REFUGEE

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Fifteen Sri Lankan Tamil refugees left Indonesia for Canada and Australia on Saturday, only two months after they were rescued at sea by an Australian customs vessel, an official said.

They are among 78 Tamils who for a month refused to leave the ship that rescued them. They finally disembarked after promises they would be rapidly resettled. Refugees in Indonesia typically wait years before being resettled.

The 78 were trying to reach Australia when their wooden boat's engine broke down in international waters near Indonesia.

They left the Indonesia immigration detention centre in Pangkalpinang on a small island just off of Sumatra on Saturday, with 13 going to resettle in Canada and two in Australia, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Sujatmiko, who uses only one name.

Australian Immigration Ministry spokesman Reese Davies declined to comment.

They are the first to find permanent homes among the 78 Tamils whose asylum claims have all been accepted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Indonesia, which is not a signatory to the U.N. Convention on Refugees, has become a major transit point for an increasing number of asylum seekers from war-ridden countries like Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq who slip through on their way to Australia.

SWEDEN has rejected a request to resettle the 78 Tamil asylum-seekers rescued by the Oceanic Viking, increasing the likelihood Australia will take them.

The rejection came as the number of unauthorised boat arrivals this year breached 2500, after the interception of a boat carrying 53 people 20 nautical miles northwest of Christmas Island yesterday.

A total of 52 boats have arrived in Australian waters, carrying 2520 people, about half of whom remain in immigration detention.

Ten Sri Lankan Tamils arrived in Brisbane yesterday after being granted refugee status by the federal government. The Tamils, who were in detention on Christmas Island, are understood to be among more than 80 boatpeople granted residence in recent days.

Several of the men said they were "very happy", but were told by officials not to comment. They will stay in motels until they can be settled in Brisbane with the help of government advocates and the local Tamil communityThe Swedish government ruled out accepting any of the Tamils who initially refused to leave the Oceanic Viking unless they were taken to Australia. After four weeks, they disembarked having secured a deal with the government to resettle in a third country within four to 12 weeks.

It is understood Sweden was one of several countries approached to take the Tamils. A spokesman for the Swedish Immigration Department, Johan Rahm, said his government was "well aware" of the situation in Indonesia. "But . . . we have not been able to assist," he told The Australian. "The reason is that quite a few of the Tamils seeking asylum in Sweden are granted protection, a fact that limits our ability to assist in this case."

Sweden's refusal to help follows a rebuff from New Zealand Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman, who ruled out taking any of the 78 and criticised the "ad hoc" manner in which the situation had been handled.

However, sources have told The Australian New Zealand is reconsidering its refusal and may take some of the refugees.

It is understood resettlement discussions are under way with several countries. Australian authorities are optimistic at least one other country will take some of the Tamils, although most will end up in Australia. A spokeswoman for Immigration Minister Chris Evans said discussions about the Tamils were under way.

"Government officials are in contact with other countries around the world, which also have resettlement programs," the spokeswoman said.

The end of the 180 day period promised by Sri Lankan President Rajapakse to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on May 23, 2009 for the release of 300,000 Tamils detained in internment camps in Sri Lanka was marked by Tamils and friends of Tamils from United States and Canada in Washington DC on Nov 20, 2009.

A spokesperson for the organizers of the event, The United States Tamil Political Action Council (USTPAC) commenting on the continuing internment of Internally Displaced Tamils said:

“These people are being subjected to collective punishment for their demands for political, social and cultural rights in their own traditional homeland. We support all efforts to allow these innocents to return freely and with dignity to their homes in a secure environment.”

Dr. Ellyn Shander of USTPAC spoke at the event urging for the release and freedom of movement of all Tamils detained in internment camps in Vavuniya and other smaller camps in North and East.

A media release by USTPAC pointed out that two thirds of these Tamils continue to be detained in poor conditions without accountability, family reunification or a timetable for release.

As Sri Lanka and even some United Nations press releases trumpet “resettlement” of Internally Displaced Tamils, there have been reports such as from The Washington Post that verify many civilians are being re-detained.

Emily Wax wrote on Nov11th in The Washington Post that, “many civilians have merely been shuffled from the large camps to smaller transit ones and are being held against their will. Others have been released, only to be taken from their homes days later with no indication of where they have gone”.

