Australia stayed silent on Lankan abuses

Australia stayed silent about human rights abuses in Sri Lanka in exchange for its cooperation in cracking down on people-smuggling, Colombo’s new Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said in an interview with The Australian published on Monday. Wickremesinghe said former president Mahinda Rajapakse had agreed to help stop boats carrying asylum-seekers leaving for Australia if Canberra kept quiet about alleged abuses by Rajapakse’s regime. In an interview with The Australian newspaper, Wickremesinghe said Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s close relationship with Rajapakse, who was voted out of power last month, was “a mystery” to Sri Lankans. Colombo’s new premier also said that “people connected to the previous government” had taken part in people-smuggling operations. “It was being done by people with Rajapakse connections, but once this deal was done between Australia and the Rajapakse government, where you looked the other way (on human rights abuses), then the secretary of defence got the navy to patrol,” he told the paper. “You could not have got anyone out of this country without someone in the security system looking the other way, the police or the navy.” The arrival of asylum-seekers by boat is a sensitive political issue in Australia, which in 2013 started sending those picked up on boats to offshore camps on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and Nauru. Most asylum-seeker boats that have made the precarious journey to Australia came from Indonesia, but 120 left from Sri Lanka in 2012 and the two nations have more recently been cooperating to crack down on people-smuggling.