Asylum seekers targeting New Zealand

[link to i.stuff.co.nz]
People smugglers in Indonesia are offering to take asylum seekers to New Zealand in shipping containers or as crew on commercial vessels, a Fairfax Media investigation has found.

The revelations come after the Sunday Star-Times reported yesterday that smugglers had attempted to send 50 asylum seekers by boat from a beach near Jakarta last Wednesday but were intercepted by police.

Sources say they will make another attempt in the next few days and have paid off corrupt police.

Fairfax has heard tape recordings of smuggler agents discussing other methods for getting to New Zealand, the preferred option now that the route to Australia has been closed under the hardline Operation Sovereign Borders turn-back policy.

The smugglers refer to containers as the "cruise ship" option. The price would range between $US8000 and $US14,000 per person and the ships are said to leave from ports in Bali, Sulawesi and West Papua.

Asylum seekers have been promised they would only spend about nine hours sealed in the container before being allowed to roam the deck, but the option did not appeal to most people Fairfax spoke to in Indonesia, who saw it as too dangerous.
Another option that had been offered was for the ship to drop the asylum seeker on a South Pacific island and make their own way to New Zealand.

The source said many people were disillusioned with the formal process of seeking refugee status through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and were considering illegal options.

"There are so many Pakistani, Afghani, Iranian, Myanmar and Syrians ready for that, to go to New Zealand, but they still wait to find a good way," he said. "We know if we go back to our own country we die, so we take risk."

The source said Australians had shown by their tough approach they had "no humanity. Tony Abbott loves dogs more than humans."

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