By Jill Fraser
MELBOURNE, Australia
The Australian Greens have called for an independent judicial inquiry into the trauma facing naval personnel tasked with intercepting asylum seekers on the high seas.
Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, the party’s immigration spokeswoman, told The Anadolu Agency that sailors with the Royal Australian Navy were being exposed to psychological risks through the excessive secrecy surrounding Australia’s policy towards boats carrying refugees.
“Coordinated delays in rescuing boats, political interference that endangers lives and an unhealthy obsession with secrecy are destroying Australian sailors,” Hanson-Young said.
“These are serious accusation from defense personnel and the government can’t investigate itself on this one."
“There needs to be an independent judicial inquiry into the secrecy and political pressure that is being applied to Australian service men and women on the high seas."
“The government needs to be upfront with the Australian people and explain what’s really going on.”
Her comments follow an Australian Broadcasting Corporation news report in which sailors talked about the horrors they witness dealing with the men, women and children who make the perilous ocean voyage to seek asylum in Australia.
In harrowing interviews, the sailors, some speaking under condition of anonymity due to the highly secretive nature of Australia’s maritime border operations, describe retrieving the decomposing bodies of refugees from the ocean.
They spoke of corpses shedding skin and flesh as they were hauled out of the sea because they had been in the water for so long and the appalling scenes witnessed aboard unseaworthy and unsanitary vessels packed with desperate asylum seekers.
One sailor, identified only as Greg, described boarding an overcrowded vessel. "You jump on and you can smell three days' worth of human faeces, you can smell vomit, you can smell diesel fuel, you can smell rotting wood, you can smell people, there are children screaming,” he said.
He also told how he intervened to stop the attempted rape of a young male asylum seeker by a man who claimed to be his uncle. "I became painfully aware that that child was only with him for the purpose of his own pleasure,” Greg told the interviewer.
The sailors also spoke of a lack of psychological support and counseling from the Department of Defence and claimed government policy was the direct cause of refugee deaths.
The navy personnel had been charged with boarding and intercepting asylum seeker vessels off Australia's northern coast between 2007 and 2013, under the Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
In 2013, Australia received 24,300 asylum seekers, mostly from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Iran, according to the UN’s refugee agency. Most travel from Indonesia to Australia's Christmas Island by boat.
Under Prime Minister Tony Abbott, boats are turned around or towed back to sea and asylum seekers arriving by sea are detained in offshore centers. Those given refugee status are resettled in Papua New Guinea, Nauru or Cambodia.
Hanson-Young called for asylum seekers’ claims to be processed in the region and for them to be brought to safety before they board dangerous boats.
“That way we will save lives at sea without destroying the mental health of Australian sailors,” she said.
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