What if? Security and asylum seekers

The security clearance industry is just that – an industry. In theory and more often in practice, the more sophisticated a society the more efficient and streamlined is the process for obtaining a security clearance.

Record keeping - births, deaths and marriages – school, trade and university qualifications, police records, military service records and media interventions, mentions and appearances, all assist in building a profile. Couple this with an efficient filing and retrieval system and obtaining a security clearance should be neither difficult nor lengthy.

Where things start to unravel is when some, or many, of the prerequisites listed above are not kept on file or are missing from file. Add to this sloppy record keeping and matters become a bit hit or miss. Further add in corruption and the process ceases to function, information can be added or subtracted as needs be.

There has been much talk recently of the efficacy of obtaining security clearances in Afghanistan: all of the negative factors listed, and few of the positive profile building prerequisites are present in that country.

In seeking security information from corrupted and degraded sources, western and other sophisticated security agencies are forced at times to make some hard calls. Rather than leave a blank on a vital section of a security form they might be forced to make a considered judgement based on the information available, which at times might be rather slim.

In the absence of reliable records and file keeping they might feel constrained to rely on the advice of a reliable and cultivated contact. There is always the possibility that this contact might be working for someone else or another organisation with a different agenda.

Nonetheless, political pressure might conspire to force assessments from quite thin evidence or from less than satisfactory sources. We live in an age where certainty is demanded when none can be given, Afghanistan being a case in point. But politicians require the environments they create to be water-tight, particularly when it comes to the dreaded ‘T’ word.

Most agencies live with this and mostly they do not end up giving clearances to members of terrorist groups. But when 20,000 security clearances were recently given the nod in Australia even when all the boxes were not ticked is indicative of the extent to which agencies tacitly acknowledge some information cannot be obtained and other information is not worth the paper it is written on.

Sometimes a senior agency, say in the U.S., France or Britain will make a judgement call or a value judgement. Over time, sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly, this call gets woven into a decision, which gets picked up by other agencies and with more time becomes an established fact.

One of the great difficulties for western agencies is relying on a single source for assessments and advice when that source is a part of, or even the other half of, an ongoing civil and political disturbance. Relying on advice from Mossad on the politics of Palestine is unwise.

Outside agencies must rely on advice for security clearances relating to Tamils living in Sri Lanka on the Sri Lankan security agencies. These agencies have been fighting the Tamils for the last three decades. They remain hostile toward the Tamils: they are the enemy.

They classified the military wing of the Tamil movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), as terrorists and in an atmosphere of heightened tension following the 9/11 attacks, were able to get a number of countries, some of them powerful, to also list the LTTE as a terrorist organisation.

The classification is contestable, but is pushed remorselessly by the Sri Lankan Government, its agencies and embassies and remains accepted by a number of countries because of this pressure. The government of Sri Lanka maintains this pressure despite having won the war against the Tamil people in 2009. This pressure, with its attendant attitude of hostility toward the Tamils, is a strong statement about the bleak prospects for reconciliation on the part of the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka and members of the expatriate community toward the Tamil minority.

To rely on the Sri Lankan agencies as sole providers of information on asylum seekers under Australian protection is perhaps understandable but unfair. It allows an unacceptable bias to be built into the process of assessment.

Given that LTTE acts of terror over three decades were carried out inside the country, with the exception of the politically stupid murder of Rajiv Ghandi in India in 1991, and that the war is now over, it is probably time to drop the single source vetting of former members and associates of the LTTE as terrorists, particularly when all members of the Tamil community in the north of Sri Lanka were associates of the LTTE in one way or another.

ASIO have taken an unconscionable amount of time to vet and provide clearances for some Tamil asylum seekers and for some already granted refugee status but who remain in detention. In a horrible act of despair and frustration a Tamil, ‘Shooty’ Vikaden, who had been in detention for two years and was still in detention despite having been granted refugee status, committed suicide in Villawood detention centre on 24 October.

As the Sri Lankan Government and its agencies are the only source of information relating to the classification of terrorists from the LTTE, what if they were withholding information from ASIO relating to Shooty? What if the Sri Lankan High Commission had made representations that Shooty should not be released until after CHOGM was over on grounds that he constituted an unacceptable risk to visiting Sri Lankan VIP’s. Such a claim would have demonised him. It would also have fed into the ongoing campaign of vilification and racism being conducted toward the Tamil community by the Sinhalese.

What if representations were made to the Australian Government by the Sri Lankan Government through their High Commission in Canberra that on grounds of security Shooty and others in his category, that is they fought against the Sri Lankan army as members of the LTTE, should not be released from detention and that the Department of Immigration was advised to hold Shooty in detention despite his having been granted refugee status.

What if ASIO or Immigration were responding to informal pressure from the Sri Lankan High Commission? We know that the AFP had contact with the Sri Lankan High Commission in the past and has ongoing contact with the police, navy and army and presumably other agencies in Sri Lanka. What would prevent ASIO and Immigration having similar contact?

The flawed industry of security clearances needs urgent investigation, particularly with respect to Sri Lankan ‘clearances’