Participants expressed concern that the Tamil Internally Displaced Persons are being forced to relocate away from their original homes and in the process being denied of their livelihood and dignity by the govt. of Sri Lanka.

Several reports of allegations have been published recently about state sponsored colonization in areas where Tamils fled during the war

The USTPAC event also honored the selflessness and perseverance three young men from Toronto, Canada who walked to Washington, DC through Chicago, IL to ‘Break the Silence’ about abuses against Tamils in Sri Lanka during and after the war.

Two of the walkers, Kannan Sreekantha and Vijay Sivaneswaran walked through the heartland of America

Tamils also observed the 194th day of the Continuous Tamil Awareness Rally taking place at near Washington DC on this day.

The rally began with march from Upper Senate Park to the Lafayette Park in front of the White House.

USTPAC media release sights UNHCR and other sources, that many people “supposedly being released” are “simply being moved to more dispersed detention centers. Many of those actually released are left on the streets without resources or the right to return to their homes”.

Tamil Canadians too continue to take part in the “non-stop” awareness rally, taking place opposite The White House

Rally attendees carried placards on Sri Lankan officials allegedly committing “war crimes”.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called for an independent international investigation of possible violations of the laws of war in Sri Lanka, after US State Department issued a report on Sri Lanka situation on October 22, 2009

Mounted Police of Washington DC on this sunny fall day

Tamils and friends of Tamils from USA and Canada attended the rally on Nov 20th

The White House vicinity was decorated with flags of America and India, welcoming the visit of Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh to meet President Barack Obama on Nov 24th.

Last week in Bambalapitya, a middle-class suburb in the heart of Colombo, a mentally ill Tamil boy was beaten to death in the sea by a group of men with wooden sticks. Hundreds of people watched. The boy had been throwing stones at a police station before he jumped into the sea. His agonising death was captured on video in what Sri Lanka's former ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Dayan Jayatilleka, described as ''our Rodney King moment''.Responding to a young journalism student this week, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd maintained that his Government's actions on the Oceanic Viking abided by the letter of the Refugee Convention. Perhaps. But what about its spirit?

On the citizen journalism site Groundviews, Marisa de Silva made the crucial connections: ''If cold-blooded murder can take place in the heart of Colombo in broad daylight, in front of a crowd, we can only wonder what happened on bloody battlefields in the Vanni, with no one left to tell the tale.''

She describes Sri Lankans as living in a spectator state, a people so inured to and benumbed by brutality and violence that they contemplate in silence the spectacle of people being disappeared (the ''white van syndrome'' refers to people taken away in unmarked white vehicles and neither seen nor heard from again); the attacks on journalists, lawyers and academics of all ethnic groups who dare voice dissent; and the horrific fate of those ensnared in the refugee camps in the north-east of the country.

It is only a few months since Australian James Elder, UNICEF's chief of media and external relations, was expelled from Sri Lanka for his comments on the camps. Other human rights observers and independent journalists too have been turned away. This is the place to which Rudd dispatched Foreign Minister Stephen Smith to work out a collaborative arrangement to ''stop the boats''. Is there no moral threshold our leaders are unwilling to cross to feed the manufactured panic they themselves have created?

The Age reported last month that Australian funds will be used to install surveillance cameras at Colombo's international airport to deter asylum seekers. The measure suggests the extent of our Government's willingness to collude with a violent and vindictive regime. At the same time, it indicates a confused policy approach, as this is surely an encouragement for people who fear persecution to clamber onto a leaky boat.

The Rudd Government's declaration that new pathways for ''unskilled migration'' will be opened up further contributes to the possibility of persecution by sustaining the fiction that those on the Oceanic Viking and the Jaya Lestari are ''economic migrants''. In fact, many are highly skilled migrants and are, as we know, already UNHCR-certified refugees.

The streets of Bambalapitiya are very well known to me. For a short while my family lived not far from there. It was on Galle Road that a man I can only assume was a Tamil ultra-nationalist slapped me on the head one day for behaviour unbefitting a Tamil woman - I was dressed in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt. Perhaps he knew, too, that I was married to a Sinhala man. Anti-Tamil violence marked the week of our wedding. I left Sri Lanka later that year, first to live in the US as a student, and later to live in Australia.

