அவுஸ்திரெலியா ABC தொலைக்காட்சியில் வந்த இந்தோனேசியா கடற்படை அதிகாரிகளினால் மடக்கிப்பிடிக்கப்பட்ட எம்மவர்களின் செவ்விகள் (காணொளி)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/10/15/2714620.htm

அவுஸ்திரெலியா 'THE WIRE' ஊடகத்தில் வந்த செய்தி

pls download this : http://www.thewire.o...%2014102009.mp3

listen from source: http://www.thewire.o...hDay=2009-10-14

The Wire : Does the government need to get tougher on people smugglers?

Produced by Catherine Zengerer

The Rudd government has been positioning itself as being tough on border protection in response to the latest wave of refugees heading towards our shores. Today the situation has escalated with 260 Sri Lankan asylum seekers in waters between Australia and Indonesia reportedly threatening to blow themselves up if the Indonesian military forces them ashore there instead of here. Former Minister for Immigration Philip Ruddock, says Australia needs to toughen up it’s border protection laws, or we’ll face a flood of asylum seekers, thanks to the work of people smugglers. But is toughening up on people smugglers going to help? Featured in story: Bernard Keane, Canberra Correspondent for Crikey and Dr Sam Pari, National Spokesperson for the Australian Tamil Congress

அவுஸ்திரெலியா ஊடகங்களில் வந்த செய்திகள்(காணொளிகள்)

http://player.sbs.com.au/naca/#/naca/wna/Latest/playlist/Sri-Lankans-appeal-to-PM/

http://www.theage.com.au/national/letters/rudd-playing-on-illinformed-fears-20091015-gz40.html

http://www.2ue.com.au/displayPopUpPlayerAction.action?&url=http://media.mytalk.com.au/2ue/audio/161009tamil.wmv

http://www.theage.com.au/national/rudd-pressed-to-visit-sri-lankan-camps-20091016-h184.html

http://fastuntoaction.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/7362/

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/what-gain-in-stopping-the-boats-20091111-i9y1.html?autostart=1

What gain in stopping the boats?

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?

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''.

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''.

Source: The Age