The Torres News – newspaper for the Torres Strait and the Northern Peninsula Areas of Cape York – has a piece on their website (and the front page of their dead tree version) about the recent arrival of fifty Tamil asylum seekers in the region.
They raise the curious question of “why the vessel and its occupants were allowed to remain stuck on Warrior Reef for four days although the (government) agencies admit to knowing the boat people were there.”
The style and detail of the story makes an interesting contrast to a lot of the mainstream media coverage of asylum seeker arrivals. It gives a detailed description of circumstances surrounding the detection, apprehension and transferring of the asylum seekers on to a plane on Horn Island en route to Weipa and then Christmas Island.
It also provides at least some insight into the terrible situations many Tamil civilians have been facing in Sri Lanka in recent months. Members of Australia’s Tamil communities have been getting more and more desperate about the deterioration in safety, which has now culminated in determined protestsoutside Kirribilli House in Sydney.
This website details some of the concerns of Tamil communities in Australia and elsewhere around the world. This UNHCR report (pdf file) from 2006 gives an idea of the widespread and entrenched human rights abuses affecting civilians from all sides of the long-standing civil conflict in Sri Lanka.
The latest statement from Human Rights Watch on the situation is at this link. To read their February 2009 report “War on the Displaced: Sri Lankan Army and LTTE Abuses against Civilians in the Vanni region” go to this link.
Of course, facts about human rights abuses in Sri Lanka do not automatically mean the asylum claims of those found in the Torres Strait will meet the high threshold required in Australia to obtain refugee status. Each of those cases will have to be assessed individually. The opinions of the Sri Lankan government and their representatives in Canberra about the situation with Tamils can sometimes make the process of making those assessments a bit diplomatically prickly, but shouldn’t impact on the eventual decision.
UPDATE: The UNHCR has just released their latest, updated guidelines for assessing refugee claimants from Sri Lanka. It provides a thorough indication of just how dangerous the situation currently is there.
ELSEWHERE: Jim Alexander at New Matilda provides a balanced view of the concerns of many Tamil people.
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