detention.  Cameo appearances from former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott — both still wearing out their shoe leather trying to promote offshore detention and processing in other parts of the world — remind us of the empathy deficit that infuses their ruthless political calculus, then and now.  With demeanours that mark them as privileged, entitled white men with not an ounce of insight, Downer and Abbott express relief that Australia was not encumbered by the inconvenience of human rights safeguards.

The obstinacy of these decision-makers contrasts with the reflections of two notable exceptions: Sir Angus Houston, then Acting Chief of the Australian Defence Force, and Bob Morrison, then Captain of the HMAS Manoora. Houston, who informed the Minister for Defence in November 2001 that the government’s claims of ‘Children Overboard’ were baseless, knows he did the right thing. Morrison, asked and answered his own question: ‘Did I think terrorists were on board? No. No evidence. No.’  Clearly moved by a request made of him by Captain Rinnan when his charges were transferred to the HMAS Manoora, Morrison recalls Rinnan saying: ‘Please look after my guests.’  The ability of Houston and Morrison to reflect on the past only underscores the inhumanity, maintained to this day, of the architects of the so-called ‘Pacific Solution’.

The series captures many of the mistruths and outright fictions that made this ‘solution’ possible.  We see how sound bites and fictitious tropes such as the ‘queue-jumper’ were trotted out as if they were unassailable truths.  The opportunistic twisting, manipulation and exploitation of law, facts and events is laid bare, as the Government of the day is acknowledged to have ‘cash[ed] in on the populist view[s] of the time.’

The series reminds us that the asylum seekers from the Palapa were unlucky in multiple ways.  In life, law and particularly politics, time and place are everything.  On the very day that Federal Court Justice Tony North found the Hazaras had been unlawfully detained by the Australian Government, two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York.  Within days, Justice North’s decision would be overturned by the Full Federal Court on grounds still regarded as controversial that, regrettably, would never be ventilated in the High Court.

There were many points along the road at which a dose of empathy and a spot of respect for international law might have changed this story.  The events of 11 September 2001 were one such point.  But there were larger forces at work.  Neither empathy nor international law would carry the day.  Instead, the politicians and their acolytes would milk those forces for all they were worth.  Towards the end of September, a raft of legislation passed with bipartisan support would include retrospectively legalising the treatment of the Tampa refugees and preventing future unauthorised boat arrivals from accessing protection in Australia by excising parts of Australia from the migration zone.   Abbott captures the Executive’s resistance to judicial scrutiny and accountability in this policy domain thus: ‘The best way to ensure that our courts have no jurisdiction is to stop people coming into the jurisdiction’.  The abductive leap required to equate asylum seekers with terrorism and therefore a national security risk provided easy pickings, despite a lack of evidence.

Although some old footage suggests Howard showed momentary signs of insight into the hardship the Hazaras had fled, this was swept away by the wave of political advantage he chose to ride.  Imagine if Howard had accepted Australia’s obligations under international law and allowed the Hazaras to be landed at the port nearest their rescue and to seek asylum?  Imagine if Howard had paused to reflect that the mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was being sheltered by the very same people the Hazaras on the Palapa were fleeing?  Imagine if the fear that drove the passengers on the Palapa to embark on that perilous journey had resonated with the Prime Minister, who was in the US on the day of the 9/11 attacks and ‘visibly shaken’?  Instead, he turned tragedy into a political opportunity at their expense.  Lucky for him, he was on the first flight out of US airspace, not the last boat out of Indonesia.

There is much to criticise in this sorry saga, whose long and stubborn tail endures to this day and tries and tries again to metastasise its way into other corners of the world.  The wisest words come from Abbas Nazari, best-selling author, speaker and Fulbright Scholar who was a child on the Palapa and among the 150 children, women and families who were offered safe haven in New Zealand: ‘There isn’t one answer.’  This is as true today as it was then.  Yet when Downer describes unauthorised boat arrivals as a ‘wicked problem’ for which there is ‘no perfect solution’, he is as right about the nature of the problem as he is wrong about the appropriate response.  The ‘wickedness’ of a problem is neither license nor invitation to throw away human decency, to tear up the rule book, to adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading laws, policies and practices, and to celebrate the absence of adequate human rights safeguards.  To shun time-honoured obligations of a ‘just assistance’ is to tread a dangerous and uncivilized — indeed, barbarous — path.  As we listen to the voices that we could not hear in 2001, to stories of the Tampa that have not been told before, we can see that history is still reminding us that the bond of our common humanity is both fundamental and fragile.  And that bond is not well served by continuing down this perilous path.