20 Asylum-seekers die on the way to Australia

At least 20 asylum seekers have drowned when their boat sank off the Indonesian coast on 1^st November 2011.
The asylum seekers were attempting to reach Australia on a small wooden boat.  The boat was carrying around 70 asylum seekers from Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan but it did not have enough equipment.  The boat left from Central Java and was heading for West Java when it sank.
Indonesian authorities said that 52 people were rescued and 8 people were confirmed dead including 4 women and 2 children. Another body was found later and the body of a nine-year-old boy was pulled from the water on Wednesday 2^nd November. At least other 10 people are still missing including three girls aged about two.
The rescue operation has failed to find any more bodies or survivors until now. Injured survivors are being cared for in a hospital and medical centre. The other survivors are understood to be at a police station and navy base.
An Indonesian policeman said "the dead have been identified as being from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The ones survived mostly from Iran. We believe there were at least 59 Iranian, three Afghanis and six from Pakistan. But the number is not supported by documents and there is a language problem too. So, we can't tell exactly the number missing. It's just a rough number."
Indonesia authorities said that bad weather and overcrowding might have contributed to the accident. There are also reports that local fishermen's associations had been warning for days that conditions were too rough to go out in the sea.
One of the survivors is an Iranian widow who had decided to try to start a new life in Australia with her two children, Mahdieh, her 14-year-old daughter, and Mahdi, her nine-year-old boy. “I was feeling sick and I was asleep [on the boat]. They woke me up when it was sinking. I said ‘I can't see my daughter, my people,’” she said. She found a life jacket and jumped into the sea but never saw her children again.
The is the first tragedy since December last year when nearly 50 people died after their boat smashed into rocks off the coast of Christmas Island. There have been many tragic incidents of asylum seekers on the way to Australia in past years, especially during the monsoon season when the weather is bad and the seas become very rough.
Australian authorities are concerned that even more asylum seekers will drown trying to get to Australia on unsafe boats in dangerous waters. The Home Affairs Minister said ''If we do not have the strongest deterrent to prevent people smugglers plying their trade, we will see further disasters ... we do not want to see further tragedies. This really does underline the need for parliament and for all parties involved to put in place the most effective deterrent to stop this awful trade.''
Australian politician Sarah Hanson-Young said the tragedy proved that more needed to be done to create safer options for asylum seekers. “This must include taking more people directly from Indonesia and Malaysia before they set out in unseaworthy vessels,” she said.
The Australian Government continues to look for support for its Malaysia Plan which it believes will break the people smugglers model and deter asylum seekers from risking their lives trying to get to Australia by boat. The Immigration Minister said “this is a terrible tragedy but it is a fact that when you have more boats coming to Australia you will see more deaths. We didn't adopt the Malaysia arrangement because it was politically easy or it was convenient, quite the opposite. We adopted it because we knew that this was the sort of arrangement that was necessary to avoid more deaths at sea.”
The Home Affairs Minister also said the Opposition should support the Malaysia Solution. "This is a tragic event, which underscores the absolutely dire need to put in the strongest possible deterrence to combat people smuggling and to prevent dangerous vessels from embarking on a journey to Australia,'' he said.