For Swe Lang, talk of life in Australia brings a wry smile. Fleeting as the grin is, it is the only sign of joy from the 15-year-old, whose grim experience is etched into his face. Swe is a member of the Karen minority in Burma, and fled his homeland with friend Tan Myen, also 15, after the Burmese military attempted to forcibly conscript them. The pair left their family and joined a group heading for Thailand, then continued further south to Malaysia.
The two arrived last month, and join the estimated 80,000 Burmese refugees now living in the south-east Asian country. Only their youth has spared them an extended stay in immigration detention. While Swe smiles at the prospect of living in Australia, the reality is he’s unlikely to experience it under the agreement between Australia and Malaysia floated earlier this month.
The 4000 refugees set to come to Australia over the next four years under the deal is a significant number, but still only a relatively small percentage of the 90,000 total refugees estimated to be living in Malaysia. That ratio, and the fact that no detail has yet been given on who will be selected and how, means refugee organisations in Malaysia are not getting excited about life in Australia just yet.
Burmese arrivals in Malaysia tend to associate closely with community groups from their home region — Chin, Shan and Karen are among the most prominent from the 20 subcommunities represented. Community leaders from several Burmese migrant groups indicated to Crikey they were welcoming of Malaysia’s mooted deal with Australia, but needed more detail. They requested their names and communities not be published, because of the risk of putting in danger the status of community members in dealing with Malaysian authorities.
Malaysia has become home to a steady stream of Burmese refugees, escaping the land confiscation and forced labour of the country’s ruling junta. Many of those escaping, such as Swe and Tan, are bypassing the refugee camps on the Thai border because they offer little prospect of earning an income.
But life in Malaysia is still tough for many refugees. The country has not been welcoming to them, fearing they are an impediment to the country’s effort to reach developed nation status by the end of the the decade.
While most arrivals spend a burst of a few months in detention when they first arrive, it is the years afterward they spend in legal limbo and with little financial support that proves most tricky. Through formally prohibited from working, many take jobs on the margins of the economy, in construction, hospitality or as domestic assistants.
“Nobody will come and feed us,” said the leader of one Burmese community group. “To survive, we have to work. We do the jobs Malaysians don’t want to do.”
With little or no state support available, the community has developed programs to look after its own. On the middle floors of one run-down housing estate, one ethnic group has established a school for 150 students, where they can learn in English as well as their home language. As the community leader states: “If we don’t teach them our own culture now, then in 10 years the only place they’ll be able to see it is in a museum.”
Elsewhere, an apartment has been established as a temporary home for more than 30 refugees, reliant on contributions from other community members and food donations from a local church to survive.
With Malaysia an unwilling host, the arrivals face a prolonged period of uncertainty. Andika Wahab, refugee co-ordinator for Malaysian human rights organisation Suaram, says he’s aware of cases of people waiting five years, 10 years and in some cases more than 20 years for their situation to be resolved.
“During this time, they cannot work and they cannot get an education,” he said. “It means they get desperate and angry.”
Underpinning all this is Malaysia’s refusal to sign the United Nations refugee convention, which would set minimum standards for treatment. Wahab reckons the government’s reluctance stems from a fear that it will increase the number of arrivals. “They see it as a threat to national security,” he said.
Malaysia’s refusal to sign the convention means the work in processing asylum claims falls on the shoulders of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. While the Burmese community leaders say the UNHCR does a decent job, its benefits are limited given Malaysia’s obstinance.
The flip side of the proposed deal is that 800 new arrivals to Australia will be sent to Malaysia for the determination of their refugee status. It is this aspect of the deal that angers many refugee advocates in both countries, given it means they will initially be housed in Malaysia’s immigration detention facilities.
“Nothing short of hell” is how Andrew Khoo, chair of the human rights committee at the Malaysian Bar, describes conditions inside. He describes the facilities as overcrowded, leaving detainees with poor sanitation and a lack of access to basic health care. His assessment is backed up by several investigations into the state of the facilities, as Crikey reported last week.
“These facilities are extremely overcrowded,” an Amnesty report last year concluded. “They fail in fundamental ways to meet basic international standards and generally accepted good practice in the treatment of detainees and the management of institutions. “Detainees in immigration centres lack bedding, regular access to clean water, medication and sufficient food. They spend most of their time in their cells with no opportunities for exercise, organised worship or other activities. Diseases spread quickly, and fights are common. Detainees under age 18 are held together with adults, in violation of international law.”
The Malaysian Bar is opposed to the refugee trade deal, and Khoo points out several practical flaws.
He says the agreement’s claim that there would be “no preferential treatment” for the 800 arrivals who come via Australia over the 90,000 refugees already here would make it impossible to meet the deal’s requirement that “transferees will be treated with dignity and respect and in accordance with human rights standards” given Malaysia’s current policy.
He also points to the fact that community groups — most of them ethnic Burmese — play a crucial role in helping refugees. The 800 sent from Australia are more likely to be from Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan, places that lack an established community presence in Malaysia. (The country does, however, have a strong Tamil community, potentially making life a little easier for one group well represented among boat arrivals to Australia.)
For its part, the UNHCR is generally positive towards the agreement, but is seeking further discussion to see how it would work in practice. “We understand the agreement could contribute to better co-operation and burden sharing among countries in the region,” Yante Ismail, a UNHCR spokeswoman, told Crikey.
The latest deal is not the first time Malaysia has acted as a temporary stop for refugees before coming to Australia. During the 1970s and 1980s, people fleeing Vietnam often spent time wallowing in refugee camps in Malaysia before they were given access to Australia.
Then, as now, Malaysia was keen to rid itself of the problem of unwelcome arrivals.
And then we put holes in the bottom of the refugee boats to make them stay in Malaysia.
The reality is it is illegal to trade in humans who have done nothing wrong so our pissant pollies can keep up the pretext that they have broken some law getting here.
And the fucking useless media never point out that all those tiny number of 6,000 that we import come under a reluctant voluntary program, they have to have family here (which is why Burmese here have been whining to Gillard to stop the Afghans), they have to have no other country that will take them and they have to be the best off.
Why on god’s green earth we just don’t live up to our own laws and do our own work instead of shunting refugees around the region is beyond me because there are about 7 million refugees in our region and we are whining about 6,000 because we choose to lock them up like criminals.
Imagine being the Immigration Officer sent to Malaysia to select 1000 human beings for resettlement! UNHCR has plenty in the resettlement pool to pick over. This is where it becomes so very clear that Australia’s resettlement program is one of our own volition with a quota fixed in each annual Budget selected from where we chose to select from. They are refugees in their thousands, but we do not take a random selection on humanitarian gounds, we select them, like migrants for their resettlement potential and possibly even their skills even though formal recognition is unlikely.
Weep for the repelled and relocated Australian asylum seekers, the 800 who won the booby prize they didn’t even enter for when they bought their tickets to freedom and democracy. How many will turn out to be genuinely fleeing persecution? What queue do they join Wayne? Can you show them exactly where and how? Will they be treated well and continue to be protected? When will their protection claims be assessed? Do you care, Wayne? