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Nick Squires

Roger Maynard

Australia has long been regarded by those behind the lucrative international trade in human traffic as a soft touch.

The figures speak for themselves. Last year, 4,175 asylum-seekers washed up on Australian shores on 75 boats, mostly manned by Indonesian fishermen out to earn a few extra dollars.

A further 4,500 have arrived so far this year and Australian intelligence reports suggest thousands more are scattered across southeast Asia waiting for passage.

Over the past decade, an estimated 13,000 unauthorised boat people made it to Australia, not including those who arrived undiscovered or the hundreds who may have drowned on the way.

What was once a trickle of boat people in the early 1990s is turning into a flood of displaced refugees.

These days most are from the Middle East and South Asia. Of the 363 boat people who sailed to Christmas Island on a converted inter-island ferry last week, most came from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

How these and many others get this far is a story of risk, intrigue and human drama that is becoming standard practice in a world where the trade in human traffic is worth about US$10 billion (HK$78 billion) a year.

Australian authorities are all too familiar with the routine. One source explained how refugees first enter Malaysia. There, they are taken south to Johor Baru before making the short ferry crossing to the Indonesian island of Batam.

From there it is a hop, skip and a jump to Jakarta and on to the southern Indonesian islands of Bali, Flores or Lombok, where they embark for Australia.

With thousands of kilometres of coastline and millions of square kilometres of open ocean to patrol, Australia's border protection services are struggling to deal not only with refugees but also with illegal imports of drugs and weapons.

Australia's air force and its maritime border protection service, Coastwatch, regularly patrol the vast area of sea between Western Australia and Java, near which lies Christmas Island. But Coastwatch has only eight boats and 15 planes, and dozens of rickety vessels crammed with refugees are getting through.

Some head for Ashmore Reef, off the north coast of Western Australia. 'It's a continually replenished pipeline,' an immigration official said last week.

Australian authorities are also battling a surge in the number of illegal Indonesian fishing boats in Australian waters. Sightings rose from just under 1,500 in 1998 to nearly 5,000 a year later. But in 1999 only 59 illegal boats were apprehended. Some sightings were not pursued at all, due to lack of resources. Aircraft carrying drugs and other illicit goods routinely sneak through blind spots in Australia's monitoring of its north coast.

Critics say Australia has failed to develop a fully co-ordinated approach to border protection. But the opposition Labor Party has proposed a complete overhaul, building a single independent agency modelled on the US coastguard.



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Australia

People-smugglers step up assault on 'soft touch' Australia's borders