Unlike the members of my extended family, I escaped the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1983. Some of my cousins and friends lost everything they owned and were lucky not to be burned along with their houses. During the long years of the war, I supported neither the murderous Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam nor the murderous Sri Lankan government: I had the prerogative of choice, a luxury many Tamils, especially in the war-torn north and east, could not afford.

That luxury to choose, perhaps the greatest of our prerogatives, is one that some Australians, too, are exercising in the face of the ethical dilemma that confronts us. The Maritime Union of Australia, whose members have worked on the frontline aboard the Oceanic Viking, collected a $10,000 donation to be presented to the refugees, as a gesture of solidarity and empathy. With demonisation of asylum seekers once again a popular sport, this gesture sends a strong signal that counters the fearmongering of our official leaders and casts doubt on the claim made by Piers Ackerman on the ABC TV Insiders program that asylum seekers put the lives of Australian sailors at risk.

As we celebrate the images of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the rush of East German refugees to freedom, what of the refugees at our borders, of the children still aboard the Jaya Lestari, a boat turned back by the Indonesian navy at our PM's request? The Refugee Convention of 1951 was agreed on by world leaders to prevent the situation all too common in the lead-up to World War II: boatloads of Jewish refugees from Germany, turned away from successive European and American ports.

To what lengths are Australians willing to be led by a historical anxiety over invasion and the ''natural right to secure borders'' to which our leaders lay claim? Is it time to face this fear for what it is - a form of aggression against the most vulnerable to shore up our own sense of power? Unless we begin to question the imperative that we must stop the boats at any price, might we too be in danger of becoming our own kind of ''spectator state''?

Suvendrini Perera is an academic at Curtin University, and author of Australia and the Insular Imagination. With John Stratton she recently edited a special issue of Continuum, ''The Border, the Asylum Seeker and the State of Exception''.

