SIEV-X will not go away, despite what you don’t read in the newspapers. After closing down the Senate inquiry into the matter, Labor and Democrats Senators are going for it again, and the plot thickens even more.

Retired diplomat Tony Kevin hasn’t stopped campaigning on SIEV-X, and nor has Marg Hutton let up in documenting all the developments on her ground-breaking website sievx, including a speech by Tony arguing that the Howard government used the pre-emptive strike option it now argues should be made part of international law during its assault on boat people last year. Tony’s speech is also at abcpublicrecord

There’s a chance the Senate will pass motions this week – the last week of sittings this year – calling for a judicial inquiry into SIEV-X and the extradition of the voyage organiser Abu Quessay when he’s released from an Indonesian jail in January.

Here’s a piece Tony wrote for Webdiary to preview the action. Webdiary’s archive on the story is in the right-hand column. The upcoming book on the Tampa by Herald journalists David Marr and Marian Wilkinson will include an interesting chapter on SIEV-X, with, I understand, new information on the matter.

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SIEV-X: Not the news

by Tony Kevin

As you know, my principal area of public interest activism is the campaign for justice and accountability in the deaths of 353 people – including 146 women and 142 children – drowned on SIEV-X on 19 October 2001 as a result of an alleged Australian-instigated covert people smuggling disruption operation in Indonesia.

This intersects closely with the broader issues you’ve been covering over the past few weeks: The attack on civil liberties both federally and in NSW, the passivity of the mainstream media on that, the new ALP refugee policy and Carmen Lawrence’s exit from Shadow Cabinet. The SIEV-X issue exemplifies and dramatises many of your broader conclusions.

In particular, you asked on 2 December in Democracy’s watchdogs blind to the danger (webdiaryDec2):

“Has the media decided that in dangerous times it is an arm of government, whatever its flaws and whatever the dangers of abuse of power?”

I think something very like that has happened on SIEV-X, especially since the Senate inquiry report was handed down in the Senate on 23 October. Let me detail this a little, and then draw some broader conclusions at the end.

With a great sigh of relief, the mainstream media shelved the subject of SIEV-X after 23 October. They did not study the detail in the Senate Committee Report, the individual tabling statements and individual chapters by Senators Cook, Faulkner, Collins and Bartlett. They simply recorded with minimal comment the overall committee judgement that the ADF had not been negligent. SIEV-X quickly vanished from the news and commentary pages. For the mainstream media, the SIEV-X game was over.

So there was almost no reporting – certainly no analysis – of John Faulkner’s firmly expressed determination to go on pursuing the people smuggling disruption program which he had questioned so dramatically in the Senate in September; no reference to Labor Senator Jacinta Collins’ bucketing of PM boat people task force head Jane Halton’s credibility as a witness (Halton was a key witness on SIEV-X) , or of Collins’ bluntly expressed concerns about failures of compassion in the border protection operations; no reference to Andrew Bartlett’s concerns about the acres of blacked-out lines in submitted documentary evidence and about official witnesses’ shifting stories; no reference to Chairman Peter Cook’s (and other Senators’) call for a judicial enquiry into the disruption program and other issues related to SIEV-X.

Undeterred, www.sievx.com pressed on with the factual investigation of the story, as did the Labor Party Senate team.

A few weeks later the issue surfaced in the Senate again. Australian Federal Police chief Mick Keelty was closely quizzed in Estimates by Faulkner and Collins on two big sleeper issues: whether the AFP knew if tracking devices had been placed on SIEV boats, and what was happening now about the AFP’s promise in Keelty’s July evidence to seek to extradite the admitted SIEV-X voyage organiser Abu Quessay to Australia on homicide-related charges after his short Indonesian jail sentence for passport fraud ends on 1 January 2003?

On the tracking devices, Keelty ducked and weaved skilfully. First he asked for more time to get the answer, then the next day he claimed public interest immunity from answering, then the next day he called a press conference and declared that the AFP had not placed a tracking device on SIEV-X.

He thereby evaded the real questions, which were: Had the AFP given tracking devices to the 20 Indonesian senior policemen it had trained, funded and equipped as people smuggling disruption agent coordinators in Indonesia? Had any of the Indonesian police disruption units set up by these 20 agents , working with Quessay, sabotaged SIEV-X and concealed a tracking device in it, in order to track where it sank and where to find any survivors? Those important questions remain unanswered.

