Australia's boat people policy hits a snag

The tiny island of Kiribati is one of the places Australia had picked

CANBERRA, Australia -- Australia's policy of diverting boat people to Pacific islands for processing has hit another snag after talks with Fiji and Kiribati collapsed, leaving a bottleneck of migrants awaiting a temporary home.

Australia had hoped to convince neighboring Fiji to take several hundred unwanted asylum seekers, but domestic troubles and post-coup pressures in Fiji have made that impossible.

A spokesman for Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer told Reuters news agency that Australia had withdrawn its request for Fiji to host a processing center, but he could not confirm reports that Fiji had asked the request be withdrawn.

"I don't know what the sort of to and fro was, but the end result is that we have withdrawn the request," he told Reuters on Friday.

Negotiations with Kiribati have also collapsed due to "logistical reasons," but talks with Palau are still going on and it is possible that Papua New Guinea may increase its intake.

'Pacific solution'

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In August the conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard began turning away all asylum seekers caught trying to sneak into Australia in boats operated by people smugglers.

Since then, hundreds of asylum seekers have been shipped by Australia to hastily built camps on Nauru, a tiny island in the Pacific, and Papua New Guinea.

But Australia's so-called "Pacific solution," hatched in the lead-up to a November 10 election, has sparked a regional backlash, with experts saying that Canberra's cash compensation is not enough to outweigh local resentment.

Already aid groups have slammed the policy, saying that Australia is in the business of human trafficking by using aid deals to lure Pacific island nations to accept boatloads of asylum seekers.

Vanuatu's Prime Minister Edward Natapei has called Australia's "Pacific solution" a "Big Brother" tactic of bullying smaller island neighbors into taking boat people.

Pacific jaunt

In a bid to shore up support for his policy, Downer has said he would visit neighboring Pacific nations in the coming weeks.

He will also host a visit by Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda to discuss the people-smuggling problem.

Indonesia is the jumping off point to Australia for most of the Middle Eastern and Afghani asylum seekers, and reaching a deal with Jakarta to control people smugglers based has become vital.

Most of the boats that arrive off Australia's coast sail from Indonesia, a journey that takes several days, with some 8,200 people arriving in Australia over the last two years. It is thought that most of them are fleeing war and religious persecution.

The Australian navy and air force has already shipped more than 1,000 mostly Afghan and Iraqi migrants to Nauru and PNG after Canberra struck financial deals with the cash-strapped nations in September and October.

Another 540 are waiting on Australia's Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island while Canberra negotiates with neighbors to take them.

The flow of boats is expected to continue until the December monsoon season effectively closes the treacherous ocean crossing from Indonesia.

Howard revealed on Friday his conservative government had even considered using an ocean liner to house the overflow of would-be refugees arriving off Australia's remote northwest coast.