The plight of Tamils living in intolerable conditions in Sri Lanka has been brought into sharp relief by the tragic drowning of 12 asylum seekers last Sunday after their small vessel sank in the Indian Ocean as they sought to reach Australia.
The Australian government’s “Fortress Australia” immigration policies, which force asylum seekers to undertake increasingly hazardous journeys in small, unseaworthy boats, are directly responsible for the drownings. But the Sri Lankan government of President Mahinda Rajapakse is also culpable. The desperation of Tamils to flee Sri Lanka is a product of the policies of his government.
Having narrowly won office in 2005, President Rajapakse restarted the communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in mid-2006, openly breaching the 2002 ceasefire. With the tacit backing of all the major and regional powers, including Australia, the Sri Lankan military waged a ruthless war of attrition, indiscriminately bombing and shelling civilians in LTTE-held areas.
In the final months of the war that ended in May, the UN estimated that at least 7,000 civilians were killed, many in the army’s self-declared No Fire Zone. Many more were injured and maimed. Rajapakse boasted that he had “liberated” Tamils from the LTTE, but the claim is a grotesque lie. Following the fall of the LTTE, the army herded more than 250,000 civilians, many of them injured and malnourished, into squalid concentration camps that were dubbed “welfare villages”.
These camps are run by the military, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers. The detainees are not permitted to voluntarily leave. Young detainees are interrogated and tens of thousands have been dragged away as “LTTE suspects” to undisclosed “rehabilitation centres,” which have been notorious in the past for torture.
Life outside the detention camps is not much better. Even though the war is over, the government is boosting the armed forces and preparing for the permanent military occupation of the North and East of the island. New police stations and military camps are under construction throughout former LTTE-held territory.
Those detainees who have been released from the internment camps have been returned to villages that are constantly under the eye of the military. Most do not have jobs or even proper shelter. They have been given no assistance. They are not permitted to travel freely. Young people are hauled in regularly for checks. As some have told the WSWS, it is just like being in a larger detention camp.
Even in the capital of Colombo, a walk to the shops or a bus ride to work for Tamils is a hazardous venture. Despite the end of the war, there are military checkpoints, roadblocks and heavily armed troops everywhere. Vehicles and pedestrians are stopped and checked. Bus passengers can be ordered to disembark. Discrimination begins as soon as a police officer or a soldier sees a Tamil name on an identity card. Questioning and harassment, interrogation at a police station, and lengthy detention without trial can all follow. All the country’s draconian emergency regulations and laws remain in place and thousands of Tamils have been detained without charge or trial as terrorist suspects.
Nowhere is safe. Any one of a number of pretexts can be used to cordon off predominantly Tamil areas, search house-to-house and transport hundreds to police stations for further questioning. Even more sinister are the pro-government death squads that have “disappeared” or murdered hundreds of people, including leading journalists and politicians, over the past three years. The Committee to Monitor Investigations into Abductions and Disappearances (CMIAD) puts the number of disappeared last year at 283, and 113 so far this year, but the actual figure is certainly much higher.
Any open critic of the government is liable for harsh treatment. In a particularly graphic case, a Colombo High Court in September sentenced Tamil journalist J.S. Tissanayagam to 20 years’ hard labour for publishing two articles critical of the Rajapakse government and its war. His conviction was based on an alleged confession to the police Terrorism Investigation Division, which is infamous for using torture. Tissanayagam not only retracted the “confession” in court, saying it had been signed under duress, but alleged that it had been subsequently altered to suggest that he had taken money from the LTTE.
The persecution of Tamils is not simply a product of the Rajapakse government. Just as the Australian bourgeoisie has relied on its “Fortress Australia” racism to divide workers for over a century, its Sri Lankan counterpart has rested on anti-Tamil communalism ever since independence from Britain in 1948. One of the first actions of the newly independent government was to strip a million Tamil-speaking plantation workers of their citizenship rights.
Just as whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment is the stock-in-trade of politicians in Canberra, their counterparts in Colombo invariably turn to anti-Tamil chauvinism in times of crisis. In 1956, Sinhala was made the only state language, reducing all Tamils to the status of second-class citizens. In 1972, a new constitution made Buddhism—the religion of many Sinhalese—the state religion, thus discriminating against all other faiths, particularly Hinduism—the main religion of the Tamil minority.
Despite government denials, much of this discrimination is still in place. In practice, official business, whether it is in the courts, government offices or police stations, as well as correspondence is still largely conducted in Sinhalese and English. So pervasive is the practice that there have been cases where so-called confessions extracted under torture from “LTTE suspects” have been in Sinhalese, even though the detainee neither read nor spoke the language.
By any definition, including the restrictive one contained in the 1951 International Refugee Convention, the entire Tamil minority could qualify as refugees. In the words of the convention, all Sri Lankan Tamils have a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”.
For the most part, the media in Australia and Sri Lanka have buried these inconvenient truths about the persecution of Tamils. In an effort to vilify asylum seekers, articles have appeared in Australian newspapers raising the scare that “LTTE terrorists” are among those seeking refuge. In some cases, these comments have simply quoted uncritically the prejudiced remarks of Sri Lankan officials, who habitually treat all Tamils as “terrorists”. The very fact that a quarter of a million Tamil civilians are being held as virtual prisoners of war speaks volumes about the attitude of the entire Colombo political establishment toward Tamils.
While the SEP fundamentally opposes the LTTE’s program, its communal outlook and its attacks on Sinhalese civilians, the LTTE is not a “terrorist” organisation but a national movement based on the demand for a separate capitalist state of Eelam. It emerged in response to decades of official discrimination against Tamils. Civil war began in 1983 after a horrific anti-Tamil pogrom by pro-government thugs across the island that claimed hundreds of lives and the widespread destruction of Tamil homes and businesses.
If there are former LTTE cadres on the boats heading for Australia, they are certainly “refugees” under international law. If returned to Sri Lanka, LTTE members would be immediately jailed without charge or trial and face the danger of torture or worse.
It is no accident that persecution of Tamils, in Sri Lanka and those fleeing on small boats, is intensifying now. Around the world, the poisonous fumes of nationalism, racism and communalism emerging everywhere are an unmistakable symptom of a diseased and decaying social order. In response to the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, the political representatives of the profit system fear above all a unified political movement of the international working class fighting for their class interests and the fashioning of better world on socialist lines.
The unification of the working class is not a hazy pipedream. Never before in history have workers been so closely integrated through the global processes of production and are exploited in many cases by the same transnational corporations. The integration of the working class requires an international party that is intransigently opposed to all forms of nationalism and racism. The Socialist Equality Parties of Sri Lanka and Australia stand shoulder to shoulder in this fight, together with their sister parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
We call on workers in Australia, Sri Lanka and internationally to come to the aid of asylum seekers wanting refuge in Australia and to demand the ending of all immigration restrictions. Working people should have the right to live, work or study in any corner of the globe with full citizenship rights. At the same time, we call for the immediate end to all anti-democratic laws in Sri Lanka and the release of all Tamils currently held in detention camps and “rehabilitation centres”. Billions of dollars must be allocated to help these victims of war rebuild their shattered lives.
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THE federal Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, has seized on a report that most of the asylum seekers in a stand-off with Australian authorities have lived in Indonesia for years.

