MORE THAN A REFUGEE

BEAUTY WITHIN TRAGEDY                     

Life is uncertain everywhere but Cisarua is extreme. Unlike most Indonesian boroughs the locals are wary.  Greetings are rare. For the Bogor hill town is no longer a cool climate retreat for the well-known regulars fleeing the filthy Jakarta sauna, but an open jail for despairing foreigners on the run.

In decaying overcrowded flats the reluctant residents have a persistent question: Will I die here in exile or go mad first?

There are no threatening black-clads clicking safety catches to intimidate. The walls aren’t scarred by shrapnel. People come and go; there’s public transport to just about anywhere, though still no escape.  This is where thousands of refugees rot.

Trapped in this limbo for almost a decade was journalist Abdul Samad Haidari. Like most squatters a refugee from Afghanistan where the Taliban has been ruthlessly persecuting the Hazara ethnic minority and oppressing writers with dissident voices.

Abdul fled his homeland when he was seven and wandered Pakistan and Iran.  He got to Indonesia through people smugglers promising settlement in Australia even while knowing that portcullis had been dropped by former Immigration and then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. 

The tough-talking former cop and his colleagues had declared the seekers for safety “would never set foot in Australia”. That included the internationally famous Kurdish-Iranian writer and film-maker Behrouz Boochani, held for six years in Papua New Guinea.

After Dutton’s demotion to Opposition Leader, Behrouz stamped hard on the red dirt, raising dust by lambasting Australia’s approach to human rights and praising Abdul’s work.

Both men found freedom in green Aotearoa which has shown compassion by taking 150 refugees a year. Abdul says NZ’s “glad landscapes speak with God and the reviving fragrance of oceans clears the lungs.” 

Much personal damage is probably irreparable: “I survived the genocide but how should I survive the traumas?”

Abdul’s second book The Unsent Condolences has been published in Australia by Palaver. In a foreword Behrouz writes:

“Each and every poem builds the unconquered fortress within the human who has endured the atrocities of evil. (Abdul’s) erudite vision reverberates our hearts, harmonises our minds, ignites our humanity to stand up and take action. In our history, there are only a few poems that have inspired marches against injustice, here we have an entire collection.”

Unable to practice journalism in Cisarua, Abdul turned to poetry.  His first collection The Red Ribbon was published in 2019 by Gramedia, promoted as a search for “peace and hope in a country that has offered him a sanctuary of human love – Indonesia.” 

That’s generous; the Republic hasn’t signed the 1951 UN Refugee Convention so the stateless can’t work, get health care or education, only temporary sanctuary.  Abdul couldn’t even sign a publisher's contract for his book that became a best-seller.

Asylum-seekers get small support from the UN High Commission for Refugees.  There are more than 12,000 of these homeless strugglers from 50 countries – mainly Afghanistan.

Abdul told an interviewer in NZ that The Unsent Condolences was: “a form of resistance against the confiscation of our lands, culture, religious beliefs, language, and history … these poems bear witness to the bitter affliction of persecution, colonization, discrimination, and dehumanization faced by the Hazara people.”

His memories are raw.  He writes about his birthplace Dahmardah “where the glorious orchards were full of vibrant dreams, the magnificent mountains stood tall as God’s height, and the rivers flew like veins, singing in rhymes as though God and nature were in an eternal dialogue about life.”

Then roaring down the road comes reality: “Hilux vehicles sprouting white flags — two at the front; two held at the back.

 “Machine guns and loudspeakers up on rooftops, shouting Taliban Zindabad. Long live the Taliban.

“They march in the village; some head down to madrasa (an Islamic school) and some to Khanju (an area in Dahmardah) searching house to house, Kalashnikovs, their necklace of carnage; rockets rank their shanks.

“They hunt down adults, forcing them to submit, elders are ejected — ‘a waste of space’. Women are silenced, shut off, guns on their heads;

“Sharia Law is enforced to carry out the slow grindings. Mothers hush children to fall asleep with Taliban’s myth. I will call the Taliban if you don’t go to sleep”.

The Australian philosopher Professor Raimond Gaita (famous for his biography and film Romulus, My Father writes of Abdul’s work:

"As Australians, we should know that our governments have shamed us with their ruthlessly devised and enforced policy against refugees fleeing their homes by land and sea. Had we understood what Abdul tries to make us understand no government would have dared implement those policies.”

The Unsent Condolences is dedicated to family and backers impressed with his talent, like former NZ High Commissioner to Indonesia Pam Dunn: “You helped me overcome the feelings of darkness during the last five years. You have been the light guiding me to find the direction to home where my soul found comfort.”

His passion won’t move the concreted minds who mix Islamic refugees with terrorism, job losses and high rents.  But for the rational rest here are insights, language to stimulate, and wisdoms that transcend politics and lines on maps:

“I am but a journalist, the lord of my own words, giving volumes to moral and righteous voices which carry the truthful hymns of the voiceless.  I am engaged, remain curious, firm and utterly prepared. 

“Because I am more than a refugee.”

##

First published in Inside Indonesia, 9 September 2024:

 https://www.insideindonesia.org/archive/articles/book-review-beauty-within-tragedy

BE VERY AFRAID - IT'S OPEN SEASON ON TRUTH

You wouldn’t read about it        

                                         

The virus of fear-politics, spread well by Donald Trump, is now infecting the Southern Hemisphere.
In Australia it’s ‘border security’, an imagined armada of desperates eing persecution and seeking sanctuary in the Great South Land.  This is being used to spook voters ahead of a general election, probably in May. 
In Indonesia it’s the sale of books which might rouse readers to favour the return of Communism as the 17 April Presidential vote looms in the world’s third largest democracy.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is warning that law changes, forced through Parliament by the Labor Opposition and Independents this month, will threaten electors’ comfortable lives.  Deep in the psyche of many is the guilt of occupying a vast resource-rich continent of only 27 million when the archipelago next door has ten times the population.
The changes allow seriously ill asylum seekers currently held on Nauru Island and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to be transferred to the mainland for medical treatment.   Mr Morrison claims this will give the green light to Indonesian people smugglers keen to restart their nefarious trade.
There are about 14,000 Middle Easterners, mainly young men, stranded in Indonesia.  They flew into the Republic earlier this decade lured by promises they’d be ferried across the Arafura Sea. Their dreams have been thwarted by the Australian Navy turning back boats, a policy with the jingoistic title ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’.
While sailors from Down Under have been scouring the horizon for SIEVS (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels), though in reality rickety wooden inshore fishing smacks, Indonesian soldiers have been rummaging stores in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Java hunting publications they claim will endanger the state.
Their principal targets are revisions of the coup last century, which took General Soeharto from Army barracks to the Presidential Palace where he stayed for 32 years wielding absolute power.  He stepped down in 1998 after mass protests and died a decade later.
The publications tend to be histories which don’t conform to the official line of what happened on 30 September 1965; that night six generals and a lieutenant were murdered in Jakarta, allegedly by members of the Communist Party (PKI).  A dreadful bloodletting followed with an estimated half million real or suspected Reds slaughtered in a purge of the party.
The Soeharto story has always been that the massacres were a spontaneous response of pious Muslims outraged by the actions of the godless Marxists. This has been proved false through the scholarship of overseas academics writing in English. 
Some of this research is being picked over and re-worked by Indonesian authors, then printed locally in Indonesian.

Last year Canadian Geoffrey Robinson, professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles released his account of the 1965 events in The Killing Season.

Months earlier Australian post-doctoral fellow at Yale University Jess Melvin published her meticulous sifting of Indonesian Army documents from the period in The Army and the Indonesian Genocide stating categorically that the slaughter was organized by the army.

There have been many earlier accounts, like the University of British Columbia professor John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder, which was translated and banned, though none quite so definitive as Dr Melvin’s work.

Governments having problems with dissidents like island solutions. Survivors of the post-putsch putdown were sent to forced labor camps, like Buru Island, 2,300 kilometers north east of Jakarta.  Here the writer and Nobel Prize nominee Pramoedya Ananta Toer was held for 13 years along with 12,000 others, mainly intellectuals and creatives.

Robinson, who was formerly with Amnesty International, called Buru a ‘concentration camp’ and ‘penal colony’. The New York Times label was ‘Soeharto’s Gulag.’ The government’s terms were  ‘resettlement projects for political rehabilitation.’ 

For a while it seemed President Joko Widodo was inclined to side with the human rights activists who have been urging an open inquiry into the events of the 1960s and a search for reconciliation.

. 

That hope slipped away with his 2016 appointment of Wiranto as coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs.  Robinson claims the former armed forces commander has said the 1965-66 violence was ‘legally justifiable’, which doesn’t mean it was morally right.

The Indonesian Army is claiming that even though the Communist Party is officially banned, only they can stop the PKI’s resurgence, so an authoritarian policy is essential, which includes burning books.  Yet this is illegal, according to a 2010 Constitutional Court decision which overthrew Soeharto’s censorship laws.

The boat-banning Australian Government says the 1,000 men left on Manus and Nauru will never be allowed to settle in Australia.  (Some proven refugees have been accepted by the US in a swap deal with South Americans.)

Opponents of the island camps call them ‘hell holes’ (the official term is ‘Regional Processing Centre’).  The detainees wait in a political limbo hoping some other country will come to their aid, or that conditions will improve in their homelands and it will be safe to return.

That seems as remote as the islands.  According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees more than 65 million people have been ‘forcibly displaced worldwide because of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations.’

With those number the fate of a few hundred in the far-away Pacific rocks no boats in Europe and North America.  A New Zealand offer to take 150 a year has been knocked back by PM Morrison claiming they could eventually get citizenship and move across the Tasman.

Cynics also note that closing Manus and Nauru would deny Australian politicians the stick to whack their opponents in an election season.  In the spirit of not letting the facts spoil a good yarn, the government has stayed silent on revelations that in 2017 almost 28,000 people sought Australian protection visas.

But they came individually, smartly dressed and by air, often masquerading as students or tourists before seeking sanctuary. It’s not an image terrifying voters like that of a fleet of over-crowded boats heading Down Under.

Do fear campaigns still work?  We’ll know in about three months.

##

First published in Strategic Review, 26 February 2019: http://sr.sgpp.ac.id/post/elections-alert-beware-of-boats-and-books

PROTESTS AND SLURS WONT FIX THE MANUS MESS

         

Wanted: The real refugee story   

There should be no asylum seekers in offshore camps funded by Australia.  They’re getting food, healthcare and accommodation - even money. But the prolonged wait is inhumane and damaging.  Impractical solutions and unbalanced reporting are compounding the problem.

The easiest answer would be to let proven refugees into the country. That won’t happen as most voters and the two major parties are convinced the metaphoric floodgates would be cranked open. It’s a compelling argument, particularly with the fear that many would perish in the Arafura Sea. But is it true?

There are more than 14,000 asylum seekers in Indonesia.  Last year 347 were resettled through the UNHCR in Australia, others went to the US and a few to Europe. Do the rest have access to escape routes?

No, according to Australia Government figures; 32 boats have been turned back since 2013 shows the Pacific Solution is working.  Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has another view.

His prelude to the tsunami features scenes of Middle-Eastern mafioso in dingy Jakarta cafes backed by guys in bulging singlets - what Indonesians call preman.

These Trump-style deal-makers among the coffee slops and full ashtrays are monitoring newsbursts 24/7 scanning for a crack in Fortress Australia’s resolve. Yellow fingers dial mystery contacts for stand-by shuttles to fishing villages on Java’s south coast.

Do Mr Dutton’s demons really exist? The only evidence are his forcefully delivered  assertions vilifying victims and belittling their supporters rather than dealing in facts.  

Are there enough cashed-up desperates in the street outside, faces pressed against the cafe windows, ready to hand-over gold bars and uncreased late-issue Benjamins to keep the travel agents afloat?

The fearful asylum seekers huddled outside the UNHCR gate in Jakarta are a pitiful sight. Some sleep on the streets. Independent reports suggest most are on the bones of their backsides in conditions far different from Manus.  

Indonesia is not a signatory to international agreements on refugees; locals want them gone and if there is strife the foreigners will find little sympathy and no recourse to courts or compensation.

  

If Mr Dutton’s fearmongering is founded on fact why haven’t the crims been crushed? The Indonesian Police backed by ASIO’s intelligence have been smashing terrorist cells with great success, so smugglers should be a pushover.

That’s if the law enforcers really want to - and aren’t in the rackets themselves. If so Mr Dutton might like to harangue the Indonesian Government.

That around three in every four asylum seekers have been found to be genuine refugees shows they were fleeing persecution, but a couple of niggling questions seldom get addressed:

Why didn’t they register in the first safe country they encountered (Malaysia has a UNHCR office) - and why are most young blokes? What’s happening to the persecuted women and kids? Aren’t they at greater risk without their menfolk?

Photos of the Manus men once had faces blurred so vengeful authorities in their homelands wouldn’t launch dawn raids on their families.  

Now images are identifiable suggesting original fears have evaporated and they can head home. According to the Orwellian-named Operation Sovereign Borders 624 have done so in the past four years.

The Manus camp’s mining camp facilities would be a soul-numbing environment.  But ‘Hell Hole’? That term is best reserved for the Rohinga camps in the mud and squalor of Cox’s Bazar.

It would help the refugee supporters’ case to be up-front about these concerns; the gentle guys v brutal bureaucrats picture they frame is as distorted as Mr Dutton’s imaginings. Parading extremes just hardens positions.  

So to offset scenes of despairing well-sinkers Mr Dutton and Mr Murdoch’s media tell of happy lads frolicking at the beach and arranging trysts with local ladies. This is curious: The parched-dowser images add to the deterrence, while the other tales could lure. Cynics might wonder what games are being played.

If refugee advocates in their worthy work took a more measured stand their messages would be better heard by those who find the present situation psychologically cruel and shameful. These people want the misery to end with a safe place where the refugees can retrieve their lives.  

But our responsibility to care has to be tempered by a political reality that’s not going to be changed by sloganeering and stand-offs.  

There’s been a forum in place since 2002 to explore alternatives with almost 50 states and agencies as members including Australia and Indonesia. The Regional Ministerial Conference on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime is better known as the Bali Process.  It last met in Perth in August.  If it said anything of worth it’s being kept secret.

Australia will take almost 19,000 refugees through the UNHCR next year, ranking us third in the world. Even more have entered via the humanitarian visa programme.

Our pride in that decency is being shouted down by Mr Dutton’s slanders and his opponents’ hyperbole.  Until another way is found the detention-based deterrent will continue to harm the refugees, drain the budget ($5 billion so far) and demean our nation. If we yelled less and pondered more maybe we could find a fix.

First published in Pearls and Irritations 22 November 2017.  See:  http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-wanted-the-real-refugee-story/

FLEEING INTO DETENTION

Lost in transit   
                                                           

Indonesia was once a short stop-over for Middle East asylum seekers queuing for ferries to Northern Australia.  Now it’s a terminal. The lines are getting longer.  So is the wait for a resolution.  Duncan Graham reports:

The grim posters feature a rickety craft on a rolling sea under a dirty sky. They are captioned:  NO WAY.  You will not make Australia home. The small print warns those registered with the UN High Commission for Refugees in Jakarta after 1 July 2014 will never reach their goal.

The government says its policy will ‘reduce the movement of asylum seekers to Indonesia and encourage them to seek settlement in countries of first asylum.’ 

A year ago there were around 13,800 known illegal migrants (the official Indonesian term) stranded in the Republic with about half from Afghanistan.  The number is now 14,475 according to Dicky Komar, the Director of Human Rights in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The increase is despite 1,236 refugees being resettled, mainly in Canada and the US in the same year.  This means almost 2,000 got into Indonesia in 2016 by-passing immigration.  Researchers say the usual route is to fly into Malaysia, take a boat across the Malacca Straits to Sumatra then public transport to Java.

Those who ignored the posters and didn’t drown in the Arafura Sea have been caught by Australian patrols and either turned back or sent to offshore detention camps now holding around 1,360. Most are young men; the majority are on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island – the rest on Nauru.

Those who did heed the posters’ message and stayed in Indonesia are seeing their resettlement hopes dashed daily. Last year Australia took 347 (down from more than 800 three years earlier), the US 761.  These numbers will tumble.  President Donald Trump is cutting the intake and trying to ban people from six Muslim-majority nations.  Refugees from Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria and Libya are in Indonesia.

Jakarta hasn’t signed the UN Refugee Convention so those trapped in the Archipelago can't legally study or work. Claims to be a refugee are determined by the UNHCR. The process can take years.

Indonesia is getting serious about trafficking. This month [Mar] a Rote Island court sentenced notorious people smuggler Abraham (Captain Bram) Louhenapessy to six years' jail.

He’s not the only one in cramped quarters.  Chairul Anwar of Indonesia’s Transnational Crimes Unit claims the 13 rudenin (detention centres) are full. So around 4,000 squat in community halls or rent rooms around Cisarua in West Java known for its cheap lodgings.

Anwar said it would take 14 years to clear all asylum seekers at the current rate of resettlement provided no new arrivals. He forecast conflict unless the process is accelerated.

Indonesia is confronting the issues but Australia is paying the bills.  This financial year it has budgeted US $1.7 million for the International Organization for Migration and US $43 million to fund ‘regional cooperation arrangements in Indonesia …to manage their asylum seeker populations’.

The social strife forecast by Anwar was downplayed by advocate Ian Rintoul of the Refugee Action Coalition in Sydney.  He said there are “large communities of Afghan families” who have been living in Cisarua for many years.

These domestic arrangements could sink soon. This year Indonesian President Joko Widodo signed a decree confirming refugees have three options – resettlement, repatriation or deportation, though countries like Iran refuse to accept returnees. Integration is not on the menu.

“Australia has created the bottle neck that leaves asylum seekers in limbo in Indonesia for years,” Rintoul said. “Australia effectively forces Indonesia to warehouse asylum seekers … while they wait hopelessly for resettlement.”

Australian academic Dr Antje Missbach was at a Jakarta briefing where the figures were released.  In her book Troubled Transit she wrote ‘most displaced people in need of protection do not have Indonesia in mind as the ultimate country of final settlement … (but) a way station and the final stepping stone on the journey to Australia.’

After the briefing she told Strategic Review:  “Indonesia is no longer so much a transit country but will become more of a containment country.”

Asylum seekers’ hopes of a life Down Under have collided with citizens’ fears of open floodgates, a popular metaphor in the debate with connotations of the ‘boundless plains’ of the national anthem being inundated. 

The major parties support the turn-back policy; polls show politicians inclined to a more humanitarian line could be thumped at the ballot box.

Although Indonesian officials complain about the foreigners the numbers in the archipelago are small when compared to neighbouring lands. There are now more than half a million asylum seekers in Southeast Asia. Most are Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar hunkered down in Malaysia and Thailand after escaping alleged persecution. 

Indonesia also has its own refugees.  According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre there are at least 31,440 citizens ‘who remained internally displaced in Indonesia as a result of conflict, violence and human rights violations’.

The increase in asylum seekers is likely to be discussed in May by a working group of the Bali Process  on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime a talkfest first formed in 2002 and now involving more than 50 nations and agencies. It is co-chaired by Indonesia and Australia.

Rintoul was pessimistic about the outcome. “There will be no constructive results because Australia has used the Bali Process to enforce anti-people smuggling (i.e. anti-refugee) arrangements onto participating countries,” he said.

Commented Missbach: “So far the Bali Process has always been more concerned with protecting borders rather than people; if this is the prime goal they have been successful, but that is to the detriment to the people who need protection.”

Whatever the Bali Process decides, it will be tackling symptoms, and not the reasons people flee.

First published in Strategic Review 24 March 2017

THE PEOPLE NO-ONE WANTS TO HELP

Stuck fast       

                                                                         

The abusers of institutionalised children in the 1960s could not have imagined a Royal Commission half a century later investigating their evil deeds.

But in 2016 those responsible for keeping asylum seekers away from our shores should be aware - and perhaps fearful - that in some more caring and concerned future they may be called to account for harm done through their actions.

Eye witnesses at this imagined inquiry will be hard to find, for few independent observers have made it to the detention centres. Those who have worked in the camps will need immunity before giving evidence; the Australian Border Force Act prohibits government employees and contractors revealing what’s going on.

Dr Antje Missbach suffers none of these restraints because she’s been looking at the issue from Indonesia, the point of departure for more than 25,000 asylum seekers since 2012.

The Monash University anthropologist has spent four years researching the tragedy of what she calls ‘transit migrants’ – the Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Burmese, Sri Lankans and now Somalis  who expected to use Indonesia as a brief staging post on their way to Australia.

But in 2013 the Australian Government’s Operation Sovereign Borders started pushing asylum-seeker boats back to Indonesia. Another policy makes those registered in Jakarta with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees after 1 July 2014 ineligible for resettlement in Australia.

According to the Australian Government the tactics have worked and no boats have made it to the mainland.

This has left more than 13,500 people in limbo, and the number is increasing.  They can’t work and the kids don’t get schooling. The Indonesian government has shelter for one in ten, the rest fend for themselves, their presence often causing conflict with locals.  Although many are Muslim, those from Iraq and Iran tend to be Shia, while Indonesia is overwhelmingly Sunni. 

In 2013 a brawl left eight detainees dead. ‘Tension and deep animosity had been building in the centre (in Sumatra) between the Burmese Muslims and Buddhists, yet no precautions had been taken to prevent violence,’ reports Missbach.  Australia helps fund the centres.

Australia sees the transit migrants’ plight as Indonesia’s problem caused by lax border controls allowing easy entry to the Republic, with corrupt officials assisting their movements through the archipelago and onto boats heading south.

Indonesia reckons this is Australia’s problem because that’s where the asylum seekers were heading.  Impasse.

Missbach’s book has been published in Singapore as Troubled Transit by the Yusof Ishak Institute.  Other scholarly investigations of immigrant movements have focussed on Europe and North America.

This appears to be the first in-depth examination of how and why the asylum seekers get to Indonesia, what pushes and pulls them, how they are faring and what happens next.

Not much, although there’s been loose talk in Jakarta about setting aside an island.  There’s no apparent urgency, though that could change in a flash if more serious conflict erupts between reluctant guests and hostile hosts.

Just before the Christmas break Australia hosted the so-called ‘2 + 2 Dialogue’ of Indonesian and Australian foreign and defence ministers. The bland 33-point communiqué was a text-book of diplomatic clichés -  ‘welcoming’, ‘noting’ and ‘underlining’ but no mention of the stranded asylum seekers.

The nearest was a reference to a meeting of the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime, scheduled for March.

Although Indonesia has long promised to sign the Refugee Convention this hasn’t happened. Missbach believes the chance of ratification under President Joko Widodo ‘remains minimal’.

Jakarta fears acceptance could lead to the establishment of a domestic asylum system.  Missbach comments:  ‘Australia could then designate Indonesia as a safe first country and return people there, which Indonesia wants to avoid more than anything else.’

Troubled Transit is a professional report thankfully devoid of the usual polysyllabic jargon some academics seem to think necessary to distinguish their work from journalism. 

The only impediments to smooth reading are in-text references.  These are like speed bumps and should not be used by publishers seeking wider readership.

Missbach’s poignant stories of individuals remind that behind the acronyms and initialisms are despairing human beings caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare.  

Recounting the personal without losing her objectivity must have been tough.  Three boys she knew drowned trying to reach Australia.  Some authorities thought her a spy. Why would a German researcher working with an Australian university be in Indonesia?

Despite the suspicions she got to state officials, jailed people smugglers and even into detention centres– impossible in Nauru or Manus Island.

Missbach interviewed those who’d learned some English or Indonesian to by-pass interpreters and so avoid risking her informants’ privacy. Many were ‘severely distressed or traumatised’.

Breaks in Germany and Australia became essential ‘to distance myself from the field and its psychological burdens.’

This book is more than a primer for appreciating the issues. It could also be Exhibit A when the Royal Commission into harm done by Asylum Seeker Policies is eventually appointed.

(First published in New Mandala 3 February 2016:  See http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2016/02/03/stuck-fast-review-of-troubled-transit/ 

##

'TRANSIT MIGRANTS' - THE NEW FOOTWEAR IRRITANT

Boats stopped: Now what about those in limbo?                       

In 1991 Indonesian troops massacred 200 in an East Timor cemetery, strengthening much of the world’s hostility towards occupation of the former Portuguese colony.

The Republic’s Foreign Minister, the late Ali Alatas, diagnosed the pain as ‘a pebble in the shoe’.  Yet it persisted until a new nation was born eight years later.

The footwear irritant has now returned, this time over the plight of asylum seekers heading for Australia but stranded in Indonesia. There are around 13,500 – a one-third increase in the past two years.

It’s a small number by world standards [Malaysia has more than 155,000] but every one a tragedy.

The human faces behind the statistics can be encountered in a joyless alley alongside a Central Jakarta high rise.  Here the desperate, unwanted by Indonesia and Australia, wait for crumbs of information from the harassed staff of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Those registered after 1 July 2014 have been told they’ll never be resettled in Australia. They can’t go home, they can’t go on. They are not allowed to work.

Indonesia has 13 detention centers with a total capacity of 1,300. Those who squat in the kampongs usually survive with remittances from their homeland. 

Thousands of bored and despairing young outsiders hanging around with no positive future in view is a recipe for strife. Ethnic, economic, cultural, sexual and religious tensions thrive. The failure of Indonesia and Australia to fix the problem means the pot simmers.

The issue has been conspiracy theorists’ happy place because a sea fog of secrecy laid down by the Australian government has smothered informed debate.

Now some of the mist has been lifted, not by politicians remembering that in a functioning democracy electors have a right to know what’s being done in their name, but through the work of an industrious academic.

For the past four years Dr Antje Missbach has been researching the issue of asylum seekers stuck in Indonesia.  The results of her work Troubled Transit has just been published by Singapore’s ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute. This is the most substantial report to date, looking at the problem from Indonesia’s perspective.

The Monash University academic lived in Indonesia as a teenager.  She has been gathering data, interviewing Indonesian officials, visiting overcrowded detention centers, talking to what she calls ‘transit migrants’ and convicted people smugglers.

Her book also gives Indonesian and Australian human rights activists the facts they need to ramp up campaigns for a just and lasting solution.

Successive Australian governments’ policies have been driven by voters’ fears of unchecked waves of asylum seekers from conflict-ripped regions like the Middle East and South Asia. If they make it to Indonesia they could be ferried south.

Several attempts to solve the problem of ‘crimmigration’ have been tried and discarded.  However the policy now in place jingoistically labelled Operation Sovereign Borders seems to have worked.

It’s an unilateral deterrent justified by the argument that it saves lives. An estimated 1,550 drowned trying to cross the Arafura Sea between 1998 and 2011.

In Indonesian fishing ports where people smugglers load frail craft with the desperate, posters warn No Way – You Will Not Make Australia Home.

More effective have been the messages back to families and friends from the people caught earlier and transferred to detention centres in Nauru and the island of Manus reporting that they have uncertain futures and are living in harsh conditions.

Now boats intercepted by Australian authorities are either escorted back to the Archipelago, sometimes allegedly entering Indonesian waters without permission, or the crew and passengers are put in a lifeboat and pointed north. 

In one case a crew was allegedly paid US$30,000 [Rp 422 million] to return asylum seekers. This has also angered Indonesia, and if correct may have broken international law.

When Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was president he called for a ‘regional solution’. Missbach told The Jakarta Post the definition was unclear and more than 40 nations could be included:

“When SBY initiated the so-called Jakarta Declaration [August 2013] he invited representatives from countries of origin, transit countries and resettlement to ‘talk things through’.

“Now under President Joko Widodo ‘regional’ seems to mean only Southeast Asia. The Bali Process [established in 2002 and co-chaired by Indonesia and Australia], which used to be the most important international forum for asylum seekers … seems to have gone rather dormant.”

What could goad the nations into action?  For Missbach it’s the possibility of Sunni-Shia conflict.  Many refugees from Iran and Iraq are Shia, a branch of Islam persecuted in Indonesia. Brawls with local people have already taken lives.

“I think the situation is actually getting worse,” said Missbach. “In October extremists raided a temporary shelter in Yogyakarta and all detainees had to be taken back into detention for their own safety.

“In other places near Medan I hear some landlords no longer rent their properties to Shia people.”

The latest proposal is to put all transit migrants on an island isolated from the locals. After the Vietnam War thousands fled by boat and were housed on Galang Island in the Riau Archipelago.

Vice president Jusuf Kalla and Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Panjaitan raised the idea this year but have since gone quiet.

“An island would be a very expensive solution as it would require everything being taken there,” said Missbach. “Once Indonesia creates a new island settlement the issue is there to stay.

“The original plan for the Galang camp was to use it for five years. It stayed for almost 20.”  

If this pebble isn’t shaken out soon it could cripple attempts to improve relationships between Indonesia and Australia.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 22 December 20150

##

IMPROVING THE RELATIONSHIP

By the way:

Trust me, I’m from Australia

Thanks to certain unidentified whistleblowers, this column can now reveal details of the top secret negotiations underway between Indonesia and Australia following last year’s spying scandal.

Readers will remember the Australian government greatly offended its northern neighbor by tapping the phones of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his good lady wife Ibu Kristiani Herawati.

The outraged president demanded a new code of conduct between the nations before formal military cooperation could be reintroduced. Since then senior bureaucrats, etymologists, black-letter lawyers and spin doctors have been seeking the right words to resolve the impasse and soothe hurt feelings. 

Here’s our exclusive – details of Australia’s response - which fell off the back of a becak.

ETHICAL CODE OF CONDUCT (Draft 149a). Without prejudice.

1)      PREAMBLE: Australia will never, ever, cross our hearts, swear on the blood of our convict ancestors, spy again on our dear and most trusted best friends in Indonesia - unless it’s in our national interest, or we are instructed to do so by Washington.

2)      BORDER RESPECT: We pledge to acknowledge and respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our great neighbor.  We will never again cross borders without the gracious permission of the Indonesian Government – unless our navigational equipment malfunctions.

3)      NO SURPRISES: We will always notify you of any policy decisions we may or may not make from time-to-time before public release. However we cannot be held responsible for any leaks published by the mongrel media causing you great embarrassment. This we will regret.

4)      DISCLOSURES: Should such leaks occur, we categorically pledge to launch thorough inquires into the source (unless we leaked).  We will condemn the stories as lies perpetrated by unnamed mischief makers, traitors and unpatriotic journalists.  However it must also be understood that we support absolutely the freedom of the press in a robust democracy.

5)      LAW: Should Indonesian slaughtermen kick our cows, or customs arrest our drug mules we will urge our citizens to respect Indonesian rules - even though we think they’re weird. Your laws, not our people.  However we reserve the right to interfere should the Australian electorate get annoyed to the point where our seats in Parliament are threatened.

6)      DISQUIET: Australia will never knowingly use megaphone diplomacy or make inflammatory statements that insult Indonesia and arouse public disquiet – unless these are in our Machiavellian master plan. Which we don’t have.

7)      SEPARATISM: We will not tolerate Australian NGOs grandstanding on separatism in West Papua. No ifs, buts or maybes. We will contrive to be outraged and issue awesome media statements. See Clause 8.

8)       PROVOCATION: Should the Morning Star flag be raised on Australian soil we will monitor the situation closely.  That’s our clear and unequivocal position.  We cannot yet control the Opposition parties, the churches, NGOs and others concerned about alleged human rights abuses. About these we know nothing – unless revealed otherwise by Wikileaks. Clause 7 will then apply.

9)      DONATIONS: We will give you orange lifeboats, patrol boats, Hercules aircraft and other military hardware that’s passed its use-by date. A condition of our generosity is that you do not remove certain specialised electronic equipment that may, or may not, have been installed.

10)  AID: Through the careful placement of our limited aid money, and in close association with Indonesian ticket-clipping authorities, we will fund projects we consider appropriate through the archipelago to the great benefit of Australian contractors. This aid will continue, unless our domestic budget needs demand otherwise. For security reasons such information must remain confidential

11)  DENIAL: We will neither confirm nor deny the existence of this or any other draft document or briefing notes which may or may not have been prepared by rogue contractors, outside operators, over-imaginative journalists, casuals and interns unauthorized by the Australian government and without our knowledge.

12)  COMMUNICATION: A Hot Line will be established to rapidly resolve problems. Phone anytime during Canberra business hours. Otherwise leave a message. Your call is important to us and may be used for training purposes.

13)  PENALTIES: These protocols shall come into force on a date to be agreed but not disclosed.  It may or may not remain in force for an unspecified time.   Duncan Graham 

(First published in The Jakarta Post 18 May 2014)

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TAKING REVENGE

By the way: 

The RAID - Redemption

Good morning delegates. Welcome to the committee formed to Respond to Australia’s Incursion Demeanor, which we’ll now call the RAID. I’ve asked Joe Taslim to be our technical advisor and take the minutes.

As you know our southern neighbors have been behaving like the arrogant colonial godless sons of convicts posturing as deputy sheriffs that we all know they are.

(Nods all round).

We’ve shown our measured displeasure by withdrawing our ambassador.  Even if we want to send him back we can’t because the road to the airport is flooded.

They won’t send their envoy home because he comes from Perth.  He’s waiting till the heat waves have passed.

Anyway, enough gossip. First item on the agenda – how to make Australia take us seriously – yes, Minister?

Thank you, Madame Chair:  I suggest we give them smartphones with GPS apps for their navy.  Then they can find our maritime borders.

… and we can eavesdrop Tony Abbott’s wife.  But do we have the money?

We’ll make them pay for it.  They give us more than half a billion dollars a year for aid projects like schools in Nusa Tenggara.  We can siphon off some of the cash.

Haven’t we done so already?  Anyway, seems a fine idea.  My cousin’s a Samsung agent – I’ll talk to him for a morning price.  (Sends SMS) Yes, delegate.

Order, order! I don’t think we should let this get out of hand. Let’s just urge the President to call his best friend.

He’s tried, but Abbott won’t pick up the phone. Perhaps it doesn’t work.  Along with his navy’s GPS. We could send him one. I’ll chat to my cousin. (Sends SMS)

Maybe the Australian Prime Minister has been attacked by black magic, like our President.

Tell him to pray.

But he’s a Catholic.

Tell him to pray for a conversion.

Here’s another one: Let’s re-arrest Schapelle Corby – that’ll turn their media feral.

Aren’t they already?

Excuse me Madame Chair; I think it’s time to talk tough.  First we ban visas on arrival for all Australian tourists. 

Treat them like they treat us. Make them fill in a 14-page form in Indonesian, apply in person in Canberra and pay ten times the price.  No Internet applications allowed.

Great thinking – let’s go further and include immigration arrival and customs forms – all in Indonesian! Make them learn our words, like demokrasi, teknologi, bisnis - we’ll become a world language leader yet.

Profile them – anyone tall, white and blue-eyed needs to be detained!  And sniffed by a quarantine dog.

Do we have any dogs?

The Balinese do.

But they’ve got rabies.

Even better.

Hang on friends, I like what I’m hearing, but suppose they bypass Bali and head for Phuket?  Think how much we’ll lose in tax on Bintang sales.

Who cares?  It’s like banning exports of unprocessed ores.  OK, thousands will lose their jobs and the economy will crash but we’ll teach those greedy multinationals that we’re not a banana republic.

How about this: We bring back all those students in Australia and make them go to our schools and universities. That’ll cripple Australia’s education industry and boost our own …

What? No way!  My daughter’s in Melbourne on an Australian scholarship. I don’t want her coming back until she’s got a foreign husba … I mean, qualification.

Order, order!  I’ve got a message here from the TNI – they’re going to send the fleet into the Arafura Sea, provided they can get fuel.

AusAID can pay.  Do they have GPS sets?  I’ll talk to my cousin. (Sends SMS)

Excuse me again - I hear the Australians have bought lifeboats to send asylum seekers back to our shores.  What do we think about that?

They’re trying to corrupt us.  Let’s reflag them with the red and white, the boats, I mean, not the refugees. Fill them with  pencak silat fighters, and return to sender.  That’ll shake them up and shows we’re honest.   OK with you Joe? Is Iko Uwais free?

Delegates, thank you for your inputs.  I think we now have the basis for a policy.  We’ll have it ready once the elections are over. Duncan Graham

(First published in The Jakarta Post 16 February 2014)

CAN INDONESIA AND AUSTRALIA EVER SHARE THE SAME BED?

Let’s just get over it                                                               

Australia and Japan have been mightily abusing each other.  The slander has been offensive, strident and public.

The issue involves trade and traditions, sovereign rights and national identity – volatile ingredients where one spark can ignite major international incidents.

Yet no credible observer has suggested the nasty accusations made by both sides in the International Court of Justice over Australia’s bid to stop Japanese whalers will lead to conflict.  Expect nothing more serious than harsh newspaper editorials.

There’ll be no greasing of M 16s. We’ll buy Toyotas; they’ll eat Queensland beef cooked with Pilbara gas. They’ll cuddle koalas and our love of sushi will be unstoppable.

This is what ‘mature relationships’ means.  Like a good cross-cultural marriage we can disagree and speak truths, but still share the same bed provided there’s mutual respect.

Will such a happy union ever exist between Australia and Indonesia? Not without some radical changes in both countries’ behaviour.

 Indonesia Country Strategy- Towards 2025 released by PM Kevin Rudd in Jakarta this month (July) glows with feel-good jargon and happy snaps of diplomats in batik.

The Strategy tells us that there are lots of Indonesians; they’re young, have cash and live nearby.  Also they use Facebook and Twitter. 

Important had Indonesia invented the technology, but mall rats rating boyfriends on smartphones is awesomely insignificant – though teens would disagree.

Commented The Jakarta Post editor Meidyatama Suryodiningrat: ‘the report often feels like a quick list of remedies that do little to address fundamental problems that will colour the relationship’. 

Of course we should get to know each other better.  What’s the problem? Here’s the Strategy’s mixed metaphor answer, highlighting why the issues are too important to be left to officials:

‘The challenge for governments will be to strengthen our bilateral architecture by deepening people-to-people engagement.’  

Mocking this thin document, pock-marked with platitudes, is easy, but detracts from a few fine advances.  Like the BRIDGE inter-school project (backed by private enterprise), and the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies programme, driven by independent academics.

Things the Strategy daringly says needs changing, like easier visa access and tempered travel warnings, could have been done years ago with a quick pen-flick.  The need has long been obvious.

‘Seeking to improve’ and ‘work to ensure’ are just wallpaper words covering a policy of hypocrisy and distrust.

We, the wong kecil, the ordinary folk not involved in trade and security, want closer friendships rooted in mutual understanding, not appeasement and bland talk – what Indonesians call basa-basi. 

We treasure being blunt. ‘Just get over it’ and ‘grow up’ are common responses when individuals clash, but know deep-down they have to co-exist.  It’s a trait with merits.

Here are some of the rocks the Strategy avoids, even while saying cultural differences need to be acknowledged.

Australians who don’t appreciate the iron grip on their neighbour’s psyche of the Unitary State, and the pride in a bloody revolution that overthrew a colonial power, will be forever doomed to misunderstand Indonesia.

Likewise Indonesians who don’t know there’s a primal fear in our DNA. It’s of descending Asian hordes, plus guilt over European boat people seizing a continent after violently dispossessing the locals. 

That’s why we let US marines use Darwin – something not mentioned in the Strategy.  Imagine a Chinese base in Kupang – a friendship gesture?

Indonesia is labelled secular, but reality is otherwise. Not all Indonesian Muslims, or Australian Christians, are moderate.  A few will say, and occasionally do, dangerous things, as in Northern Ireland. 

View in proportion and share the outrage.  Have we stopped going to Boston because it harboured mad bombers?

A functioning democracy has a robust media.  Indonesia’s press is the most free in Southeast Asia – check the anaemic Singaporean newspapers to prove the point.

Many comments will offend prickly nationalists overdosing on patriotism – Samuel Johnson’s ‘last refuge of the scoundrel’. Freedom of expression isn’t just for us – they have equal rights to sledge.

If Indonesians don’t like our simplistic views of the way they do things, then offer alternatives, like graft-free projects, altruistic politicians, and respect for the rule of law.

If we don’t want to be seen as godless, arrogant Kuta cowboys, then the solution is in our hands.

Wicked tests loom: Brain-dead Australians will get caught with drugs.  Indonesia does its laws, its way. We won’t like the penalties.   Too bad.

We’ll give sanctuary to West Papua separatists and promote their cause. Indonesians will be outraged.  Stiff cheese.

The Strategy quotes Indonesian students in Australia citing the proverb; ‘If we don’t know you, we don’t care about you.’ Check Indonesian driver behaviour for the truth of that adage.

But that’s not us. Our Judaeo-Christian heritage has given us opposite values of which we should not be ashamed.

 Which is why we agitate for the human rights of West Papuans.  If the students haven’t learned this, then they should ask for their money back.

Politicians everywhere claim probity and wisdom.  Then they speak and we learn otherwise.  Anticipate goading on either side of the Arafura Sea ahead of elections in both nations.  Treat trash as trash, delivered for venal purposes, and move on.

In 1998 Indonesians threw out a dictator and took on democracy.  It was one of history’s most impressive transitions of power, achieved without outside help and little bloodshed. 

Had it all gone wrong (consider Egypt and Syria) we might have been so flooded with refugees that Australia would now be South Java.

The Strategy says Indonesia is strong, confident and mature.  So why continue aid? We’ve just trashed $100 million on a failed replanting project in Kalimantan’s peat bogs, money better spent on scholarships. More than 10,000 have been given – fantastic.   Add a couple more zeros for real impact.

Don’t anticipate an Australia Country Strategy coming from Jakarta, one city with more than half our continent’s population. Former President BJ Habibie once allegedly described neighbour Singapore as ‘just a little red dot’ on the map. If so, then we’re just an ochre blob.

(First published in On Line Opinion, 15 July 2013)

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WILL VIDEOS DETER ASYLUM SEEKERS?

Get the message: No Advantage! Right?       

Cartoon: Eureka Street

                 

Potential visitors to Australia can watch You Tubes showing majestic landscapes and fine shopping.  ‘Please come,’ they say, ‘stay and enjoy our beautiful country’s advantages.’

Now there’s another program available, though carrying a starkly different message.  Titled: No Advantage the 40-second clips are pitched to the foreign asylum seekers in Indonesia keen to cross the Indian Ocean but facing tough new laws designed to swamp their plans.

Instead of making it to Sydney they’ll be sent to Manus Island off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, and the Micronesian island of Nauru.

This tiny South Pacific nation was once known as Pleasant Island, but the videos don’t feature slim couples downing cocktails before dashing into shimmering surf.

Instead the images show basic barrack-style accommodation designed to show that life in these poor and isolated outposts will be bleak and boring. There’ll be guards and wire fences. 

Just in case viewers don’t get the message a stern male voice says “No Advantage” five times.

Nauru, a textbook example of a failed state, has only 10,000 residents, but will house an expected 1,500 asylum seekers. No shopping malls, little to do, nowhere to go. Better stay in Indonesia patiently waiting to leave when officially approved.

But will the 4,000 registered – and a similar number of unregistered - Afghans Iraqis and Sri Lankans, packed in cheap hotels around the Archipelago and sustained by international aid pittances, watch and take heed? 

Unlikely. More than 1,000 men, women and children have drowned trying to reach Australia since 2001 – the latest last month. (Aug)  Such awful deaths should deter all but the most desperate from clambering aboard decrepit fishing boats crewed by kids – but they don’t.

Political and religious freedom, high wages and quality lifestyles make Australia a magnet for the persecuted and fearful.  Along with the US, Canada and a few north European countries, Australia is the great refuge, the promised land of opportunity and safety, work and welfare – a destination worth a few years on a little island, for everyone knows the wait won’t be forever.

The videos are the latest strategy in a complex series of policies rapidly introduced and passed last month (Aug) by the Australian Parliament.

They follow the release of a 162-page report compiled by a three-man expert committee appointed by the government.  This was headed by former defence chief Angus Houston and supported by refugee advocate Paris Aristotle and foreign affairs academic Michael L'Estrange.  It was a trio of such integrity and authority that its views had to be taken seriously.

They were, breaking the deadlock that has gripped Australian politics for the last few years as the boats kept coming. Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr has forecast 180,000 boat people a year if the deterrents don’t work.

Houston said his 22 recommendation report was: “Hard-headed, but not hard-hearted; that practicality and fairness should take precedence over theory and inertia; and that the perfect should not be allowed to become the enemy of the good.”

In brief those with money to buy passage on a boat will no longer have a headstart over those with equal or better claims for resettlement but no dollars or desire to risk their lives.

Refugee support groups remain unhappy even though numbers accepted will immediately jump from 13,500 to 20,000 a year.

The previous government of Liberal John Howard shunted asylum seekers off to Nauru and Manus. The boats stopped coming, but the refugees eventually got to Australia and the camps closed.

The Jakarta-based people traffickers reopened their businesses after 2007.  In that year the Labor Party took office and dumped Howard’s so-called Pacific Solution claiming it was cruel to make people wait years to be processed.

But that’s now their fate.  Boat people will remain in Nauru and Manus for as long as they’d stay in Indonesia or Malaysia if waiting to access what the Houston report calls “regular migration pathways and established international arrangement

More likely to deter is a stop to family reunions through the special humanitarian program for those arriving by boat.  In the past men who’ve made the trip and got permanent residence then called in their relatives.

Houston also recommends “bilateral cooperation on asylum seeker issues with Indonesia be advanced as a matter of urgency.”

This reinvents the wheel.  Indonesia and Australia already have long-standing talk tanks.  They include the Bali Process on People Smuggling, co-chaired by Indonesia and Australia.  It has 46 members and has been in place since 2002.

How effective? The figures speak: In the past ten years about 410 boats carrying around 25,000 people have sailed to Australia.  In the week following Canberra’s acceptance of the Houston recommendations nine boats quit Indonesia and delivered their human cargo.

If you’d still like to visit the Great South Land and cuddle a koala don’t be deterred by all this negativity.  Provided you’ve got the cash for a holiday, a visa and intention to return home you’re welcome. Just don’t come by boat.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 13 Sept 2012)

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