Indonesia’s ambassador to Australia has criticized Canberra’s tough stance on people smugglers, saying many of the accused traffickers in detention were innocent, a newspaper reported yesterday.
This year has seen a surge in arrivals of asylum seekers in Australia’s northern waters, generally from war-torn countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka, and usually brought by boat from neighboring Indonesia.
Primo Alui Joelianto, Jakarta’s ambassador to Australia, told the Weekend Australian many Indonesians detained when those boats were intercepted knew nothing about what was going on.
“Our staff went to the detention center in Christmas Island and in Perth and they found that some of the fishermen told them that they didn’t know anything,” Joelianto told the newspaper.
“They were just asked to bring persons to fish and to go somewhere. Then, in the middle of the sea, they were told that they had to go to Australia,” Joelianto said.
Under Australian law, people-smuggling can carry penalties of up to 20 years in prison or a A$220,000 (US$175,000) fine.
A series of mostly poor Indonesian nationals have appeared in Australian courts over recent arrivals by boat and several have been sentenced to jail.
A week ago, 11 Indonesians were sentenced to jail over four boat arrivals between last December and March.
Joelianto’s comments follow the interception a week ago of a boat carrying 194 people, an unusually large number on a single vessel.
Australia’s detention center on Christmas Island, a tiny Australian possession in the Indian Ocean just south of the Indonesian island of Java, is getting full with hundreds of asylum-seekers waiting to have their claims processed.
Australian Immigration Minister Chris Evans said on Friday the government was looking at using staff quarters at a casino on the island as alternative accommodation.
Illegal immigration is a hot political issue in Australia and the conservative opposition has accused Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of taking a soft stance on asylum seekers, saying it has fueled the new wave of arrivals.
After his election in 2007, Rudd ended the “Pacific solution” of his predecessor John Howard, closing down a much-criticized processing center on the tiny island nation of Nauru.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
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