He suggested that it destroyed the Government's claim that recent boat arrivals were due to the end of the Sri Lankan civil war rather than Australian policy changes.

The Sun-Herald reported yesterday that in messages thrown off the Oceanic Viking, asylum seekers said they had been living in Indonesia for as long as five years and had been accepted by the United Nations in Jakarta as genuine refugees.

Mr Turnbull told Channel Ten: ''If, in fact, it is true that most of the asylum seekers on the Oceanic Viking have been living in Indonesia for five years, then that completely demolishes Kevin Rudd's argument that the only reason we're seeing this recent surge in the last 12 months or so is because of … the end of the hostilities of the war in Sri Lanka.''

The Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, said the status of the asylum seekers was unclear. ''As always in these things, I believe it's best not to rush to judgment and not assume facts that we might see in media or other reports,'' he told Channel Nine.

''The best way of ascertaining that is for the 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers to go off the boat and be assessed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Indonesia.''

The asylum seekers are refusing to disembark because they want to seek asylum in Australia.

The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, said he did not know the status of the asylum seekers, but said it was a matter for the UNHCR. ''I'm unaware of what the outcome of any processing or initial processing or initial discussions may be,'' Mr Rudd told reporters in Canberra.

He could not say whether Australian officials had interviewed the asylum seekers.

He criticised Mr Turnbull for refusing to put forward an alternative policy. ''If you don't have the courage and the determination to frame a policy on border protection, how could anyone expect you to have the courage and the determination to take the tough decisions on border protection which are expected of a government on any particular day?''

Mr Turnbull refused to say what the Coalition would do.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

THE union movement will today demand Kevin Rudd adopt a softer approach to asylum-seekers and allow 78 people in limbo on board the Oceanic Viking to enter Australia for processing.

Unions that contribute millions of dollars to the ALP's election war chest through membership fees will urge Mr Rudd to end the standoff by ordering the Customs vessel to head for Christmas Island to process the asylum-seekers' claims.

The ACTU has also taken out an advertisement in The Australian today, calling on the government to take a more humane approach to asylum-seekers.

The union push comes amid claims that Indonesian authorities restricted water supplies on the weekend to another wooden refugee boat with 255 Australia-bound asylum-seekers anchored off the Indonesian port of Merak in a bid to force them off the boat.

Three people had been hospitalised and more than 30 asylum-seekers, including sick children, are suffering from conjunctivitis.

ACTU president Sharan Burrow said blue-collar workers would back Mr Rudd if he showed leadership on asylum-seekers rather than "blind adherence to hardline border security policy", adding that it was time for Australia to "do the right thing".

"The government should demonstrate Australians' strong humanitarian values by stepping in and bringing these people to Australia," Ms Burrow told The Australian. "Everyone deserves a fair go. These unfortunate people have been through enough. Their ordeal should be brought to an end and they should be given immediate shelter and proper care by Australian authorities.

"It's absolutely legally accurate they were rescued in international waters. Technically, this is Indonesia's responsibility. But that's not the point. You can't have 78 asylum-seekers floating around indefinitely.

"Working Australians will respect strong political leadership that shows a humane response rather than a blind adherence to hardline border security policy."

Ms Burrow said that, as more asylum-seekers were fleeing Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and the Middle East, the Rudd government should work with other leaders in the region to establish humane facilities for people seeking safety from conflict zones. Unions NSW secretary Mark Lennon is leading the push to form a coalition with church groups to call on Mr Rudd to show greater compassion.

Australian Workers Union boss Paul Howes was the first to break ranks to urge Mr Rudd to change tack, calling on him to show leadership and saying to change the debate would be "real Labor hero stuff".

Despite fears children could be held behind the razor wire of Indonesian detention centres, the Rudd government's caucus has remained largely silent, with MPs Michael Danby and Julia Irwin the only ones to publicly question elements of Mr Rudd's approach.

The asylum-seekers refusing to leave the Oceanic Viking are entering their third week on the vessel after they were rescued by Australian authorities in Indonesian waters following a request for help from Indonesia.

As the Indonesians are refusing to remove the asylum-seekers by force, the Rudd government has been locked in a standoff with local authorities who have accused Australia of using the region as a dumping ground for asylum-seekers and the people on the boat who do not want their claims processed in Indonesia.

A refugee advocacy group said yesterday that 37 of the 78 Tamils on the Oceanic Viking had been assessed as refugees by UNHCR.

Mr Rudd said he was unaware whether the asylum-seekers had already been declared refugees.

The Prime Minister conceded lack of access to Sri Lankan detention camps by international aid agencies such as the UNHCR was a factor in Tamils opting for the people-smuggling route to a better life in Australia.

Mr Rudd said his policy on asylum-seekers was clear cut: "We believe that in the national interest what's required is a responsible policy on immigration, hardline on people-smugglers, humane on asylum-seekers."

Refugee advocates in touch with the Tamil boatpeople in Merak told The Australian yesterday more than 30 asylum-seekers, including children, were infected with conjunctivitis. That boat was intercepted in Indonesian waters following a tip-off from Australia.

Saradha Nathan of the Australian Tamil Congress said the Merak asylum-seekers had just one communal toilet to share between more than 250 people.

The "tough talk" over the case of Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Australia's abrogation of its responsibility to these people in deals with Indonesia (which have turned sour) has left me puzzled and disappointed.

Where was this "tough talk" when Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka were being relentlessly shelled by the Sri Lankan military in the war earlier this year? What practical measures has the Australian Government taken to address the suffering of Tamil civilians in the internment camps in Sri Lanka since the war ended in May? More than 250,000 Tamil civilians have been detained since May in barbed-wire fenced internment camps, where they are subject to massive overcrowding, shortage of food and medical facilities, abductions, including the abduction of children, rape, torture, disease, and when the monsoons set in, flooding.

It is the extreme, so-called "push factors" and the entrenched discrimination against Tamils in Sri Lanka that leads to desperate acts, such as embarking on a dangerous voyage on unsafe vessels.

Human Rights Organisations, such Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have repeatedly expressed their concern about the conditions in the camps. Both organisations have repeatedly called for the release of Tamil civilians from the internment camps and have accused the Sri Lankan Government of falsely claiming that it had allowed thousands of detained civilians in the camps to return home. In reality, many of the people that the Government claims to have released have been transferred from one detention camp to another, a so-called "way station". Asia director at Human Rights Watch Brad Adams has said: "While the Government has the right to screen the displaced persons for security reasons, the process has turned into a ruse to hold as many Tamils for as long as possible in the camps. The Government's untruthful statements and promises should not fool anybody anymore."

Amnesty International has stated that the camps are filthy, overcrowded and dangerous. Heavy rains in September caused rivers of water to cascade through the tents, forcing camp residents to wade through sewage. Monsoon rains are expected to start soon, threatening to flood the camps. One escapee told Amnesty that some women are forced to give birth in front of strangers without privacy.

All international media and non-governmental organisations have been locked out of the camps, ensuring that the suffering of the people is far from public attention. The Times newspaper in England has reported that 1400 civilians each week are dying in the camps. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has admitted to the House of Commons that the British Government was aware that the extrajudicial killing of Tamils has taken place, both inside and outside the camps. The European Union is set to recommend withdrawing trade benefits from Sri Lanka over alleged human rights abuses in the last stages of the civil war. The EU has investigated whether Sri Lanka violated the UN Convention against Torture, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In August it completed a report that described a culture of "complete or virtually complete impunity in Sri Lanka", citing police torture, abductions of journalists and uninvestigated disappearances.

