No Happy Ending

From the SIEVX website

Vale Amal Basry
1 July 1953 - 18 March 2006
by Marg Hutton
19 March 2006
Less than five years after surviving the horrific sinking of SIEVX, Amal Basry lost her three year battle with breast cancer. She passed away on Saturday afternoon 18 March in Melbourne's St Vincent's Public Hospital in the presence of her son Rami and daughter-in-law Daniella. She was fifty-two.

Amal and Rami were rescued from the Indian Ocean on 20 October 2001 after spending nearly twenty four hours in the water fighting for their lives. Amal and Rami defeated the odds - only about one in ten passengers aboard SIEVX survived and most of the 353 who drowned were women and children. Unlike most of the other survivors they did not lose any immediate family members, although they did lose cousins, nieces and nephews.

In June 2002, eight months after the sinking, Amal and Rami were finally permitted to come to Australia on temporary protection visas (TPVs) because they had proven family connections here. Amal's husband Abbas Akram had made the journey to Australia on an earlier boat arriving on the north-west coast in January 2000. He spent 8 months in Woomera Detention Centre before settling in Melbourne on a TPV. Only seven survivors of the sinking were permitted to settle in Australia; the remaining 38 were resettled in other countries where they were very quickly granted permanent residency. Unlike the 38 who went to other countries, Amal and Rami had to endure an inexplicably cruel three year wait before being granted permanent protection visas. It is difficult to imagine how this needless bureaucratic obstructionism affected these already deeply traumatised people. They wanted nothing more than security and were forced to wait for years never knowing if they would be allowed to put down roots and make their home here. It was not until the middle of last year (2005) that they were finally granted permanency.

I never met Amal but I did hear her speak once.

On the first anniversary of the sinking - only days after the first Bali bombing - I attended a memorial service at Edwardes Lake Park in Reservoir. At exactly 3.10pm, a year to the minute since SIEVX sank and 353 people perished, Amal bravely took the stage supported by Gabrielle Fakhri of the Thornbury Asylum Seekers Resource Centre and recounted, first in Arabic and then in English, the story of the sinking.

To hear Amal speak was an unforgettable experience. She had a powerful presence - strong, courageous, poetic, dramatic. Speaking haltingly in English but with conviction she moved the audience to tears as she told of her son kissing her goodbye for what they both believed would be the final time.

I taped Amal's speech. Although the sound recording is very rough and some of the words are indistinct, the tape provides a glimpse of an exceptional woman. Below is a transcript:


Good afternoon. I would like to welcome you all. It means a lot to me. It gives me hope .... because this time last year I was fighting for my life, fighting like many others who were with me last year. When our boat sank we felt we were going to die. Everyone... screamed - 'God, God, please help us, save us please'... I can never forget the unbelievable pictures in front of my eyes. Some people... in the water, some swallowing the water and choking and choking. I will never forget the bodies lying on the sea. And the moment that pushed me into... the....water and... I saw my son fighting for his life as well... finding a piece of wood, my son started to scream 'Mum, Mum, we will choke, we will die. God please save us.' At this point I was anxious to get where my son was but I saw a dead woman's body beside me. And with my heart burning I feeling very scared and try to hold the hand of the dead body to support myself to swim to my son's side. Thank God I could arrive near my son. We kissed each other. [sobbing] Then he said 'Give me a kiss mum, we are going to die'... where some other people were still fighting for their lives. The screaming still rings in my ears. And one man screams 'All my family drown' and my friend who was holding onto a piece of wood had all her children's dead bodies floating around her. Next morning while we were still waiting for death the Indonesian fishermen help us and save us. And now I am living in Australia with my family and all my dreams come true. Thank you.


One thing Amal did not mention in this speech was her role in saving the life of her son. When she was rescued by the Indonesian fishermen her son was not among the survivors. Amal prevailed on the captain to turn his boat around and continue the search and her son and ten others were eventually found clinging to a small piece of wood.

Amal believed she had survived for another purpose as well - to tell her story. She wanted the world to know what had happened to the people of SIEVX. As she said to Geoff Parish of SBS Dateline, the story of SIEVX is 'a disaster that deserves to be written down by someone. People bought death in seeking freedom'.

During her four years in Australia, Amal recounted the story of SIEVX many times. In August 2002 she told her story to Michael Gordon of the Age:

At her new home in Broadmeadows this week... [Amal Basry described] in near forensic detail how almost 400 people were coerced into boarding a small, unsafe and ill-equipped boat: the trip in five buses with curtains drawn to the apartments where they prepared for the voyage; the demand that the women and children board first, apparently to ensure the men followed; the refusal to return mobile phones surrendered the previous week; the attempt to plug a hole with material from a pair of jeans; the decision of the men not to let on that the engine had failed and could not be repaired; the sound of women screaming as the boat sank; the two mysterious lights in the distance as she clung on to the body of a drowned women; the rescue by Indonesian fishermen alerted when they saw floating luggage and bodies.
After saying all this through an interpreter, she looks at me intensely and says in English: "I was like a camera. I remember everything."

Amal's story travelled far and touched many. I don't know if she ever knew that the harrowing account of her survival as retold by Arnold Zable in an essay in Eureka Street was incorporated into a London production of Pericles - a joint production of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Cardboard Citizens. The Australian folk singer Suzette Herft also credits Amal as being the inspiration for her song 'Journey on the Wind'.

Amal was a patron of Jannah the SIEVX memorial, an online condolence book established by Mary Dagmar Davies - the first memorial of any kind to the SIEVX dead. Amal was also involved in the national SIEV X memorial project begun by author and psychologist Steve Biddulph and Uniting Church Minister Rod Horsfield.

She attended the opening of the Memorial Exhibition in Sydney in October 2004 where she gave the most remarkable speech. Mary Dagmar Davies described the occasion:


When [Amal] reached the lectern she started with the words 'I am still in the water with the dying' and then she looked across the room and suddenly saw Sondos Ismail the mother who lost her three little girls... Seeing Sondos with her little daughter Allaa who was born in Australia and looks so much like her three little sisters that she will never meet overwhelmed Amal and she broke down in tears. For a moment it looked as though she could not go on. But Amal, who is fighting cancer, is an exceptionally strong woman and she knew she must speak for Sondos as well. And Amal continued with tears rolling from her eyes. She was so articulate her voice rang out loud and clear... She spoke for less than four minutes. She spoke of her cancer and her experience on SIEVX and in the water. She told us more about SIEVX than any of us knew because she was there. She was poetic. She was compelling. She was the truth. People listened intently, some cried, and in the packed church a pin dropping would have sounded like a thunder clap.


Amal was haunted by the SIEVX tragedy. In an interview with Helen Lobato in 2002 for 3CR radio's 'Women on the Line' she spoke of how SIEVX had diminished her, how difficult it was for her to do normal every day things and how afraid she felt. She told Lobato : 'I lost something in myself in this accident'.

But Amal didn't let her fears or her illness prevent her from bearing witness to what she had endured. In 2004 she made the long journey to Brisbane to give evidence at the committal hearing of Khaleed Daoed, one of the organisers of the SIEVX voyage.

Amal was always prepared to stand up and speak about SIEVX on behalf of the survivors despite her illness and the fears she carried with her from the trauma of SIEVX. In many ways she was the public face of SIEVX.

More than 140 women lost their lives on SIEVX. We don't know their names and cannot mourn them as individuals. But over the last four years many of us have come to know Amal and she will be deeply mourned both as the warm courageous person she was and as a symbol of all the nameless women who drowned on SIEVX while seeking sanctuary and a better life in Australia.

Our thoughts are with her family both here and overseas.

The Myth of the New India

By PANKAJ MISHRA
Published: July 6, 2006

INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story." So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor. India's leading business newspaper, The Economic Times, summed up the general euphoria over the event in its regular feature, "The Global Indian Takeover": "For India, it is a harbinger of things to come — economic superstardom."

This sounds persuasive as long as you don't know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia's imminent economic superstardom.

In recent weeks, India seemed an unlikely capitalist success story as communist parties decisively won elections to state legislatures, and the stock market, which had enjoyed record growth in the last two years, fell nearly 20 percent in two weeks, wiping out some $2.4 billion in investor wealth in just four days. This week India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made it clear that only a small minority of Indians will enjoy "Western standards of living and high consumption."

There is, however, no denying many Indians their conviction that the 21st century will be the Indian Century just as the 20th was American. The exuberant self-confidence of a tiny Indian elite now increasingly infects the news media and foreign policy establishment in the United States.

Encouraged by a powerful lobby of rich Indian-Americans who seek to expand their political influence within both their home and adopted countries, President Bush recently agreed to assist India's nuclear program, even at the risk of undermining his efforts to check the nuclear ambitions of Iran. As if on cue, special reports and covers hailing the rise of India in Time, Foreign Affairs and The Economist have appeared in the last month.

It was not so long ago that India appeared in the American press as a poor, backward and often violent nation, saddled with an inefficient bureaucracy and, though officially nonaligned, friendly to the Soviet Union. Suddenly the country seems to be not only a "roaring capitalist success story" but also, according to Foreign Affairs, an "emerging strategic partner of the United States." To what extent is this wishful thinking rather than an accurate estimate of India's strengths?

Looking for new friends and partners in a rapidly changing world, the Bush administration clearly hopes that India, a fellow democracy, will be a reliable counterweight against China as well as Iran. But trade and cooperation between India and China is growing; and, though grateful for American generosity on the nuclear issue, India is too dependent on Iran for oil (it is also exploring developing a gas pipeline to Iran) to wholeheartedly support the United States in its efforts to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The world, more interdependent now than during the cold war, may no longer be divided up into strategic blocs and alliances.

Nevertheless, there are much better reasons to expect that India will in fact vindicate the twin American ideals of free markets and democracy that neither Latin America nor post-communist countries — nor, indeed, Iraq — have fulfilled.

Since the early 1990's, when the Indian economy was liberalized, India has emerged as the world leader in information technology and business outsourcing, with an average growth of about 6 percent a year. Growing foreign investment and easy credit have fueled a consumer revolution in urban areas. With their Starbucks-style coffee bars, Blackberry-wielding young professionals, and shopping malls selling luxury brand names, large parts of Indian cities strive to resemble Manhattan.

Indian business tycoons are increasingly trying to control marquee names like Taittinger Champagne and the Carlyle Hotel in New York. "India Everywhere" was the slogan of the Indian business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year.

But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country's $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106.

Nor is India rising very fast on the report's Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day.

Malnutrition affects half of all children in India, and there is little sign that they are being helped by the country's market reforms, which have focused on creating private wealth rather than expanding access to health care and education. Despite the country's growing economy, 2.5 million Indian children die annually, accounting for one out of every five child deaths worldwide; and facilities for primary education have collapsed in large parts of the country (the official literacy rate of 61 percent includes many who can barely write their names). In the countryside, where 70 percent of India's population lives, the government has reported that about 100,000 farmers committed suicide between 1993 and 2003.

Feeding on the resentment of those left behind by the urban-oriented economic growth, communist insurgencies (unrelated to India's parliamentary communist parties) have erupted in some of the most populous and poorest parts of north and central India. The Indian government no longer effectively controls many of the districts where communists battle landlords and police, imposing a harsh form of justice on a largely hapless rural population.

The potential for conflict — among castes as well as classes — also grows in urban areas, where India's cruel social and economic disparities are as evident as its new prosperity. The main reason for this is that India's economic growth has been largely jobless. Only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy.

No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already.

For decades now, India's underprivileged have used elections to register their protests against joblessness, inequality and corruption. In the 2004 general elections, they voted out a central government that claimed that India was "shining," bewildering not only most foreign journalists but also those in India who had predicted an easy victory for the ruling coalition.

Among the politicians whom voters rejected was Chandrababu Naidu, the technocratic chief minister of one of India's poorest states, whose forward-sounding policies, like providing Internet access to villages, prompted Time magazine to declare him "South Asian of The Year" and a "beacon of hope."

But the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir, which has claimed some 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half, and the strength of violent communist militants across India, hint that regular elections may not be enough to contain the frustration and rage of millions of have-nots, or to shield them from the temptations of religious and ideological extremism.

Many serious problems confront India. They are unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy, both inside and outside the country, choose to believe their own complacent myths.