SIEV X - a helpless human cargo

Has my thinking on SIEV X advanced since I wrote my book? Yes.

I now believe SIEV X sank at the height of a covert undeclared war between powerful Indonesian national security elements that had encouraged and protected so-called people smugglers in Indonesia, with the aim to send large numbers of Middle East origin asylum-seekers down to Australia as punishment for Australia’s alleged betrayal of Indonesia in the 1999 East Timor secession: and Australian national security agencies determined to stop this plan while not publicly announcing their knowledge of it.

Many of the strange episodes noted in my book are more readily understandable under such a hypothesis. It would help explain the acute national security sensitivity of the story, the extreme ADF hostility towards the Middle Eastern asylum-seekers who came through Indonesia, all the contrived official cover-ups of fact since the sinking. It would help explain why the numbers of unauthorised boat people arrivals exploded, from 921 in 1998-99 to 4175 in 1999-2000 (DIMA Fact Sheet 73 “People Smuggling”, revised Oct 2002 (pdf 24 KB)).

It would help explain the high-level Indonesian protection of Quassey, the obsessive Australian police pursuit and sentencing of some “people smugglers”, and much more.

Most dramatically, such a view is now retrospectively supported by remarkably explicit Indonesian Government warnings to Australia earlier this year, that people smuggling of Middle Eastern asylum-seekers from Indonesia to Australia which ended in 2002 with the help of the Indonesian authorities might resume if Australia were to go on accepting West Papuan boat people as refugees. I understand statements by President Yudhoyono and Foreign Minister Wirayuda to be clear warnings.

Is this latest twist in the SIEV X story provable? Not yet. Probably now it will take deathbed confessions, sworn notarised statements by men or women of conscience who are in the know. But it makes some sense in explaining the political context for an otherwise inexplicably cruel and ruthlessly covered-up event.

If the people on SIEV X were a helpless human cargo, innocent collateral damage in a secret war between two neighbouring countries’ intelligence and special operations agents, this still does not explain how their boat was allowed to sail for over 30 hours out into the perilous open sea where it predictably sank and hundreds died without help from any quarter. My original questions remain unanswered. One day they will be answered.