On extradition of Quessay, Keelty replied casually that advice from Attorney-Generals’ Department was that extradition for homicide was not possible because of the difficulty in establishing a jurisdiction on the basis of uncertainty where SIEV-X sank. (MARGO: Remember John Howard’s cast iron guarantee during the election campaign that SIEV-X sank in Indonesian waters? This would have meant no jurisdiction for Australian Courts, but we found out later Howard had no evidence at all for that claim and that all the evidence was to the contrary, that it sank in international waters.)

Instead, he suggested, AFP might be able to get Quessay out here on people smuggling charges if the Indonesians passed an anti-people smuggling law before Quessay is released on 1 January.

There was no media analysis or comment on these significant pieces of testimony by Australia’s Federal Police Commissioner – Australia’s top cop. There was no scrutiny of his claims regarding Quessay’s extradition despite this issue’s obvious importance.

Then Labor Senator Linda Kirk presented a South Australian petition calling for a full powers independent judicial enquiry into SIEV-X. She made a stirring speech. Again, no media coverage.

Then I gave two strong factually detailed speeches in Brisbane and Sydney. AAP wire service ( Nikki Todd) reported the Brisbane highlights. In Brisbane I said:

“There is increasing circumstantial evidence that two or three Australian federal police liaison officers who were running the Australian people smuggling disruption program out of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta during October 2001, are likely to know a great deal about how 353 asylum-seekers, mostly women and children, were killed by a ruthless Indonesian disruption operation that achieved its intended result the capsizing of a deliberately grossly overloaded boat with great loss of life – on 19 October 2001.

“But it would not be fair to simply blame these two or three men who did the job expected of them in their positions. Others further up the line of authority know enough of what may have happened to take care not to know more …”

There was no coverage of that speech (though a minor right-wing blogger website picked up the above quotation).

Last Wednesday in the Senate, Senator Bartlett asked two strong questions of AFP Minister Senator Ellison on the disruption program – in part drawing on Faulkner’s and Collins’ earlier questions to Keelty – and followed this up with an uncompromising statement noting that SIEV-X was a mass killing on the scale of Bali, that it happened in international waters, and that Australia had an obligation to do something about bringing Quessay to account and to answer outstanding questions about SIEV-X. Again, no media coverage at all.

What is going on here? Is this really such a minor story? Is it really so boring to readers? Is it really so hard to report intelligibly? Or is the truth that it is too frightening, too confronting of our complacent self-image? At what point do our mainstream media decide to pick up the SIEV-X story again?

This coming week, there is a good chance of further SIEV-X activity in the Senate.

Non-government parties may, to their great credit, agree to put down further public benchmarks of Senate opinion on the issues. How will the mainstream media report and comment on this? What will make it “news”?

This is where your wider diagnosis fits in, Margo. There has been a lot of interesting analysis lately by senior commentators of John Howard’s growing agenda-setting power, and of his power to get things done without wanting to know the detail of how they are done. (Carr is operating on similar lines). Both trends are important indicators of a growing “soft authoritarianism” in Australia.

In the latter regard, the children overboard photographs are often cited as an example. But this is a “safe” example to use. It takes considerably more courage to link questions about SIEV-X with discussions on John Howard’s growing power. Maybe discussion of that linkage must be postponed till more evidence is in on what was really happening in Indonesia between the AFP, its Indonesian police agents, and its undercover agents.

Possibly there is now a view in influential editorial offices that the SIEV-X and people disruption story – even if it is true – is too disturbing and confronting at a time when Australia is still digesting the tragedy of Bali, and the government is trying to build a national consensus that does not yet exist behind war with the US ally against Iraq.

Maybe the mainstream editorial view is – we don’t want to have to deal in Australia with this complication and distraction from the “war on terror”, so let’s push this aside until such time as we may have more leisure to devote some attention to it. Don’t let it grow into a big issue now, because it could become too divisive.

If true, this would explain the media’s lack of attention to SIEV-X over the past seven weeks.

I profoundly disagree with such a view. Like the WW2-era British police inspector in the excellent recent ABC TV series Foyle’s War, I believe that murder is murder whenever it happens and whoever is responsible. After all, 353 people died on SIEV-X!

I am glad to see the Senate supporting these concerns and setting an example to the rest of Australia. The evidence is building (see www.sievx.com) that SIEV-X was not an accident, and this evidence needs to be examined by an independent judicial enquiry with powers to subpoena witnesses and compel testimony from reluctant witnesses. Quessay needs to be detained as a key witness. It is precisely because the SIEV-X issue is building again at a time when we face difficult national challenges that it needs to be handled correctly and courageously under our law. Let the chips fall where they may.

Watch point: How will our newspapers handle developments in the Senate on the AFP people smuggling disruption program, Abu Quessay and SIEV-X, in its last sitting week 9-12 December before Quessay’s release on 1 January?