Aussies torn over asylum seekers

The Australian government yesterday released nine Afghan teenagers from a dusty detention center in the outback, where more than 200 of their fellow asylum seekers are on a hunger strike. The boys had made a pact: They would commit suicide if they weren't released.

The government moved the boys from the Woomera Detention Center in South Australia into foster care. It was a small gesture meant to defuse an increasingly volatile situation. And with that they brought to a close yet another conscience-churning episode in an uneasy summer for many Australians as they consider just how to handle what has become the dominant issue on the country's intellectual landscape.

Like many developed countries, Australia has seen a marked increase in asylum seekers in recent years. And the country has engaged in a heated debate over how it should handle their arrival. But in no country have so few boat people - 8,000 in the past five years - drawn so much attention as they have here.

"This has taken over everything," says Neville Roach, a respected businessman who resigned in protest last week, after serving for six years as a senior adviser on migration issues to Prime Minister John Howard.

For a decade, Australia has been the only developed country in the world to put asylum seekers arriving illegally in mandatory detention while it processes their claims. More than 2,500 asylum seekers are now held in six detention centers around Australia.

But last September, the debate over what to do with boat people was inflamed when Mr. Howard sent the Navy to block a Norwegian freighter carrying 438 boat people it had rescued at sea between Australia and Indonesia.

After a tense stand-off, the boat people were taken to the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru to have their refugee claims processed.

From that emerged a new policy under which Australia resolved not to allow boat people into its waters to claim asylum, choosing instead to pay Pacific neighbors like Nauru and Papua New Guinea to house the arrivals while their claims are processed.

While it has been widely criticized overseas, that policy is now hugely popular in Australia, and many analysts say Howard, who arrived in the US on Monday for a week-long visit, owes his reelection last November to both the boat-people crisis and the events of Sep. 11.

Howard claims Australia is simply exerting its right to choose who is allowed to cross its borders. It also, he says, has no other option but to detain boat people who often arrive without any identification papers.

And even in the face of a two-week-old hunger strike at the Woomera center, Howard has refused to review what many critics charge is an inhumane policy for dealing with people fleeing wars and political persecution.

"Nobody likes what is occurring at present, but there is no alternative," Howard told reporters this week. "We have a completely principled and soundly based policy, and I don't make any apology for it."

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