Hosted alongside the premiere of 'Tampa: The Turning Point', a panel featuring Abbas Nazari, Alexander Downer and Dr Madeline Gleeson explored the lasting political and human consequences of one rescue at sea.
The international standoff now known as ‘the Tampa affair’ happened in August 2001, when the Howard Government refused entry to the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, which was carrying 438 people it had rescued from a fishing boat distressed at sea. On board was Abbas Nazari, a seven-year-old Afghan boy. In Canberra was then-Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
Twenty-five years later, both Downer, now a board director and consultant for a UK think tank, and Nazari, a New Zealand-based business owner, Fulbright scholar, author and father, were together on stage at Sydney’s Australian National Maritime Museum. They were joined by the Kaldor Centre’s Deputy Director, Dr Madeline Gleeson, for a discussion chaired by David Marr, journalist and co-author with Marian Wilkinson of Dark Victory, a 2003 book about the events.
The audience had just watched the dramatic first episode of Tampa: The Turning Point, a new three-part ABC/Mint Pictures series that screened as part of the museum event.
At moments during the panel discussion and its Q&A session, the atmosphere was as charged as when Australia’s response to the Tampa first made headlines around the world.
‘It’s easy to be emotional,’ Downer replied as he faced questions about political motivations at play during the standoff. ‘But when you’re in government, you have to deal with practical issues.’ Wicked decisions, as he called them in the new documentary.
Nazari described another wicked decision. ‘I try to put myself in my dad's shoes when he decided that we needed to get out of Afghanistan,’ as the Taliban violently took over his homeland.
‘He was a truck driver, and he hatched a plan that he was going to get us out of there to Pakistan – because, from where we lived in the east, it was easier to get to Pakistan than Iran. And that was the extent of his plan: get to Pakistan and figure out the rest from there,’ Nazari told the Sydney audience.
‘So, in the back of a truck, over the course of a week, we made our way to Quetta, in Pakistan, and from there we had to figure out life. Living in a UNHCR tent on the side of the road, renting a house, relying on connections with Dad's other truck-driver friends.’
‘We did that for weeks, and months and seasons went by. We figured out that we couldn't go back to Afghanistan, and we couldn't build a life [in Pakistan] either, because we had no rights to education or employment, no right to building a life. We couldn't go back, and we couldn't go forward, in that country. All the doors seemed shut. So where to from there?
‘Putting aside all the political arguments, if you're the head of your household, you naturally just have to ask yourself: “I have my wife and my kids in tow, where can I give them the very best foundation for life?” So, after months of living in that refugee camp, you realise the best way forward is to try and go elsewhere,’ he said.
In his bestselling memoir After the Tampa, Nazari writes, ‘When we see a trail of desperate people fleeing conflict, perhaps on the television news, we miss the point in time when a parent has to make a life-altering decision on behalf of a whole family. To stay or go? To endure known misery or to march towards an unknown future?
‘Caught between the endless ocean and an uncertain earth, we chose life,’ Nazari wrote. ‘Some kind of future beckoned, and desperation powered us to climb aboard.’
As the documentary captures, day by day the government, facing an imminent election campaign, escalated the stakes.
Those events are often framed as a crisis – a notion Dr Gleeson countered. She urged the audience ‘to interrogate the idea that what Australia was facing with the boats in 2001 was a “crisis”, and that tough action was required on Tampa specifically because, if the government caved on that one boat, an imminent catastrophe was looming.
‘Australia had been receiving asylum seekers by boat since the 1970s, and there is no reason why this vessel, in particular, should have been remarkable.
‘Yes, there had been an uptick in boat arrivals that year, driven predominantly by geopolitical factors. As you can see in the documentary, the Taliban was a major driver of displacement in our region.’ Dr Gleeson said
‘But we were nowhere near the upper limit of what we could have processed at that time. And we were certainly nowhere near the numbers that Australia had received and managed quite successfully in previous decades. We had seen millions of people displaced from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1970s and 1980s.’
‘Our response to the Tampa, and what we saw with the boats, the bluffing, and then offshore processing, did not first emerge in 2001,’ Dr Gleeson said. ‘In [her book] Asylum By Boat, Dr Claire Higgins examines the records from the 1970s and documents how many of the arguments we heard in 2001, including those featured in the documentary, were put to Cabinet in the 1970s and rejected as unworkable, unlawful and inhumane.
‘It is excellent that we are gathering now to unpack this history, but we also need to challenge the idea that there was an imminent disaster on the horizon if some humanity had been shown to this particular group of people, and if the law had been followed in this case.’
Dr Gleeson explained the principle of non-refoulement, a key part of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which mandates that no country push or send someone back to a place where they fear persecution or serious human rights violations.
‘If any of the countries that asylum seekers transited through on the way to Australia from Afghanistan had been States parties to the Refugee Convention, we would be having a very different conversation,’ she said. ‘If people had the legal right to remain in Pakistan, or Indonesia, then Australia could have said: we'll send you back to the first safe country you reached, and that is where you should seek asylum.
‘But if you look at a map of the countries that have signed up to the Refugee Convention, you see that none of the countries on the route between Afghanistan and Australia are States parties to this agreement. As a result, there is nowhere people can stop and receive protection, until they reach Australia.’
Dr Gleeson explained that there is no evidence that the actions Australia took – including holding the MV Tampa at sea for an extended period and subsequent offshore processing policies – deterred people from arriving by boat. ‘What you're left with is something that is both inhumane and ineffective,’ Gleeson said.
Yet, then-immigration minister Philip Ruddock rose in the audience to revive the criticism of people who turn to people smugglers, asking the panel if they should be put ‘at the front of the queue’.
Dr Gleeson took on this ‘queue-jumper’ myth and its underlying logic that asylum seekers who engaged the assistance of people smugglers have somehow ‘stolen’ a place from a more deserving refugee elsewhere.
‘First, most of the world's refugees will never be resettled. They could wait a lifetime for the so-called "correct route" and die waiting. Only about 1 per cent of the world's refugees will ever be resettled.
‘The second issue is that whether someone is able to find a way out via a people smuggler is largely a matter of chance. It often comes down to circumstances and opportunity. The idea that someone who uses a people smuggler is simply throwing cash around and using their privilege to get something that others cannot is not borne out by the reality of displacement.
‘Let's take a different example and look at Syria. At the beginning of that conflict, many Syrians, if a door had been open to them, could have and would have willingly used their savings to pay for a visa, fly themselves to safety, and establish themselves in a host country,’ Dr Gleeson said.
‘But every door was closed to them. Their money was no good. There was no plane ticket they could buy because they could not get a visa, and they faced carrier sanctions and other obstacles. So, what we saw, over the course of a many-year war, was people reduced to destitution.
‘By the time many reached the shores of Europe, forced to resort to people smugglers, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs.’
Policies that produce such outcomes are not rational, Dr Gleeson noted.
Nazari said he understood that ‘immigration is one of those political footballs that ignites people's passions, regardless of which end of the political spectrum you're on.
‘I can see both perspectives incredibly well. I've been to Europe and seen, in some parts, huge social upheaval in places where host communities in cities and villages have become very anti-immigrant. Why? Well, perhaps some of the incoming communities are also not being accommodating of the communities they're coming into. Two forces are coming head-to-head, and there's no respite whatsoever. Neither party is better off.
‘But at the same time, I see the other side, too. When we were resettled in Christchurch, New Zealand, we had this innate desire to say: ‘We left Afghanistan, we've been given a golden ticket to resettle and build a new life in New Zealand.’ And most importantly, the host community in Christchurch welcomed us with open arms.
‘So, there was a beautiful symmetry: us, wanting to soak up and rebuild a new life, and them – our neighbours and teachers and footy coaches – embracing us. That is the perfect world,’ he said.
You can explore more at the Kaldor Centre’s resource page, ‘The legacy of the MV Tampa’.
Tampa: The Turning Point will premiere on ABC TV on Tuesday 1 September at 8.30pm, with all episodes available to stream on ABC iView from 7am on Wednesday 26 August, the 25th anniversary of the rescue.
Visit the UNSW Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.