Vietnamese migrants

Vietnamese migrants detained on Galang

Reuters Jakarta/Canberra

Thirty-one Vietnamese migrants bound for Australia have been taken into custody after their unseaworthy boat was found beached on a small Indonesian island, a migration agency said on Thursday.

The boat was found on Galang Island just south of Singapore with a broken-down motor, said Steve Cook, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration in Jakarta.

"The motor had conked out so they removed it and the locals were trying to help them fix it," Cook told Reuters, adding all on board the boat, including women and children, were healthy.

"Only 10 of these people say they want to return to Vietnam, while 21 want to claim asylum," he said.

Galang Island, with few inhabitants and dotted with scrub- covered hills, held more than 10,000 boatpeople at a refugee camp in the early 1990s.

Indonesia, with porous borders and a lack of laws on people smuggling, has in recent years become a springboard for asylum seekers heading for Australia. The issue has strained ties between Canberra and Jakarta in recent years.

Cook said the whereabouts of another boat carrying 42 Vietnamese migrants found near Indonesia's Borneo island last week was unknown.

Their rickety boat was found stranded with no fuel and authorities, after checking if any of the passengers were suffering from the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, re- supplied it with fuel, food and water and sent it on its way.

Australia, while criticizing Indonesia for not taking the migrants ashore, has already warned the Vietnamese would not be allowed to land on Australian soil if they made it that far.

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard said his hardline policy, adopted in 2001, of blocking access to all boatpeople still stood and the vessels would be turned back or diverted to a camp for asylum seekers on the nearby Pacific island of Nauru.

"We will, of course, continue to follow the thing very carefully and we'll act in a humane fashion, as we always have, but we don't intend to change the policy that we've adopted," Howard told an Australian radio station on Thursday.

Jakarta deflected the criticism, saying it was unfair to put the onus on one country. Indonesia has said the issue would not harm relations with its neighbor but it could set a negative tone at a regional people-smuggling summit on the Indonesian resort island of Bali next week.