Australia yesterday urged Sri Lanka, having defeated the Tamil Tigers in May, to now embrace political reform and reconciliation to stem the flow of asylum seekers leaving the country.
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith will meet his Sri Lankan counterpart Rohitha Bogollagama in Colombo today amid a standoff in Indonesia involving 78 Tamil asylum seekers, who are refusing to leave an Australian vessel that rescued them last month.
“I will reiterate Australia’s view that having won the war, Sri Lanka now needs to win the peace through political reform and reconciliation,” Smith said in a statement. “Mr Bogollagama and I will discuss bilateral and regional cooperation on people smuggling and ways in which Australia will continue to assist Sri Lanka rebuild after decades of internal conflict.”
The standoff in Indonesia involves an Australian customs vessel, the Oceanic Viking, that rescued a group of boatpeople in international waters at Indonesia’s request. It took them to the Indonesian port of Tanjung Pinang but the Sri Lankans have refused to leave the vessel and they want it to sail to Australia.
Canberra wants them to leave the ship for internment in an Australian-funded immigration detention center at Tanjung Pinang on Bintan, which is near Singapore.
On Friday Indonesia extended for another week a deadline for the ship to leave its waters.
The arrival in Australia of several boats carrying asylum seekers, many of them Sri Lankans displaced by the civil war, has ignited what is a hot-button political issue in Australia.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has had to defend his border security policy, which critics say has been softened and is attracting more boatpeople.
Opinion polls show the popularity of Rudd’s government has taken a tumble in the past few weeks as a result of its handling of the issue.
The recent surge in arrivals of undocumented immigrants — more than 30 boats have arrived this year compared with seven for the whole of last year — has damaged the popularity of Rudd’s two-year-old Labor government.
Almost 300,000 civilians were forced from their homes and moved into the cramped camps in the north of Sri Lanka during the final months of Sri Lanka’s 25-year-old civil war against separatist Tamil rebels which ended in May.
Meanwhile, an influential parliamentarian said yesterday that Australia should repatriate the Sri Lankans.
“If you want to show strength, ... then send the Oceanic Viking to Colombo, and you’ll have made a strong statement,” opposition upper house member Barnaby Joyce said.
Joyce, who is the de-facto leader of the Nationals, told local television that Rudd should not bow to pressure and order the Oceanic Viking to sail to Australia’s Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island, where it has a refugee detention center.
“That is, in essence, defeat,” Joyce said of calls for the Sri Lankans to be interned on Christmas Island. “It means people have worked you out. They just hang about on the boat, and in the end, you will capitulate and you will land at Christmas Island.”
Both Australia and Indonesia have pledged not to use force to break the impasse, which could sour relations between Jakarta and Canberra.
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