Tony Kevin - Keynote address at Hope premiere

Keynote address for 'Hope' premiere, Dendy Cinema, Canberra 24 July 2008

(Tony Kevin, 2100 words)
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I am glad that I have not yet seen this film. I wanted to have the experience of seeing it for the first time in a cinema, watching it with other people. Thank you all for your affirmation of humanity in coming to see this film.

Steve Thomas?s film ?Hope? is important because it brings to life the SIEV X events as remembered by one brave survivor, Amal Basry.? Through watching Amal?s life story, we see that the SIEV X tragedy is much more than a cold statistic of collateral damage, in a border security campaign waged during 2001 by Australian government agencies against still unknown adversaries, both onshore in Indonesia and in international waters south of Indonesia.? We see the human dimensions of this great tragedy.

Amal is one of an officially reported 421 people who boarded the unnamed boat that I later named SIEV X, ?suspected illegal entry vessel, unknown?, using the Australian Defence Force abbreviation ?SIEV? for such boats. She is one of just 45 people who survived the sinking, and one of just seven of these who were allowed to come to Australia. The other 38 were prudently scattered among various countries around the world.???

I want to summarise from my book some key facts about the sinking, so far as they are known from official evidence and my own and Marg Hutton?s analysis of that evidence and other public-record evidence.

The suspected illegal entry vessel that I later named SIEV X was originally numbered ?SIEV 8? in official documentation, in the days when on the basis of Australian intelligence reporting it was officially listed as a predicted imminent arrival at Christmas Island. But then, the ADF border security operation, named Operation Relex,? made a crucial operational judgement: that due to the boat?s reported overcrowding and insufficient seaworthiness, it must have returned to Indonesia because the weather was bad and the crew would not risk a passage and their lives in the prevailing weather conditions.

Operation Relex command therefore never directed the daily Australian RAAF surveillance aircraft flights to conduct any safety of life at sea visual searches for the boat, then still named SIEV 8, or for any possible survivors.?

Despite later vehement official denials, there can be no doubt that the boat referred to in official People Smuggling Taskforce meeting notes in Canberra for 22 October 2001 as SIEV 8 ? the entry reads ?SIEV 8? - not spotted yet, missing, grossly overloaded, no jetsam spotted, no reports from relatives?? - was SIEV X. The boat went missing as it was coming out from Indonesia? ? and the Australian border security system, which was supposed to be combing the seas for every incoming boat, simply crossed it off their list, and assigned the number SIEV 8 to a subsequent boat.

We know from reliable multisource public evidence analysed by Marg Hutton and myself that SIEV X sank between 50 and 60 nautical miles south of Indonesia?s Sunda Strait navigational buoys, at around 3pm on 19 October 2001. This means SIEV X must have entered the RAAF aerial surveillance zone around 9 am on the morning of 19 October. SIEV X was travelling in Operation Relex - surveilled waters for at least six hours before it stopped and sank.

According to government-released RAAF aircraft flight maps, a P-3C Orion surveillance aircraft flew a routine morning patrol on 19 October, right above the area where SIEV X entered the Australian surveillance area. A P-3C Orion again flew over the same area on 20 October 2001, in the hours when fishing boats were picking up survivors, including Amal Basry. Yet the ADF told the Senate Committee that these flights picked up no data pertaining to SIEV X.

As The Australian?s national security reporter Cameron Stewart wrote on 29 June 2002 in his article? ?Spy plane patrolled ocean where 353 people drowned?, both flights were routine patrols which had not been tasked to look for SIEV X.? A few weeks later, an ADF witness confirmed to the Senate Committee that flight crews on these two flights were never directed to conduct Safety of Life at Sea searches, which would have used visual techniques, to look for the boat or for wreckage or survivors. It?s quite possible therefore that survivors did hear an Australian P-3C Orion aircraft overhead ? these aircraft are large, noisy and fly low when collecting data. But the crew of the plane might not necessarily have seen them, unless they happened to be looking out a window.

As to the boats that came on the night of 19 October and ignored the survivors, an event reported by five survivors including Amal Basry, my book?s analysis suggests that these were Indonesian boats, most probably police or naval boats. There is no other logical way to explain the arrival of Indonesian fishing boats on the scene the next day to rescue survivors. The mystery boats the night before may have instructed the fishing boats precisely where to go the next day to pick up any survivors. The fishing boats gave inconsistent and unconvincing explanations of how they came on the scene, which suggests they were instructed not to reveal how they located the site.???

My 2004 book ?A Certain Maritime Incident? does not try to answer what happened. It simply sets out the available evidence, in all its massive contradictions and inconsistencies. It is clear from the evidence that Marg Hutton and I assembled and analysed that from the beginning of this story, there has been systematic Australian official silence, or obfuscation of truth, or lying.? It is impossible to take anything said about SIEV X by Australian official sources as necessarily true. As an Australian, I am deeply ashamed of this.

My book was this year reprinted and reissued, with corrections. It is again on sale through good booksellers.? I urge any of you who do not yet have my book to go out and buy it, after you have seen this film.?

