Category Archives: people smugglers

June 1, 2019 · 9:56 am

Sri Lankan Asylum Boat sparks Fresh Australian Fears: One Boat, Massive Panic

Paige Taylor in Weekend Australian,30 May 2019, with this title “Peter Dutton warns more illegal boats may be headed to Australia”

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton says the government is concerned more illegal boats are headed to Australia, after a vessel carrying 20 Sri Lankans was intercepted by Border Force. Anthony Albanese has demanded a security briefing today from Scott Morrison as it was revealed the first boat had arrived on the shores of Christmas Island in five years, and that the vessal had set sail weeks into the federal election campaign.

Mr Dutton said the Sri Lankan arrival was “very disturbing” and that people smugglers had been marketing a change of government to asylum seekers before the Coalition’s shock election win. “It’s a very disturbing development and, without going into all of the details, it’s not the only vessel that we’re worried about,” the Home Affairs Minister told Sydney’s 2GB radio.

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July 10, 2018 · 10:55 am

A Wiradjuri Woman Medico becomes South Australia’s Rhodes Scholar for 2018

ONE: News Item from University of Adelaide: “Indigenous Doctor is Rhodes Scholar for South Australia,” 26 October 2017

Outstanding University of Adelaide medical graduate Dr Claudia Paul has become the third Australian Indigenous person to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, having been named the 2018 Rhodes Scholar for South Australia. Dr Paul, 24, a Wiradjuri woman from Broken Hill, will use her scholarship to undertake a Masters of International Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford from next year. The Governor of South Australia, His Excellency Hieu Van Le, AC, announced Dr Paul as the Rhodes Scholar for South Australia at a ceremony at Government House late yesterday.

Claudia Paul with Governor Hieu Van Le …. a dinky-die local with a Vietnamese refugee migrant from the 1970s … Hurray

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October 31, 2016 · 9:32 am

Returned Tamil Asylum Seekers Today: A Jaundiced and Gullible Australian Reporter’s View

Greg Bearup, in The Australian, 31 October  2016, where the title is “In the Wash-Up Asylum Loser Wins” …. with emphasis in this presentation being t e work of The Editor, Thuppahi.

The crab-trapper of Jaffna is a happy man; he has a sturdy boat with a new Suzuki motor. Each morning he rises before dawn to motor out to a vast lagoon in his new auto rickshaw to fish for prawns and crabs — partly funded by the $5000 given to him by Australian taxpayers. In August 2012, when Marcus Pireesan fled Sri Lanka for ­Australia in search of a better life, Jaffna, the northern Tamil capital and his home town, was a very different place from what it is today.

marcus Pireesan with some of his children — Pic Greg Bearup

The long civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ended in 2009 – a UN report estimating that 40,000 people died in final months of the conflict, mainly civilians – but the Rajapaksa regime, which brutally obliterated the Tigers, was still in power; young Tamil men were still being bundled into government vans and never seen again. “We lived in constant fear,” Pireesan, 40, tells me, “just knowing information was dangerous. You could be stopped at a roadblock and kidnapped (by the government forces) and no one would ever know.” And fishermen like him were told where and on what days they could fish. Continue reading →

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June 22, 2016 · 8:45 am

An August Gathering Addresses Indo-Lanka Issues

Shamindra Ferdinando, in The Island, 22 June 2016, where the title is “Unresolved Indo-Lanka Issues”

One-time head of the Law Faculty, University of Colombo, Dr Nirmala Chandrahasan last Thursday (June 16) called for tangible action on the part of the Sri Lankan government to bring in Sri Lankan refugees, living in India, particularly in the state of Tamil Nadu. Dr Chandrahasan estimated the number of Lankan refugees in India at the peak of the conflict at 200,000. The appeal was made over seven years after the successful conclusion of the war with the annihilation of the LTTE leadership.  The distinguished law academic insisted that special arrangements should be made to facilitate the return of refugees. Dr Chandrahasan was addressing a forum on India-Sri Lanka relations in the 21st century, organised by the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BSIS).

