AS POSTED HERE ---> 'Security risk' refugees left in limbo
AN AMMUNITION runner for the Tamil Tigers is among six Oceanic Viking refugees languishing on Christmas Island, despite an offer of quick resettlement from the Rudd government to end last year's standoff with Indonesia.
Mr Rudd brought the six Tamils - three men, a woman and her two children - to Australia knowing they were a security risk.
They are now condemned to indefinite detention. No country wants them after ASIO declared them a threat to national security, and they cannot be returned to Sri Lanka having been deemed refugees.
The Age met two of the men in detention on Christmas Island this week, including Shanmugarayah Sasikanthan, a trained LTTE combatant who used to smuggle pistols and ammunition hidden in books from Tiger to Tiger.
The one-time maths teacher believes the arms and messages he passed on as an informant were used in assassination attempts.
Their predicament makes a mockery of the special deal Mr Rudd cut with the 78 refugees rescued last year by the Australian customs vessel Oceanic Viking.
Under the deal, they were offered resettlement to a third country within 12 weeks. The government insisted they did not get special treatment, even though other asylum seekers can wait for more than a year to have their applications processed in Indonesia.
The other 72 refugees have been resettled in a variety of countries, including the United States, Canada, Norway and Australia.
Mr Sasikanthan, 27, had told UNHCR he was a Tamil Tiger before Mr Rudd cut the deal.
"Everybody's first selection is Australia because Australia is a humanitarian country," Mr Sasikanthan said, seated at a detainee visiting room. "We believe and we hope that we can restart our new life in Australia and continue with our study."
The UNHCR declared Mr Sasikanthan a refugee. Despite the Tamil's assignments for the notorious LTTE rebel group, the UNHCR decided his activities did not amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Mr Sasikanthan had initially phoned The Age from the Phosphate Hill detention compound on Christmas Island.
"We are from Oceanic Viking and we want to tell our story," he said. In earlier reports, Mr Sasikanthan had denied LTTE involvement.
Sinnathurai Yasikaran, 27, is the eldest of five children. He said he left school in Sri Lankan grade 7 to help his father look after the family when his mother died of illness.
"After the peaceful time, the LTTE collected young people to join their group so [I] couldn't stay in Sri Lanka," he said, using Mr Sasikanthan to translate. He did not discuss the information he had given to UNHCR.
In mandatory checks for refugees, Australia’s domestic spy agency found four Oceanic Viking refugees were "directly or indirectly a risk to security", including a woman. Her children, a boy aged two and a girl aged six, are also indefinitely detained after assuming the security assessment of their mother.
ASIO never interviewed the adults or explained why they were considered dangerous. The negative assessments were based on interviews by immigration officials and the UN, the former inspector-general of intelligence and security Ian Carnell said.
"There were practical impediments to ASIO officers conducting interviews at the relevant time," Mr Carnell wrote in a letter to their lawyer dated the day before he retired as inspector-general.
Mr Carnell could not say whether ASIO also relied on information from the Sri Lankan government "as this relates directly to ASIO's collection methods and is not something which it [sic] is appropriate for me to discuss in public".
The refugees' lawyer, Stephen Blanks, warned such information could be unreliable. He admonished the government for failing to honour its resettlement deal, which he said was "not qualified by a requirement to fulfil identity, security or health checks".
His clients had lived in detention camps in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia for years and arrived on Christmas Island in a mentally fragile state. "To describe this situation as raising serious human rights concerns is putting it at its mildest," he said.
Outspoken Liberal backbencher Wilson Tuckey was roundly criticised last year for saying that those aboard asylum seeker boats could include terrorists.
