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Refugee Boat Sabotage
September 29, 2002
Reporter : Ross Coulthart

ROSS COULTHART, REPORTER: Nearly one year ago in a crowded refugee camp in Jakarta, desperate asylum-seekers told Sunday that they would still pay people-smugglers to get them to Australia despite the dangers of such a journey.

How many of you will go to Australia on a boat again, to try to get refuge in Australia?

CROWD: roars general agreement

REPORTER: We were here only a few days after 353 people had drowned in the sea between Australia and Indonesia on a boat now known as the SIEV X.

This survivor told us how he’d lost his wife and his cousin on that voyage. He’d kept his daughter alive in the open sea by sitting her on his shoulders. But he claimed he’d try again.

SALA CRESAK, ASYLUM SEEKER: I don’t want to go by the ship again but if the UNHCR does not pay attention and do not reply my application, I will do it again because even if I sank again, I will do it again.

REPORTER: As the Government was quick to point out this week, no more people-smuggling boats have made it to Australia since then.

SENATOR ELLISON, JUSTICE MINISTER: And that has been because of our strategies which have largely involved cooperation with the Indonesian Police.

REPORTER: But was it at a cost? This week, the leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Senator John Faulkner, dramatically stated the concerns he now clearly holds after many months of questioning Government officials about Australia’s covert people-smuggling disruption program inside Indonesia.

SENATOR JOHN FAULKNER: How far has it gone? What activities are acceptable; what are not? Who carries them out? Who pays for them? What accountability and control mechanisms are in place? Who authorises these activities? What is the effect of these activities? What, if any, consideration was given to questions to the safety of lives at sea?

REPORTER: Senator Faulkner, one of the Opposition’s most experienced and respected Shadow Ministers, raised the politically explosive question: Was the SIEV X in any way targeted by the Government’s disruption activities?

FAULKNER: I intend to keep pressing for an independent judicial inquiry into these very serious matters. At no stage do I want to break or will I break the protocols in relation to operational matters involving ASIS or the AFP. But, but those protocols were not meant as a direct or an indirect licence to kill.

REPORTER: Details of Australia’s covert disruption program in Indonesia only came to light after Sunday’s investigation into this Australian man, Kevin John Enniss.

KEVIN JOHN ENNISS: But I’ve been working with the Australian Federal Police.

REPORTER: Indonesian locals had told us Enniss was a people-smuggler in Kupang, taking money off refugees, promising to get them to Australia. But Enniss revealed he was working as an informant for Australia.

Do you think you can put us on to people in Federal Police in Australia who could confirm your story?

ENNISS: Yes, I’m sure. Not in Australia, in Jakarta. To the Federal Police from the Australian Embassy.

REPORTER: And do they know that you’re actively involved in people-smuggling operations?

ENNISS: Yes, yes, they know. I can’t go on air with it you know. We can confirm it so that you’re satisfied, OK?

REPORTER: Late last month the Federal Police released a summary of their investigation into our story on Mr Enniss’ activities. They dismissed our concerns about his people-smuggling activities, claiming Sunday’S evidence was consistent with his role as an informant. But as we reported, the AFP’s investigation has serious short-comings. It fails to deal with the possibly criminal implications of Enniss’ involvement in people-smuggling – a view backed by one of Australia’s top criminal law experts:

PROFESSOR MARK FINDLAY, SYDNEY UNIVERSITY: Enniss carried out his activities with the knowledge of the AFP and perhaps some limited authority. He misrepresented himself and took money as a consequence. All of those issues tend to make me believe that offences were committed under Commonwealth law

REPORTER: If the Federal Police knew that, for the period of the time that he was working for them, and did nothing to stop it, did the Federal Police commit an offence?

FINDLAY: Again, I’d say that depends on the way in which we look at their involvement. But if we were to speculate that they did nothing to restrict Enniss, that they supplied Enniss with money and some support, that they allowed Enniss to generate relationships with the Indonesian Police then there’s an argument to say that they were criminally involved.

REPORTER: As we reported earlier this month, there was another far more disturbing admission made by Enniss when we confronted him last year. Enniss boasted to myself and two other colleagues that he’d paid Indonesian locals on four or five occasions to scuttle people-smuggling boats with passengers on them.

FAULKNER: I ask these questions: Was Enniss involved in the sabotage of vessels? Were others involved in the sabotage of vessels? Do Australian Ministers, officials or agencies have knowledge of such activities?

REPORTER: Senator Faulkner raised a number of intriguingly specific questions:

FAULKNER: I note that on 13 June 2001 the Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, travelled to Jakarta.

Mr Ruddock should now confirm whether he raised certain disruption activities during meetings at the Embassy either in June last year or his visit in September.

In October 2001 the high level PM & C Peoplesmuggling taskforce notes indicate that disruption activities were discussed on a number of occasions including a direction that disruption be beefed up.

What was the taskforce asking agencies to do when they referred to it being beefed up?

REPORTER: What no one in the Government tried to deny this week was the possibility that someone in Indonesia did sink boats in an over-zealous pursuit of Australia’s disruption policy.

ALEXANDER DOWNER: There has never been any Government policy to sabotage boats and endanger lives. That has never been the Policy of this Government and of course we wouldn’t.

JOURNALIST’S QUESTION: That’s not the question though – did it happen? It may not have been Government policy…were people asked to…were Indonesian…

DOWNER: The Australian Government certainly did not sabotage any boats. Did anyone ever sabotage a boat? I have no idea.

REPORTER: But, as we reported earlier this month, recent history records that sabotage has been used before by some Government officers to stop asylum-seeker boats getting to Australia. In this 1992 documentary a former Australian Immigration officer admitted sinking vessels during disruption activities in the 1970s. Vessels carrying Vietnamese boat-people were deliberately holed just off the Malaysian coast to stop them continuing to Australia.

GREG HUMPHRIES, DOCUMENTARY MAKER: We bored holes in the bottom of the ships and the boats and they sunk overnight. So they had to be landed. We were successful in stopping a lot of boats – by one way or another.

REPORTER: This week the Federal Justice Minister Chris Ellison repeated previous attacks on Sunday citing, but not releasing, legal advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions rebutting Sunday’s claims that Enniss and possibly also the Federal Police committed crimes through Enniss’ involvement in people-smuggling.

ELLISON: And we had yesterday the outrageous allegation by Senator Faulkner that in some way Australian authorities were involved in endangering life.

REPORTER: A subsequent Federal Police media release asserted Enniss’ denial that he was involved in sabotaging vessels. But the statement did not say if Enniss had admitted telling Sunday about his role in sabotage.

FAULKNER: It is not enough to say, as Senator Ellison and Mr Downer have said publicly today, that it’s never been the policy of the Australian Government to sabotage people-smuggling vessels. It’s not enough to say that the Australian Government has never sabotaged vessels or directed that they be sabotaged. That’s just huff and puff, the usual huff and puff – they denounced the Opposition, criticise us for daring to ask what they described as ‘outrageous questions’. I say asking these sorts of questions and demanding answers is a responsibility of the Opposition.

REPORTER: Enniss insisted to us last year that no lives were lost on boats he arranged to be scuttled. But the former Minister for Defence and Immigration, Labor Senator Robert Ray raised this concern.

SENATOR ROBERT RAY: The big what if is if you have sabotaged a boat and it does get 60/70 miles out into rough seas, well it may go to the bottom with major loss of life.

REPORTER: Senator Ray also made some savage criticisms of the evidence given by Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty in several Parliamentary hearings.

RAY: I mean I’ve read the tirade from the Commissioner of Police today who can’t understand the subtlety of what Senator Faulkner said in the last three speeches; just completely, just completely misinterprets it for his own purposes. I mean if ever I’ve seen an evasive witness, it was him at the Estimates and the children overboard, sorry the Certain Maritime matters Inquiry. Why doesn’t he front up and give straightforward evidence? Why have all these officials got such selective memories or lack of intellectual rigour that would force them to go and probe certain issues that they should be pursuing if they hold responsible jobs. I can’t understand that.

I’m not saying that the Government’s involved in a policy that says go out and sink some boats but if you’ve been funding some lousy stinking people-smuggler to the tune of 25 grand I would want to know what he was doing. And this Government should want to know but they don’t want to know. They don’t want to investigate this.

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