IOM launches programme against people smuggling

A programme, designed and run by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in conjunction with Australia’s Customs and Border Protection service, intended to address people-smuggling at the grassroots level is being carried out in Indonesia. Similar initiatives are planned for Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

The campaign slogan is simple: “I know smuggling illegal immigrants is wrong” and the four million dollar project includes similar initiatives in Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

And the message is being spread across the Indonesian archipelago to thousands of impoverished villagers - emblazoned on mugs and T-shirts and repeated at prayer sessions and village festivals in an education program paid for by the Australian government. 

In Tanjung Leidong, a fishing village in northern Sumatra, there were tug-of-war competitions and a new television set to be won, as well as knick-knacks available, all bearing the slogan on smuggling.

The program, designed and run by the International Organisation for Migration in conjunction with Australia’s Customs and Border Protection service, is intended to address people-smuggling at the grassroots level - the fishermen who often crew the asylum boats and their families who turn a blind eye.

Border protection and the flow of asylum-seekers into Australia remains a key political issue, with the navy on Sunday night intercepting a boat carrying 37 passengers and two crew, 230 nautical miles west of Darwin. The Gillard government’s attempts to broker a regional solution for the offshore processing has met resistance, with the East Timorese parliament yesterday voting to reject an Australian government proposal to send them there.

The “soft” education approach being used in Indonesia is a world away from the anti-asylum-seeker rhetoric being ramped up ahead of the federal election, and relies on positive messages designed to reinforce socially acceptable behaviour, rather than threats that focus on drowning boatpeople or other negative outcomes.

Muslim preachers have been conscripted into the program, delivering their Friday sermons based around sound theological reasons not to become involved in the business. The sermons have been so successful that a collection of them is being published for distribution to mosques around the country.

There have also been local radio spots featuring dramatised segments between, for instance, a fisherman who has been offered money to take foreigners on a boat to Australia, and a friend advising him against doing it.

Some of Indonesia’s most remote villages have been chosen for the pilot program, from Sumatra in the country’s west, to Flores in the east and several of the southern jumping-off points from which asylum-seekers often head to Christmas Island.

Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor, from whose office the scheme is funded, has a simple explanation for how it operates.

“The communications campaign is important so that people understand the consequences of their actions,” Mr. O’Connor told The Australian.

“We’ve dedicated resources . . . to get the message out that people-smuggling is a crime, that providing material support for people-smuggling attracts the new penalties of up to 10 years’ jail.

“And we want to make sure that we deter people, for example, from engaging with people smugglers, becoming crew of vessels and so on.”

The bill for Indonesia’s part in the program so far is $810,000 but the IOM hopes a mooted second stage will see it rapidly spreading across the country. The $4 million project includes similar initiatives in Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

The major hurdle on the Indonesian side is that anti-people-smuggling legislation promised by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on his visit to Australia early this year has yet to even be debated in the parliament.

Those running the IOM campaign admit it would be easier to convince villagers not to hire out or sell their boats, or crew them, or help people-smugglers in a multitude of other ways, if the local laws against it were simpler. Currently, most Indonesian prosecutions dealing with the issue are based merely on breaches of maritime law, and as such carry minimal penalties.

But in the villages where the campaign has already been run there is a unanimity of purpose.

“We will always help people from a humanitarian point of view (if they arrive here by boat), but we know that getting involved with smuggling is wrong,” one ethnic Batak labourer in the tiny village of Tanjung Leidong said.

Father of four Lumumba Ritonga, 50, lives on the front line of Australia-bound people-smuggling between Malaysia and Indonesia, across the Malacca Strait. He knows exactly what goes on across these waters, unwatched by any coastguard or government agencies - and he laughed at the notion that it could be stopped.

“Impossible,” he declared.

It’s a waterway that’s been plied for hundreds of years, usually free from the gaze of prying officials. Indeed, whole empires have risen and fallen on control of this crucial patch of sea, between Sumatra and the Malaysia peninsula.

As Mr Ritonga points out, the smuggling of goods across the strait - long the lifeblood of these coastal communities - is functionally and economically little different to the smuggling of people. “It’s only a few hours across the water. When the foreigners arrive here, they get dumped on the beach and if we find them, we help them. But then usually we turn them in to authorities,” he said.

Hence another of the IOM campaign’s slogans: “Give assistance, but don’t break the law.”

One very memorable such group of arrivals hit the shoreline here last May - 19 Iraqis and 11 Afghans, bedraggled, footsore and lost - led to the tiny village of Simandulang, which juts into the strait; houses perched on stilts metres above the water.

“They were in a terrible way,” Simandulang village chief Sangkot said. “They were exhausted. They were dirty and they had walked for hours before someone from the village found them.

“But the problem is that the smugglers don’t care where they drop these people - so long as their (human) cargo is unloaded, then they disappear immediately. And out here, we are far from the authorities, so it’s easy for them to do it undetected.”

The IOM scheme might be literally just a drop in the ocean, but it’s significant how positive the reception has been. Villagers design their own festivities, based around activities they would ordinarily stage for such big occasions as Indonesian independence day.

In Tanjung Leidong recently, there were tug-of-war competitions and a new television to be had as a prize, as well as mugs, T-shirts and other knick-knacks all bearing the “I know people-smuggling is wrong” slogan.

At Teluk Pulai Luar, near to Tanjung Leidong, there was a traditional Panjat Pinang competition, the quintessential ethnic Malay game of co-operation involving teams of boys or men climbing each others’ shoulders to reach the top of a greased tall wooden pole, thus claiming prizes strung from a crossbar.

The symbolic resonance between this and the IOM’s attempt to sow the seeds of co-operation between communities to halt the people-smuggling flow could hardly have been greater.

Of course, no one pretends this campaign alone, or any other single measure, will stop the flow anytime soon.

Indeed, as 70-year-old Tanjung Leidong man Tan Chui Chan’s life makes clear, there might never be an end to it.

Mr Chui Chan’s own father was one of countless early 20th-century Chinese fleeing war and seeking prosperity - landing on these North Sumatran shores, finding a local ethnic Malay wife, then dying even before Mr Tan was born. But as the sprightly businessman observed, “men are like birds . . . wherever there is a better life, that’s where they’ll land”. - (The Australian)