Posts Tagged ‘Indonesia’
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
Posted in Health & Children, Human Rights, Indonesia, Sex Trade | No Comments »
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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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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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
Posted in Health & Children, Human Rights, Indonesia, Sex Trade | No Comments »
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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Sunday, April 18th, 2010
Alicia Wood; 18/4/10
Ahmed Shab Aldoury has no one left. His parents were killed in a bomb blast that levelled his Baghdad house when he was 15 and he has been on the run ever since. Two weeks ago, Ahmed, 19, was detained in Villawood Detention Centre after travelling through Syria, Malaysia, Indonesia and Christmas Island. He became one of 40 Iraqis who held a week-long hunger strike after their applications for asylum were rejected by the Immigration Department. In 2008, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, ruled that Ahmed was a genuine refugee, and he was granted legal refugee status in Jakarta. Now he is urging the Australian government to allow him to stay. ”If they send me back to Iraq, they send me dead,” he told The Sun-Herald last week… He said he would have preferred to arrive in Australia legally but, after waiting two years in Indonesia, he met many legal refugees who had been waiting more than nine years to be resettled in Australia.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Iraq, Migrants & Refugees
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Iraq, Refugee & Migrant, USA | No Comments »
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 »
Friday, April 9th, 2010
Tom Allard; 9/4/10
People smuggling is ”totally out of control” in Indonesia, with thousands of asylum seekers now preparing to come to Australia, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The commissioner’s senior representative in Indonesia, Manuel Jordao, told The Age that a ”huge percentage” of almost 4000 asylum seekers registered there would try to reach Australia by boat rather than wait for resettlement though official channels. Along with those registered with the UN, there are believed to be thousands more Afghans, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans who bypass the organisation as they wait for people smugglers to take them to Australia.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, UN
Posted in Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
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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Thursday, March 25th, 2010
Amanda Hodge, 25/3/10
The UN’s refugee agency has warned that the Rudd government’s decision to allow dozens of Sri Lankan boatpeople in Indonesia to jump the immigration queue will encourage others to try similar tactics. UN High Commissioner for Refugees representatives met in Colombo last month to discuss the effect of the decision to strike a deal with 78 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers rescued from a floundering vessel last October and taken to Indonesia by the Australian Customs boat Oceanic Viking.The government agreed to rapidly resettle all those on board deemed to be refugees, following a month-long standoff during which the asylum-seekers refused to leave the boat.All 78 were eventually classified as refugees and at least 18 are believed to have been sent to Australia so far.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Lex Hall; 18/3/10; (2 Items)
A navy warning notice issued to the master of asylum-seeker vessel SIEV 36 was “clearly inappropriate” and sparked a series of events that led to the deaths of five Afghan asylum-seekers in an explosion off the northwest coast last April, the Northern Territory Coroner has found. In handing down his findings into the deaths, Greg Cavanagh said the fire had been deliberately lit and most of the 47 asylum-seekers on board had known of a plan to sabotage the boat. Mr Cavanagh said three of the asylum-seekers – Ghulam Mohammadi, Arman Ali Brahimi and Sabzali Salman – had set fire to the vessel to cripple it in order to prevent its “perceived” return to Indonesia. The three men may face criminal charges, as Mr Cavanagh has referred his findings to the Territory’s police commissioner and Director of Public Prosecutions.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Mark Dodd; 17/3/10; (2 Items)
Asylum-seekers whose claims have not been finalised will be moved to the mainland, overturning the government’s policy of insisting almost all claims be dealt with on Christmas Island. The Australian understands asylum-seekers in the final stages of processing for refugee status could soon be moved from the island detention centre to Darwin for eventual resettlement. There are now 1997 asylum-seekers on Christmas Island, leaving room for only 65 new arrivals. But the government has ruled out any “imminent plans to transfer hundreds of asylum-seekers to Darwin”.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees
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