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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS