Indonesia is in talks with Australia about temporarily housing asylum seekers stranded in Indonesia on an island in the archipelago if Canberra covers the cost, a report said yesterday.
Canberra has introduced policies to stem the flow of asylum seekers reaching its shores on people-smuggling boats, with those arriving by sea denied resettlement in Australia even if found to be genuine refugees. Instead they are turned back to their country of departure or sent to the tiny state of Nauru or Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
Indonesia, a major transit point for asylum seekers en route to Australia, has long been riled by the approach, particularly the policy of turning migrant boats back to the archipelago when it is safe to do so.
Photo: AFP
However, there have been signs that ties between the neighbors are improving.
Indonesian Minister of Security Luhut Panjaitan told the Jakarta Post newspaper that Indonesia could work with Australia to house migrants on its territory.
“We can discuss the possibility of allocating an island [for the refugees], but Australia is required to entirely finance it,” he told the daily.
He said there had been talks about the island, but they were “preliminary.”
He said that many asylum seekers ended up stuck in Indonesia’s poorer provinces and could create tensions with local residents, according to the newspaper.
Panjaitan’s office had no immediate comment on the report.
Jakarta entered into a similar scheme in the past, hosting about 200,000 Vietnamese on Pulau Galang off Sumatra between 1979 and 1996 after many fled the nation by boat following the Vietnam War.
According to the new plan, Panjaitan said asylum seekers should only be housed temporarily on the island, as many of the Vietnamese ended up staying in Indonesia for too long.
He made the offer after a trip to Australia earlier this week and ahead of a return visit from Australian officials to Indonesia in the coming weeks.
However, the minister also demanded that Australia end its policy of turning boats back to Indonesia.
“I told them that such actions are wrong and against humanitarian principles,” he said.
Canberra has made no secret of the fact that it is in talks with a number of nations about taking refugees now living on the two Pacific islands.
Earlier this year, Australia struck a deal with Cambodia to take in refugees in exchange for millions of dollars in aid over the next four years.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion