HMAS Melbourne’s seizure of 353kg of heroin worth $700 million during an operation in the Indian Ocean off Tanzania last week will hurt the terrorist groups that rely on such shipments to fund their activities. The navy’s little reported success is also a telling and timely counterpoint to the misleading denigration to which it has been subjected by the ABC and Fairfax Media.
Yesterday, the ABC’s Insiders program persisted with the corporation’s selective defence of the allegations aired on its radio program AM last month. On January 22, AM reported claims that passengers on an asylum-seeker boat were deliberately “forced by the navy to hold on to hot metal”, causing severe burns and blisters. The government and the Defence Department vehemently rejected the claims.
While dismissing Defence Minister David Johnston’s criticisms of the ABC as “drivel” and claiming critics of the original story should “grow up”, Mark Kenny from Fairfax Media, like his fellow panellists and host Barrie Cassidy, ignored the definitive reporting on the matter by this newspaper and others, drawn from interviews with primary sources.
In our front-page report on January 31, the only alleged “victim” of the incident to have spoken publicly denied he was tortured. Bowby Nooris, 20, who was among a boatload of 47 asylum-seekers returned to Indonesia on January 6, told Jakarta correspondent Peter Alford his hand had been burned during a protest when he stumbled against the hot engine on the boat. Nooris confirmed his account in an ABC radio interview, revealing he threw himself into the water before being rescued by navy personnel, who also treated and bandaged his hands. The picture that emerged, later corroborated by other witnesses, was a long way from supposed torture or deliberate mistreatment by navy personnel.
Alford’s front-page report also established that the man who made the most serious claims aired on the ABC - Sharmarke Abdullah Ahmad, a 25-year-old Somali business and English student - was not even on the boat where the alleged abuse took place. Another injured asylum-seeker, Mohamed Abdirashid, 18, who was on a boat forced back to Indonesia on December 19, told The Australian that his arm had been injured when sailors threw him on to the engine during a quarrel between the navy and asylum-seekers.
The following day, we reported two more eyewitnesses who denied they had seen anything to support serious cruelty allegations against navy personnel. Of eight Somali asylum-seekers interviewed at length by Peter Alford, only one, Yousif Fasher, who did not receive any burns, maintained that three asylum-seekers on the January 6 boat were “tortured”. Fasher repeated his claim a week later to Fairfax’s Michael Bachelard, whose report broke no new ground.
In such a conflicted matter, primary source accounts are vital. The salient point conveniently ignored by the ABC and Fairfax is that of those alleged to have been tortured only one - Bowby Nooris - has spoken out and said he accidentally sustained injuries when he fell against a hot engine.
ABC journalists emphasise, rightly, that the navy is not beyond legitimate scrutiny. Nor, in the public interest, is the taxpayer-funded national broadcaster.