All Australia can offer is guano island

The 460 refugees on board MV Tampa dreamed of an idyllic life overlooking Sydney Harbour. Now, thanks to global inaction and Australian domestic politics, they could end up on a pile of seagull droppings. If they're lucky.

Jason Burke, Matthew Brace in Sydney and Sandra Jordan, Saturday September 01 2001, The Guardian

The Mosque on Christmas Island, a speck in the Indian Ocean 1,500 miles north-west of Australia, howled out the Muslim call to prayer at noon on Friday. On the deck of the Norwegian freighter the MV Tampa, two miles offshore, lines of men knelt on the hot metal, the tropical sun beating down on their backs as they turned their faces to Mecca and their distant homelands.

For six days they had been on the ship. For six days the world had looked on as the Australian government resisted massive international pressure to let them land. For six days the United Nations, as well as Norway, Indonesia and dozens of other countries, statesmen, go-betweens and emissaries, had frantically tried to resolve their fate.

Yesterday - the seventh they have been on the Tampa and seventeenth in all at sea - the Australians announced they had a solution. A third of the 460 refugees, who include 21 women and 44 children, will be flown to New Zealand and their claims processed there. The details are to be decided, but it is likely the rest will be taken off the MV Tampa by a 'non-Australian ship' and ferried to East Timor. From there they will be flown to the island republic of Nauru - eight square miles of guano and rock inhabited by 11,000 people and a lot of seagulls. There their claims for asylum will be processed.

Had the refugees known their eventual destination their prayers on Friday afternoon would have been especially fervent.

Last night the Australian plan was already in difficulty, with the UN expressing grave reservations. On top of growing international concern, the refugees may refuse to go, the Australians might not find the boats in time or, most likely, a legal injunction granted by an Australian judge, to be reviewed today by the federal court, could simply stop the government moving the refugees out of Australian territorial waters. The refugees' plight is far from resolved.

Most of them are Afghan. In Kabul, capital of their homeland, the walls of restaurants and kebab stalls are decorated with posters. Some are religious. Others - while still obeying the Taliban government's ban on the reproduction of the human image - are more secular. Most common are three garish picture landscapes: Swiss chalets, Newcastle-upon-Tyne under an unlikely blue sky, and Sydney opera house and harbour. For most Afghans the images are so distant as to be unreal. But some are determined to make the dream a reality.

Inquiries by The Observer in Pakistan have found that many of those on the MV Tampa had been living in Pakistan for considerable periods. Some were even born there - a crucial legal point which could affect their asylum claims. Others left their homeland only a month or so ago.

Mohammed Ali was contacted by telephone on the Tampa last week. He said he was a teacher in Kabul before the Taliban closed all schools for women and he lost his job. His family sold most of their possessions to fund his trip. Having walked through mountain passes over the border into Pakistan he bought a flight to Malaysia then travelled by bus to Indonesia.

Others on the ship were brought to Indonesia by gangs based in the Western Pakistani city of Peshawar. They paid between $4,000 and $5,000 - their families' life savings. Some came from long-established Afghan refugee communities in Pakistan. 'On their journey they are told by the smugglers what to eat, what to say, where to sleep - everything,' said Mohammed Paikar, an Australian refugee worker.

As their fee covers merely 'transport to the West' , the smugglers pick the destination. Fake travel documents provided by the gangs allow the refugees to fly to the Far East. 'We came in small groups from Afghanistan and converged in Indonesia,' Mohammed Ali said.

In Jakarta Ali was contacted by the smugglers. For $1,000 (£680) he bought a berth on a rickety wooden boat bound for Australia from the island of Bali. 'It takes a long time to arrange a boat - usually people stay for three or four months, and some of them have no money and are desperate. It is their last chance.'

After 10 days at sea the boat began to sink. A plane spotted a makeshift SOS painted on a scarf, and 60-year-old Captain Arne Rinnan, on his way from Australia to Singapore with a load of second-hand machinery, was sent by Australian coastguards to the rescue.

Once on board the MV Tampa the refugees told Rinnan, one of Norway's most respected seamen, to change direction. 'A delegation of five men came up to the bridge. They behaved aggressively and told us to go to Australia. They said they had nothing to lose,' Rinnan said. The Norwegian ship headed for Christmas Island - two days sailing from Indonesia but in Australian territory and thus a favourite target for the smugglers.

John Howard, the right-wing Prime Minister in Canberra, used the incident to justify a hard line on an issue that is becoming increasingly explosive in Australia.On Wednesday morning Rinnan was warned by Christmas Island authorities not to approach the shore. 'Nobody comes off, nobody,' he was told.

Within hours Australia and Norway were engaged in an unprecedented diplo matic battle. The Norwegians were livid that Canberra had refused its 'international duty' to let the shipwrecked refugees land at the nearest port. The Australians said they were 'queue-jumpers'. To allow in people who had, in effect, hijacked a ship, they said, would be wrong.

When Rinnan defied the authorities and sailed into Australian territorial waters citing humanitarian necessity, they sent their SAS aboard. But, with Indonesia refusing to take the 460 back, no one knew what to do next.

To strengthen their case, Australian Ministers claimed that dozens of ships full of hundreds more refugees were waiting to set out on the same journey. Last year 54 boats carrying 4,141 people arrived in Australia, and a strong signal had to be sent to those who ran the operation, they said.

But the focus swiftly turned to Australian domestic politics. With a national election in Australia due within months, the Opposition having recently won three state elections and both leading parties neck-and-neck in the polls, the incident could swing crucial votes.

At first there was a surge of support for Howard, but as the days passed and Australia's diplomatic isolation became clear there were signs he had miscalculated. By Friday, polls showed increasing opposition to him.

Canberra certainly appeared unprepared for the world's reaction. Amnesty International accused Australia of violating the UN Refugee Convention. Norway called the actions 'inhumane', and reported the country to the UN and the International Maritime Organisation.

At home Opposition leaders accused the Government of adopting the policies of the right-wing One Nation party, which has been winning seats at state elections and could heavily influence a national election. Yesterday, when Howard announced that a solution had been found, his domestic concerns were clearly paramount. The agreed formula 'does not involve the people being taken on to Christmas Island or on to Australian territory,' he stressed.

Australia will pay all the costs of the operation. What happens if the refugees refuse to travel to such a barren spot as Nauru is unknown. As they fly in from East Timor, their first sight of the island will be the offshore reefs followed bya moonscape - of bird droppings.

For centuries, Nauru has been a rest stop for migrating sea birds that have left several hundred thousand tonnes of guano behind them. The phosphate from these deposits has kept Nauru afloat economically for the past 100 years. The phosphate was first mined by the Germans. Since the First World War it has been mined by a British-Australian-New Zealand consortium. But now, though a small phosphate stockpile remains, most of the island has been denuded and Nauru is facing an external debt of £19m. As a result, the world's smallest republic has turned itself into an off-shore financial centre. In the last decade billions of dollars have flowed through accounts registered on the island.

But there are grave concerns. A US State Department report last year quoted the governor of the Russian Reserve Bank saying roughly £45m of Russian mafia money had been laundered through Pacific islands, primarily Nauru. And there have also been allegations that the island is the centre of a criminal passport forging racket.

Despite the bad press, Nauru is a full member of the Commonwealth, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and several trade bodies. No one is sure where the refugees will be housed. Most of the island's fresh water comes from Australia - and drinking it is about as close to the scenes in the idyllic Kabul kebab shop posters that many of the refugees will ever get.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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