When Christian Maltau, the chief officer on the Norwegian shipping container ship MV Tampa, helped to rescue more than 400 asylum seekers from a sinking boat 20 years ago, he couldn’t have known the fallout that would follow.

The event kicked off months of news headlines and fierce international debate in the lead up to the 2001 Australian federal election.

But on that day two decades ago, Maltau and his captain were simply responding to a call for help.

“We were sailing from Fremantle up to Singapore …[and] we received a message from the Australian Coast Guard telling us there was a vessel in distress with 80 persons plus onboard,” Maltau tells ABC RN’s the History Listen.

Maltau discovered not 80 but 433 people on board the wooden fishing boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean. He worked hard to help them all, one by one, up a ladder to the safety of the container ship.

It was August 26, 2001. And it was the start of the Tampa affair.

The Tampa’s chief officer Christian Maltau was the first down the ladder to help the asylum seekers in distress.(

Supplied: YouTube

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‘Do we get on? Is it safe?’

As Maltau and another officer began to transfer people, the conditions onboard the fishing boat, the KM Palapa, hit home.

“They were terrible,” Maltau says. “I was really shocked.”

The condition of the boat also shocked the then seven-year-old Abbas Nazari as he boarded the vessel in Jakarta in Indonesia, after a dangerous journey from his home in Afghanistan.

Nazari, his parents and four siblings were escaping the brutal Taliban regime.

“It was this old, rickety, wooden fishing boat,” Nazari, now 27, remembers.

“And everyone thought, ‘Wait, that’s our boat, this little flimsy dinghy?’ And they said, ‘Yes, that’s what you paid for’.

“You suddenly realise that there’s a hell of a lot of people [getting on the boat]. There’s a massive conversation about, do we get on? Is it safe? Is it sea-worthy? Have we been duped?”

Abbas Nazari was seven years old when he was rescued by the Tampa.(

Supplied: Abbas Nazari

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For Nazari and his family, there was no best option. Only a least bad one.

“You’ve risked your life to get to this very point … you’ve journeyed across land and sea, across mountains, and now here you are at this final step. Do you get on this boat that may or may not deliver you to some semblance of safety and security? Or do you stay back for fear that you might drown?”

Finally, one by one, people started to climb aboard the Palapa.

“That’s when our journey to Australia truly began,” Nazari says; the journey to “find life anew”.

Parents ‘praying for mercy’

Twenty-four hours after the fishing boat left Indonesia, its engine died. There was no radio onboard and no land in sight.

“We were like a bath toy in this giant, vast ocean,” Nazari says.

He recalls a storm hitting and water starting to seep into the boat.

“Everyone is seasick. There’s vomit and faeces just tossing [around]. I remember I was just covered in all of that. And that was the moment when everyone thought, this is it,” he says.

“Dad’s clinging on to me. He’s kind of wrapped his belt around one of the beams, one of the rafters, and I’m clinging on, and I remember parents holding on to their children praying for mercy.”

An Australian Coast Guard’s plane came into view but disappeared. On its second loop, however, it caught sight of an SOS sign that the asylum seekers had made from some women’s headscarves and engine oil for paint.

When the request for help was called in by the coast guards, the Tampa was only four hours away.

Nazari remembers Maltau arriving.

“A ladder gets dropped down and first off is Christian Maltau. He climbs down and says, ‘Alright guys, one by one, up you get’,” Nazari remembers.

Maltau was shocked by how many people kept emerging from the bowels of the fishing boat.

“As we started evacuating the people, [the boat] never became empty,” Maltau says.

Finally, with all asylum seekers rescued from the Palapa, the Tampa headed for “the nearest land, which happened to be Christmas Island”, Maltau says.

They sailed right into a raging immigration debate.

Anger on board, defiance on land

The government was “not at all happy” about the Tampa captain’s decision to sail to Christmas Island and into Australian waters, says Peter Mares, journalist and author of Borderline: Australia’s response to asylum seekers and refugees in the wake of the Tampa.

“They told [captain Arne Rinnan] that he should take the rescued asylum seekers to the Indonesian port of Merak,” Mares says.

Philip Ruddock, then Australia’s immigration minister, says, as the Tampa veered towards Indonesia, “the people on board the vessel had said to the captain, ‘no, that’s not where we ought to go’.”

Ruddock says it was delivered as a demand, not a request.

“The advice that we received was that [the captain] was under duress,” Ruddock says.

Philip Ruddock was Australia’s immigration minister at the time of the Tampa affair.(

ABC News: Marco Catalano

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Nazari confirms passengers did not want to return to Indonesia.

He says a delegation of asylum seekers told the ship’s crew, in broken English, “There’s nothing for us in Indonesia. We’ve risked it all to come this far. Christmas Island is the nearest port, take us there”.

“Keep in mind that these people have just been through three days onboard a fishing boat. They’ve been close to death, all their pockets are empty, they’ve thrown their life savings. And you are now so close to where you want to be. Of course, it’s going to lead to a tense atmosphere,” he says.

Maltau was shocked by the rescued asylum seekers’ response.

“They were threatening with jumping overboard, they were threatening with riots. They were quite rude actually,” Maltau remembers.

“We thought that was very strange, because, hey, we’re helping you guys. We’re friends. But they were quite aggressive, very aggressive, actually. We never felt really threatened, but everything on board was very confusing.”

Captain Rinnan said at a press conference at the time that, amidst the passengers’ anger, he decided to turn the ship back around and head to Christmas Island.

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Maltau offers another reason.

“We just realised we can’t cross the ocean with [433] people on board on a cargo ship with two lifeboats and safety equipment for a crew of 30 and 12 passengers,” Maltau says.

“We basically declared ourselves not seaworthy, so we were unable to do as instructed by the Australian authorities.”

The Tampa captain was warned that if he crossed into the 12 nautical mile exclusion zone, he could face criminal charges, so he sat the Tampa just outside that zone and waited.

Both sides refuse to budge

The health of some of those rescued aboard the Tampa was deteriorating. Medical supplies were requested but Mares says none arrived. He says the reasons for that were political.

A federal election was due by the end of the year and John Howard and his government hadn’t been polling well.

“There was a political reason to take a stand because the general view towards asylum seekers in Australia was very negative,” Mares says.

“So there was a sense that if [Howard] was able to use this opportunity to take a stand against the Tampa, this would work well for him politically in the lead up to national elections.”

Journalist Peter Mares says Australians’ views towards asylum seekers were largely negative when the Tampa incident happened.(

Supplied: Peter Mares

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Maltau says the Australian government “made life very difficult for us because they just told us to go away”.

“It was a very aggressive tone from Australia, and we were quite shocked,” he says.

Onboard the Tampa were women in the late stages of pregnancy and unconscious people being treated by crew with intravenous fluids, which had run out.

“It was a medical emergency,” says Maltau, who was in charge of medical on the ship.

“We really wanted to have a doctor to come onboard.”

Ruddock doesn’t remember there being calls for medical help that the government ignored.

“I don’t recall being told that that was the nature of the requests that [Rinnan] was making,” he says.

Maltau describes the situation as a “long standoff”, and says eventually the need for a doctor became too great.

On 29 August, the captain steered the Tampa towards Christmas Island, putting the ship inside Australian waters, despite government orders not to do so.

That’s when the SAS soldiers appeared.

“It was three or four military rigged boats approaching us fast, with one or two persons in each boat,” Maltau says.

“They said they were coming out with medical supplies, and we should prepare a ladder.”

It was a ruse.

“When they came up alongside [the Tampa] we saw down in the boats they had canvases in the boat and underneath the canvas was a lot of soldiers, and they came up,” Maltau says.

They were there to ensure the Tampa didn’t get to Christmas Island.

Rinnan was instructed by the Australian government to return the Tampa to international waters. He refused.

Mares says the diplomatic wheels were already turning.

“The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said to Australia, look, allow these asylum seekers to land and be processed, then we’ll help you find other countries for them to be resettled in if they’re refugees,” he says.

Norway and New Zealand had agreed to take some of the asylum seekers and Canada and the UK were being consulted.

“But the Australian government said no,” Mares says.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.

Meet Abbas Nazari – from Tampa refugee to Fulbright scholar(Michael Vincent)

Both major political parties were largely in agreement on the issue, and Mares says politicians were in “a difficult situation”.

“The Australian public wanted tough action. There’s no doubt about that. And, whipped up as [the situation] was by tabloid media and shock jocks and all the rest of it, politicians – both Liberal and Labor – would have said, ‘Well, this is what the Australian people want us to do. They want us to be tough. They want us to stop these boats’.”

But Australia had voluntarily signed the International Convention on Refugees decades earlier. Various legal obligations came with that, Mares says.

“You can’t both sign up to a convention and then say, well, we don’t want to have anything to do with it. You can’t have it both ways,” he says.

Finding a solution

The government began a desperate search for a solution to the problem of what to do with the asylum seekers onboard the Tampa.

“[The government] started putting in place some extraordinary processes,” Mares says. “It excised Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef from Australia’s migration zone, meaning people arriving there by boat could no longer seek asylum in Australia.”

It also came up with the Pacific Solution. “Australian diplomats, particularly in the Pacific, were being sent around to other countries to cut some kind of deal with a Pacific island nation to take these asylum seekers on Australia’s behalf,” Mares says.

“In the end, the country that was convinced to take the asylum seekers was Nauru.”

The agreement was reached by September 2, and most of the asylum seekers were taken to the island for processing.

Then Leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley says, at the time, he considered it an “distinctly undignified” solution for “a proud nation” who should be able to “deal with their own problems”.

Former opposition leader Kim Beazley considered the Pacific Solution “undignified”.(

ABC News

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But he says he didn’t object to offshore processing of asylum seekers from a human rights or an international law perspective.

“Countries are entitled to control their borders … You think about [the] thousands of kilometres in dangerous sea states; how could you morally justify for one second encouraging that as a process to reach Australia? It’s an outrage. It’s a no-brainer intellectually and morally to do what you can to stop it,” Beazley says.

The other government response to the Tampa affair was Operation Relex.

The Australian Defence Force border protection operation was a “military or naval response to stop boats arriving in the first place” by forcing boats back to where they came from, which it was very effective in doing, Mares says.

Tampa’s complicated legacy

Mares argues that the Tampa affair “undermined” Australia’s commitment to the International Convention on Refugees.

“The legacy of Tampa is that Australia now has a policy whereby any asylum seeker who tries to arrive by boat will be detained in another country altogether, supported by both sides of Parliament,” Mares says.

It also had global implications. Mares says Australia has set an example “suggesting that any country should do whatever they can to stop people arriving in the first place, so that they don’t have to honour any obligations under the Convention”.

Ruddock says that government responses to the Tampa, particular after the events of the September 11 terrorist attack, the following month, in New York, “reinforced my view, that not only do you have to satisfy yourself that people have bonafide claims [for seeking asylum], you also need to satisfy yourself that you are not exposed to people who may have other objectives”.

“I had a strong and passionate view that what we were doing was right and in the national interest — and it was not about trying to deliver an election outcome,” he says.

The majority of the asylum seekers were held on Nauru, with many waiting for years while their claims were processed. A few dozen came to Australia, while others returned to Afghanistan.

New Zealand accepted 131 people, primarily women, children and families. Among them was Nazari and his family. It’s something for which Nazari has said he is “incredibly grateful”. 

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