In addition, earlier this week, in a 70-page report, the US Government was highly critical of the Sri Lankan Government. The report alleged that Sri Lankan Government forces abducted and killed ethnic Tamil civilians, shelled and bombed no-fire zones, and killed senior rebel leaders with whom they had brokered a surrender. The report describes a hellish scene, in which a no-fire zone, crowded with civilians, was struck by sustained shelling and bombing. It estimated that 100 people per day were killed by Sri Lankan army shelling and bombing. Hospitals in the area were continually struck by shells, even though their locations had been carefully reported to the Government.

Many of the critics of the 260 asylum seekers label them "queue jumpers". How can one jump a queue, when one was never allowed to join the queue? The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), which is responsible for processing the claims of refugees, is not allowed in the camps.

The Australian Government's response has been to pledge to send Australian police to Sri Lanka to help the Government there clamp down on the exodus of asylum seekers. This is after the Australian Government that sent its deputy chief of the navy, Rear Admiral Davyd Thomas, to Colombo in June 2009 to urge that young Tamils be prevented from coming to Australia. Has Australia sent a parliamentary delegation to Sri Lanka to inspect the internment camps and see the conditions for themselves? The answer is no. The weak response of the Australian Government to its own citizen, UNICEF spokesman James Elder who was expelled from Sri Lanka, illustrates its lack of conviction in addressing the human rights concerns of the Tamil people. Furthermore, in July, a second Australian citizen, also a senior UN diplomat was given two weeks to leave the country, for providing detailed rebuttals of Sri Lankan Government "wartime propaganda" during the final battles against the Tamil Tigers. Both expulsions were under the instructions of Palitha Kohona, the then permanent secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Sri Lankan Government. He has just been awarded permanent representative of Sri Lanka to the UN. Kohona is also an Australian citizen, who, before returning to Sri Lanka, was the head of the trade and investment section of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

People do not flee their home countries lightly. Demonising asylum seekers or people smugglers does not help the situation. We need to understand the conditions that force people to flee their home countries. The definition of a refugee is someone who flees persecution. It would be worth examining why Sri Lankan Tamils fear persecution. The Australian Government should look carefully at the situation in Sri Lanka, and urge the Sri Lankan Government to improve its treatment of Tamil citizens if it wants to stem the tide of asylum seekers.

A senior member of Australia's Sri Lankan Tamil community says there are certain to be some former Tamil Tiger guerillas among asylum seekers fleeing Sri Lanka.

Doctor Victor Rajakulendran, secretary of the Australasian Federation of Tamil Associations, says while he has no specific names, it stands to reason there will be some former guerillas among those seeking asylum.

"They will be on the run like any other people in Sri Lanka," he said.

Dr Rajakulendran says the fact they have been guerillas should not be a barrier for them being accepted as genuine refugees, as they face the most persecution if sent back.

He says the former guerillas pose no threat to countries like Australia, but will need help to resettle.

"Put them into some sort of education, vocational education, because they were not in schools for years," he said.

Dr Rajakulendran says he believes the proportion of former guerillas on the boats trying to come to Australia is small.

He also says it appears parts of the Sri Lankan security forces are helping some asylum seekers flee the country.

"There are stories that people are getting out of the detention camps by paying money to the security forces. I wouldn't be surprised even if the Sri Lankan navy is helping these people to get out of this country," he said.

Over 250 Tamil asylum seekers fleeing Sri Lanka have appealed to Australia to grant them refuge after the Indonesian navy intercepted their boat on its way to this country.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had earlier this week asked Indonesia to intercept the boat carrying the asylum seekers, and the vessel is struck in an Indonesian island.

"We are Sri Lankan refugees, please take us to your country, we can't live in Sri Lanka. Please help us and save our lives. We are your children. Please think of us," an AAP report quoted a nine-year-old girl Brindah, who is on the boat, as appealing to the Australian government.

The report said Brindah is one of the Tamils crammed on to the bow of a rickety wooden cargo boat moored alongside an Indonesian navy ship in Merak, western Java.