IMAGING INDIA

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September 1, 2015 · 4:00 am

Tsunami of Asylum Seekers swamps Europe

Christina Lamb, courtesy of The Sunday Times & The Australian, 1 September 2015, where the title is “Europe’s asylum-seekers form a human tide of desperation

tsunami 11

It took perhaps an hour for them to die. The children would have suffocated first: the baby girl of around 18 months, the three boys aged about eight to 10, watched by their anguished mothers, helpless to give them air inside the hot, sealed truck. By the time it crossed the border from Hungary into western Europe where the asylum-seekers must have hoped for a new life, all 71 were dead: 59 men, eight women, four children. The Austrian police who found them said their bodies were piled one on top of the other inside the vehicle as if they had tried to climb up. With four bodies for every square metre, they had been so desperate to get air that the side of the truck was bent out of shape.

tsunami 55 Blankets hide the chicken delivery truck in which 71 people, believed to be Syrian, suffocated in Austria last week. Continue reading →

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October 14, 2014 · 1:39 am

Gunasekera vs SBS: Mahinda from Canada places Corlett’s Dateline Video and SMH Report in Context

ITEM ONE. David Corlett: “The Nightmare of Returning to Sri Lanka,” 10 September 2014 

 TORTURE BACK SMH Tamil asylum seeker shows his wounds from being tortured.

The Abbott government has all but claimed victory in stopping asylum seeker boats. Offshore processing and turning around boats at sea have been important elements in achieving this goal. Also important has been its efforts at returning asylum seekers, especially Sri Lankans. Continue reading →

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July 10, 2014 · 8:17 pm

Sinhalese Asylum-Seekers are dumped back in Galle, while …

Stefanie Balogh, in The Australian, 9 July 2014 in a news items i within the hard copy  which has several images of Sinhalese asylum-seekers in line for court hearings after being brought ashore at Galle by a SL Navy vessel 

THE Abbott government has no intention of sending 153 asylum- seekers at the centre of a High Court challenge to Sri Lanka where Tamil refugees claim they face persecution, as fresh doubts surfaced over the route of their voyage and the identities of those on board. After weeks of denying the boat’s existence, lawyers for the government yesterday revealed the group was being held on a ­Customs boat after it was intercepted outside the country’s ­migration zone.

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January 6, 2014 · 7:09 am

Laksiri Jayasuriya explores the transformation of White Australia

James Jupp, in  Journal of Population Research, 2013, vol. 30: 387-88 — reviewing Laksiri Jayasuriya: Transforming a ‘White Australia’: Issues of Racism and Immigration, SSS Publications, New Delhi, 2012, 180 pp., ISBN 81-902282-9-3

James-Jupp-web This short study by an eminent Australian scholar covers the entire period from the initiation of the White Australia policy in 1901 until the asylum seeker controversies of John Howard’s government in 2001. It will be of considerable value to those outside Australia who have only a limited knowledge of the radical changes during this century of organised mass immigration.  They include many Asians who still believe that Australia implements a “whites only” admission policy, which is far from being the case. It will also be of value to the many Australians who have only a distorted and populist view of recent developments. Continue reading →

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August 13, 2013 · 9:46 am

Arguments in Australia as irregular migrant flow becomes an election issue

Rowan Callick, in The Australian, 12 August 2013, where the title is “A Different Destination“

callickTHE drama of this especially intense election campaign is being shadowed by a more bitter struggle being played out in the tropical zone to Australia’s north, on perilous seas and in remote islands. The characteristically bold – or impetuous – Kevin Rudd solution to the asylum-seeker dilemma initially shook up the opposition as much as it did the people-smugglers, threatening to prise away Tony Abbott’s popular grip on the issue, as intended.

146788-asylum-seeker-boatIt may not fully unravel by September 7, nor is it likely on present evidence to demonstrate sustained success by then, despite the claims of Immigration Minister Tony Burke that asylum-seekers in Indonesia now “realise that what they have paid for is no longer available to them”. About 1900 have arrived since Rudd’s Papua New Guinea-Nauru solution was struck, but numbers have moderated in recent days. Continue reading →

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August 13, 2013 · 8:28 am

Lost and at sea: the asylum-seeker debate in Australia

Michael Roberts, courtesy of ASIA SENTINEL, 12 August 2013

Electoral politics have swamped the debate on irregular migrants, the “boat-people that is, in Australia. There is no change of consequence however. Rudd, Abbott, the Greens and Letters to the Editor continue to present (a) many of the old shibboleths and oversimplifications that have skewed discussions of this issue for years. The motifs peddled in most quarters are also directed by (b) misinformation, exaggeration and fabrication and (c) ideological blinkers.

ASIA SENTINEL from Asia Sentinel

A self-evident fact is often glossed over: migration in modern times, whether legal, humanitarian or irregular, is a complex phenomenon. Given the diverse lands from which migrants have headed for Australia it follows that one must attend to regional differentiation in speaking about this topic. Yet sweeping generalizations are continuously voiced – not only by politicians and human rights lawyers, but also by concerned citizens of compassionate heart and, on the other side, by intransigent Aussies on the Right. Continue reading →

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