Quarterly Essay 53 That Sinking Feeling by Toohey Paul;

Author:Toohey, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2014-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

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That night we encountered an ambulance transporting the little girl who appeared to be brain-­damaged up to the city of Cianjur. We asked the driver if we could stick in its wake and followed it at speed through winding hills to Cianjur hospital, arriving around midnight. They had continued to work on the little girl, whose name was Yasamin, aged three, all through the long drive. She still showed no signs of coming around. Her father, Ahmad, said they had clung to a cabin door all night, without life jackets, and Yasamin had kept going under. We learned the blonde-­haired woman who had been in diabetic shock, Fatemah, had also come to this hospital. We spoke to various hospital drivers and learned the Sri Lankan woman who had lost her son had been taken further north to a police hospital in Jakarta, having made the long cross-­Java journey nursing his body. We did not know her name but wanted to find her, to learn her story.

Rudd’s view was the tragedy was not related to his announcement, nor was it a sign that his policy was not working. “I also said that as soon as it became clear we were making this change the people smugglers would seek to test our resolve by pushing even more at us. So we don’t intend to flinch,” he told the Nine Network. Tony Abbott announced he would be appointing a three-­star general to lead the Coalition’s fight against the boats, Operation Sovereign Borders. The message seemed to be that he wanted a more rounded militaristic posture by putting a soldier, rather than a naval officer, in control of what happened on the high seas.

We drove further north to Cisarua, looking for a hotel. We spotted a group of eight or so Iranians who had survived the sinking, trudging along the main road at 1.30 a.m. We hailed them down and took them into a little warung, or café, to talk. We were surprised to see them there, having assumed they – given the international attention – would have gone into detention or been put in the care of an aid agency. Instead, the police in Cidaun had declared that all fit and able asylum seekers would immediately board police buses and be sent back to Cisarua. They were dumped on the street in the middle of the night.

Among the group of Iranians was a small girl, aged eight, whom they were taking turns carrying. Her name was Hasti and she was the daughter of Fatemah, the woman who had suffered diabetic shock. The little girl was beyond tired. Only eighteen hours earlier, she had been pulled from the sea. When her mother was taken by ambulance to the Cianjur hospital, Hasti was left behind in Cidaun, and this group – some of whom knew her mother – had grabbed Hasti and taken her with them. “We took her with us because we cannot leave her,” said Mitt, one of the men. They said they would care for her until they could learn where her mother had been taken.

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