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Steve Thomas?s film ?Hope? is not about accountability. It is the personal story of one heroic person who survived SIEV X.? We will get to know her, see her strength, her courage, her compassion and humanity. That is all we need to know ? that there was one person like this who suffered on SIEV X.? Amal represents the 353 people who did not survive the sinking, whom we will never know. Through Amal?s experience, we see how this doomed voyage was a crime against humanity.

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I now believe that there was a secret war going on, between Australian border security authorities and whoever it was in Indonesia that sent nearly 12,000 unauthorised boat people to Australia in the years 1998-2001. The sinking of SIEV X was the cathartic shock that ended this secret war, in which boat people had become expendable pawns.?

The numbers of boat people arriving at Ashmore Reef or Christmas Island exploded between 1998 and 2001. They went from near-zero in 1997 to 4000 people a year in 1999, and stayed at this high level for the next three years.

Why did this large movement of refugees through Indonesia happen when it did? I do not believe that there ever were international organised crime people smuggling syndicates, as Australian official sources claimed.? People smuggling was done by small-scale local entrepreneurs: men like Abu Quassey, the Egyptian small-scale crook resident in Indonesia who organised SIEV X and at least three earlier voyages, in all of which he was assisted and protected by senior Indonesian police.

I now believe that events in East Timor in 1998-99 are a large part of the answer; that the 1998-2001 people smuggling trade was encouraged and facilitated by powerful Indonesian national security elements, angry at what they saw as Australia?s betrayal of good-neighbourly obligations to them in the East Timor independence crisis. I believe that these powerful Indonesian elements covertly encouraged commercial people-smuggling from Indonesia to Australia, as a way of punishing Australia for East Timor.? This hypothesis well fits the known facts and dates.??

Why did this three-year movement of nearly 12,000 people abruptly end soon after SIEV X sank? Partly it was the sheer worldwide horror at the event, which might have brought people on both sides to their senses. Perhaps also, the anti-Australian mood in Indonesian security circles simply ran out of steam, after so many innocent victims had died. Who knows?

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The SIEV X story changed my life completely. I had no idea when I started to ask public questions where this would lead. I assumed that there was a core integrity in Australian governance and national security agencies, that would at some point kick in. I was shocked when it did not. I have also learned through bitter experience that some stories are personally costly to tell in Australia.

Now my expectations are much more modest. I no longer expect that the full truth about SIEV X will be made public in my lifetime. I am glad now if, simply, the event of the sinking of SIEV X is not forgotten ? if it is remembered by enough people to remain part of Australia?s history.

For years I was disappointed when good people on my side of the argument seemed to have much lower aspirations than my own.? Now I see that they were more realistic than I was about what is possible in Australian society.

Whatever the truth of what happened to SIEV X , the disturbing questions Marg Hutton and I uncovered at the heart of the story, and the cruelty and dishonesty with which official agencies rebuffed and evaded those questions,? revealed a cold callousness, an indifference to human life, in the culture of Australian border security operations.? Quite large numbers of Australian people seem content with this, quietly averting their eyes from the SIEV X story.? They just don?t want to go there, because it is about national security. I suppose that is why SIEV X is rarely mentioned in any of the political literature commenting on the Howard years. The safe topics of Tampa and children overboard are listed with monotonous predictability? ? SIEV X, almost never.

Labor seems to have forgotten SIEV X.? Senator John Faulkner pledged in the Senate in September 2002 that he would get to the bottom of SIEV X and the Australian Government?s people smuggling disruption program. But the last public references to SIEV X by any federal Labor politician were by Senator Faulkner in January 2004. Since Labor gained government, there has been silence on its earlier calls for a full-powers independent judicial inquiry into the sinking of SIEV X and the people smuggling disruption program.

So I no longer have any expectations that the removal of the Howard government will lead to early transparency. I suspect that there are murky secrets here that will stay buried for many years, because it will suit both Australian and Indonesian governments to keep it that way. Rather like the Balibo killings in 1975, though SIEV X victims do not have the kind of persistent lobby group that the murdered Australian journalists at Balibo had.

Nowadays, I am grateful for whatever is done to keep the public memory of SIEV X alive. For Don Maclurcan?s SIEV X schools history study kit. For Hannie Rayson?s play,? ?Two Brothers?. For Kate Durham?s cycle of SIEV X paintings. For Steve Biddulph?s group and the over 1,000 volunteer artists who painted the National SIEV X Memorial poles in Weston Park, Canberra. And for Steve Thomas?s film we are about to see. And I?m grateful to you, the audience, for having the courage to come and see this film.?

Out of such brave actions, I hope that we will keep our courage and compassion, and maintain a firm message to all future Australian governments that nothing like this should ever be allowed to happen again to defenceless boat people in the name of Australian border security.

Now let?s sit back and experience Amal?s story. Think of her sacrifice as part of the making of our richly diverse Australian society ? a society born of cruelty, suffering and injustice, but which over 200-odd years became a generally decent country of acceptance and compassion.? Australian history has generally proved wrong those who thought they were strong and could oppress those whom they saw as weak. In Australia, the weak have a way of fighting back and finally winning. One day, I believe there will be a national apology to the victims of SIEV X.