Ben Doherty, in Tamilnadu, India, from the Sydney Morning Herald, 11 Sept. 2011
Pic by Kate Geraghty
On the broad sands of southern India’s beaches lie thousands of wooden dhows and fibre glass skiffs, plied in trades, legitimate and otherwise, in the Bay of Bengal. On one of these boats, from one of these beaches, two years ago, Rathidevi’s son Dhuuaragan leftIndia, and his life in a refugee camp, bound for Australia. She has not heard from him since. She does not know whether he is alive or dead. Four months after her son left in October 2009, she received a phone call from a number and a voice she did not recognise, telling her her son was in an Indonesian jail. The line then dropped out. ”I do not know who called me.”
Brindha
Alex
Dhuuragan’s family invested everything in his trip. ”We had to pay 1½ lakhs [$A3100],” Rathidevi says. ”We sold all the jewellery we had, all the gold that I had. We sold everything to pay that money.”
With the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war two years ago, the movement of Tamil asylum seekers across the globe has slowed. But at least three times in the past three months, groups of Tamil asylum seekers have been arrested by authorities trying to leave for Australia, in one case caught standing on a beach in the early hours of the morning waiting for their boat. Last month, 147 men, women and children were arrested in Andhra Pradesh, about to meet their ”migration agent”. Continue reading
