Australia playing Sri Lanka's authoritarian game

In the dog-whistle competition between major political parties against asylum seekers and the war on alleged “terrorism”, the Australian government has jailed legitimate refugees, without charge, for reasons — extraordinarily — we are not allowed to know about. Opposition Senator George Brandis claims refugees who are deemed a “security threat” should be jailed because they entered Australia “illegally”, parroting the patently misleading line put by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

The government is more careful, simply saying a group of asylum seekers who have been granted refugee status have been found to be a security threat. Prime Minister Julia Gillard says we should not second-guess ASIO’s security assessment of asylum seekers who are found to be genuine refugees but who have had an adverse security assessment:

“They know about things like the conflict in Sri Lanka. They use the best intelligence they can to give us the best advice they can. So any suggestion that these people are just naively ringing up governments around the world and saying ‘What do you reckon?’ is not fair to those intelligence analysts and you should not create that perception in people’s minds.”

This admonishment not to ask questions, however, runs contrary to what is known about the way in which the Australian government reached previous determinations on the issue. In terrorism trials against three Sri Lankan Tamil Australians in 2010, the Australian Federal Police relied on evidence provided directly by the Sri Lankan government. That case failed on the grounds that the Tamil Tigers, with which the defendents were allegedly connected, was not actually proscribed as a terrorist organisation in Australia.

While ASIO is not just naively ringing up governments around the world, at least one government is “ringing up” Australian security agencies and providing information. That information, from a government that is under scrutiny for war crimes and continuing human rights violations, has been deeply biased, hence flawed and quite often wrong.

The ASIO finding that some Tamil refugees remain committed to achieving a separate state for Tamils in Sri Lanka coincides with the Sri Lankan government’s own assessment of their continuing, and self-serving, threat to that state. The Tamil Tigers were destroyed in 2009, along with the deaths of some 40,000 civilians, and they no longer exist.

But in Sri Lanka, Tamils are still persecuted and “disappeared”, Tamil women are r-ped, and even non-Tamil Sri Lankans are increasingly living under the Rajapaksa government’s jackboot. Journalists are targeted for assassination, the high court has been emasculated, and President Mahinda Rajapaksa has removed restraints on his personalised rule.

But, having fled this environment in fear of their lives, as found by the Refugee Tribunal, former combatants or or pro-independence sympathisers are now being jailed, under secret terms that, on the face of it, fit neatly with Sri Lanka’s authoritarian regime.