348 boat people land on Australia's Christmas Island

Asian Political News, August 20, 2001

SYDNEY, Aug. 16 Kyodo

A leaking boat carrying 348 Middle Eastern asylum seekers and three Indonesian crew members arrived at the remote Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island on Thursday, the second largest such group ever to land in Australia.

An immigration department spokesman said the illegal immigrants would be housed in an emergency shelter before being transferred to mainland Australia for processing by immigration officers.

Large groups of asylum seekers are known to be still waiting in Indonesia to make the journey to Australia and authorities are expecting an influx of arrivals by boat, the spokesman said.

Since the beginning of 1999, Indonesia has become the key staging point for the movement of people from the Middle East and Afghanistan to Australia by organized people-smuggling rings.

Christmas Island's administrator Bill Taylor said the ship was in extremely poor condition and at least a third of its occupants were women and very young children, some of whom had been hospitalized.

The island, with a population of less than 2,000 people, is an Australian territory lying just 400 kilometers south of Jakarta.

Thursday's group was exceeded in size only by a boat carrying 353 people that arrived in November 1999 at Ashmore Island, a tiny outcrop just 200 km south of Indonesia's West Timor.

The latest arrival brings to 2,834 the number of asylum seekers and crew to arrive in Australia by boat so far this year.

Last year, 51 boats carrying 2,939 passengers arrived unlawfully in Australia, while 3,722 people on 86 boats came in 1999. Many of the voyages were made in ill-equipped vessels on which the passengers faced numerous dangers and privations.

Cambodian police last month arrested 253 Afghans and Pakistanis as they were about to board an Indonesian ship that was to smuggle them to either Australia or New Zealand.