Archive for the ‘Indonesia’ Category
Monday, July 19th, 2010
Tim Costello; 19/7/10; (12 Items)
It is already clear that asylum seekers and ”stopping the boats” will be a critical element of this election. Yet the politics of asylum seekers is both deflating and confounding. Little wonder Immigration Minister Chris Evans, in an unguarded moment, reflected on his frustrations on the issue, which he said was ”killing the government”. Evans later said his frustrations were historical and things had changed since Julia Gillard became prime minister. Nevertheless, the issue remains perplexing. One poll last week showed tougher rhetoric on asylum seekers had boosted the government’s electoral support, despite a significant proportion of people polled saying they had little faith the government’s
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Human Rights, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees, USA
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Monday, July 19th, 2010
19/7/10
Malaysian police have smashed a child-trafficking racket and rescued eight children and babies, an official said yesterday. Police detained 16 suspects, including four Indonesian women, in a sting operation after an Indonesian woman was nabbed last Monday when she tried to sell a 23-day-old baby girl for 10,000 ringgit ($3590). In the latest operation on Friday, police rescued a four-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl and detained two Indonesian sisters, said to be the caretakers of the children. Police said they were yet to determine who was behind the group or whether the eight rescued children involved any foreigners. The eight children, including three infants, are aged between 23 days and 12 years.
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Tags: Children, Human Rights, Indonesia, Malaysia
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Monday, July 19th, 2010
Paige Taylor; 19/7/10 – 6 Items
Patrick McGorry, touched down on Christmas Island yesterday as a guest of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. The leading mental health researcher, Australian of the Year and and outspoken critic of immigration detention centres, (he has described them as factories for mental illness), said he was there to “look and learn”.Professor McGorry will inspect the Indian Ocean island’s three detention facilities, including a former workers’ camp where families with young children are detained – amid increasing focus on incidents of self-harm and conflict among asylum-seekers on the island. Approximately 2500 people are detained on Christmas Island and two boats, carrying suspected asylum-seekers, are on their way there now. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship frequently allows refugee advocates inside its compounds on Christmas Island but it has never opened the gates to such a high-profile mental health expert.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Human Rights, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees, Vietnam
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Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Paul Maley & Stephen Fitzpatrick; 13/7/10 – 15 Items: which includes archival material about East Timor
Julia Gillard’s plan for a refugee processing centre in East Timor was dealt another blow yesterday when East Timor rejected the idea. As Tony Abbott declared the Prime Minister’s plan was “lost somewhere in the Timor Sea”, a spokesman for Indonesia’s Fretilin party, Arsenio Bano, said yesterday’s vote would “send a very clear signal” to the Australian government that East Timor was not interested. “Timor is not ready to become part of any kind of Pacific Solution, or so-called Timor solution, for Australia,” Mr Bano told The Australian. Yesterday’s motion formalised a parliamentary debate reported in The Australian last Friday, in which Timorese politicians condemned Ms Gillard’s proposal. The vote came as UN officials indicated UN support for the government’s Timor plan would hinge on the type of processing centre Ms Gillard had in mind.
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Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Indonesia, Refugee & Migrant, Terrorism, Timor | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
Paul Maley; 11/5/10; (2 Items)
Five Australia-bound asylum-seekers who perished at sea set themselves adrift in a fatal attempt to find a passing ship after their wooden fishing boat ran out of fuel, food and drinking water. As the remaining 59 Sri Lankans from the boat arrived yesterday at Christmas Island after being rescued and the Australian Federal Police began investigating the incident, new details emerged about the tragedy. The master of the vessel that rescued the 59 Sri Lankans, Oleg Chechulin, told The Australian he believed the passengers aboard the boat had panicked after spending more than 20 days at sea. It also emerged last night that a defence search aircraft on Saturday spotted one of the missing men, lying motionless on a floating tyre tube, but lost sight of him.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Lanka, Migrants & Refugees, Sri
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Sunday, May 9th, 2010
9/5/10
Reports that five suspected asylum seekers have drowned trying to reach Australia are “tragic”, the federal government says. Fifty-nine people were rescued yesterday near the Cocos Islands after their boat became disabled. Today they were taken ashore the Australian territory. But Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor says the rescued passengers have reported five people went missing after leaving the vessel “several days ago before help arrived”. “If reports about five missing passengers are correct, this is a tragic and unnecessary loss of life, and highlights that these types of voyages are extremely dangerous,” Mr O’Connor said in a statement.
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Tags: Australia, Migrants & Refugees
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Saturday, May 8th, 2010
Hamish Macdonald; 8/5/10;
Worth reading; Jill Jollife; Scribe Pulications,2009
After the debacle of “sexed- up” intelligence and misleading statements to legislatures by George Bush’s administration and allied governments as they decided to invade Iraq, the use of “national security” to block public scrutiny of such decisions is not accepted as readily as it was. How much more so when defence and intelligence agencies use the same excuse to stop disclosure of the information that backed vital government decisions on foreign policy and the safety of Australian citizens 35 years ago? An interesting test comes up later this month when a Canberra academic takes on the Defence Department at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to get a series of secret intelligence bulletins put out by its analysts at the height of the East Timor crisis from October to December 1975, covering Indonesia’s invasion of the then abandoned Portuguese colony.
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Tags: Australia, Timor, UK
Posted in Human Rights, Indonesia, Terrorism, War | No Comments »
Friday, April 30th, 2010
Stephen Fitzpatrick; 30/4/10; http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/indonesia-sings-to-end-slavery-and-exploitation/story-e6frg6so-1225860378463
Some of Indonesia’s top rock bands, a bubbly pop starlet who makes teenagers swoon, the music channel MTV and the Australian government’s aid program might seem an unlikely combination. But a series of concerts kicking off this weekend in Pontianak, the regional capital of West Kalimantan, has a serious objective: raising awareness of human trafficking. The five free concerts, which it is hoped will attract about 100,000 young Indonesians, are designed to push the message that being sold into prostitution and forced labour is a major human rights violation. UN figures suggest 2.5 million people are trafficked annually, the majority in the Asia-Pacific. About 100,000 Indonesian women and children are sold into sexual slavery each year, according to Unicef.
AusAID and its American counterpart, USAID, are the concert program’s major sponsors, which is headed up by young former Sydney lawyer Matt Love and spruiked by Agnes Monica, a young pop singer, dancer and soapie actress who sends Indonesian teens delirious. “It takes more than just one person, it takes more than just MTV, it takes more than just the government, it takes everyone to stand up and do their part,” Ms Monica said at the Jakarta launch.
Tags: Children, Human Rights, Indonesia, Sex Trade, Women
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Monday, April 19th, 2010
19/4/10;
Indonesian authorities plan to move a group of Sri Lankan asylum-seekers who have refused to leave their boat for the past six months into an Australian-funded detention centre today. The Tamils’ boat was headed for Australia last October when Kevin Rudd called Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and asked that the vessel be halted in Indonesian waters. But the Tamils — then numbering 254, including 31 children — subsequently refused to disembark at the west Java port of Merak, fearing they would be forced to wait in Indonesia for years before being resettled.
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Tags: Australia, Indonsia, Migrants & Refugees, Sri Lanka
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Monday, April 19th, 2010
Amanda O’Brien & Jodie Minus; 19/4/10
Refugee advocates are predicting a return to riots and lip-stitching after the federal government’s shock decision to reopen the notorious Curtin detention centre in Western Australia. The remote facility in the Kimberley will house hundreds of Afghan and Sri Lankan men whose applications for refugee status have been suspended for six months and three months respectively. The first residents could be there in weeks. Advocates yesterday were appalled by the decision. “Curtin was a torture centre under the Howard government. We are unbelievably nervous today,” Perth-based advocate Jack Smit said.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees
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Saturday, April 17th, 2010
Yuko Naurushima; 17/4/10
A veiled woman cradling a baby girl was the first asylum seeker helped off a fishing boat yesterday, caught sailing to Christmas Island despite the government’s hardened immigration policies. She was among 82 asylum seekers, believed to be Iraqi, spotted close to the island late on Thursday and trailed by a navy ship into Flying Fish Cove just as the sun was rising over the island. Another boat of intercepted asylum seekers is expected today, holding the first people to be directly hit by the Rudd government’s suspension of processing for Sri Lankans and Afghans for between three and six months.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees, UN
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Friday, April 16th, 2010
16/4/10
Greepeace campaigners have abseiled into a Nestle shareholders meeting to urge the food giant to stop using palm oil harvested from rainforest destruction. An AFP photographer saw the two activists break through the roof and abseil into the hall with mountaineering gear overnight. They hung a banner with the slogan “Nestle, Give the orangutans a break!” – in a play on a Nestle marketing slogan – and remained dangling about 20 metres above the shareholders’ heads as the meeting continued. More activists dressed as orangutans handed out leaflets outside the assembly hall in the western city of Lausanne.
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Tags: Environment, Indonesia, Trade
Posted in Aid / Trade, Environment, Indonesia | No Comments »
Monday, April 12th, 2010
Paige Taylor; 12/4/10
The fastest-growing ethnic group inside Christmas Island’s Immigration Detention Centre — the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority group of western Burma — is not affected by the Rudd government’s asylum freeze. While Afghans and Sri Lankans have effectively no chance of a new life in Australia in the short term, the Rohingyas are not on the Rudd government’s banned list and as a result many more of the group are expected to risk their lives to make it to Australia in the coming months. “People say there are five or seven boats (of Rohingya) in Indonesia wanting to come,” one Rohingya detainee told The Australian.
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Tags: Australia, Burma, Migrants & Refugees
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Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
Stephen Fitzpatrick 7/4/10
The people-smuggling trade through Jakarta has become such big business that spotter’s fees of up to $540 a person are being offered for getting asylum-seekers on to boats headed for Australia. And with a range of smuggling networks operating to ferry asylum-seekers through the archipelago after they have fled Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the “brokers” offering their services are thick on the ground. The flow of refugees making the perilous crossing to Christmas Island from points on Java’s southern coastline is also being accelerated by the fact successful arrivals are immediately telephoning friends and relatives remaining in Jakarta and nearby, urging that they follow “while the gates are still open”, one asylum-seeker told The Australian. There is widespread acknowledgement among the asylum-seeker community that the trip to Australia is now as easy as it was in 2001 – the previous numerical high point in the flow. One Afghan man, former bootmaker Mahdi Naeimi, had his 12-year-old son fetch a map of Indonesia to demonstrate the most practical jumping-off points from Indonesia to Australia. “All the agents are liars,” Mr Naeimi said. “They all lie. But when we talk with them, we can see what percentage they speak truly, and what percentage is false. Then we decide which one to go with.”
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Tags: Asia, Australia, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees
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Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
Tom Allard; 3/4/10
Indonesia’s government plans to create a vast agricultural estate in the restive province of West Papua, sparking fears of environmental destruction and a return of mass migration policies that have antagonised the indigenous population. Launched last month and already piquing the interest of foreign investors, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) will initially earmark 1.6 million hectares of land for development but could expand to 2.5 million hectares, or about half the area of Merauke district in south-east Papua. The proposal marks a return to the massive agricultural developments promoted by former dictator Suharto. Some of these were spectacular failures, such as the 1 million-hectare ”mega rice” project in central Kalimantan that devastated peatland forests and did not produce a bushel of rice.
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Tags: Environment, Human Rights, Indonesia, Trade, West Papua
Posted in Aid / Trade, Environment, Human Rights, Indonesia, PNG / West Papua | No Comments »
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
Stephen Fitzpatrick, 3/4/10
Indonesian immigration authorities are questioning 47 asylum-seekers seized this week trying to reach Christmas Island from Java, one of several boatloads taking advantage of the end of the rainy season. “The weather is definitely a factor,” national police spokesman Edward Aritonang said. “If we use the picture from previous years as a guide, we can see there’s a rise – we’ll see what develops this year.” Many of those trying to reach Australia’s immigration zone in the current wave are from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, and most appear to have been living in temporary accommodation near Bogor, south of Jakarta.
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Tags: Asia, Australia, Indonesia, Migrants and Refugees
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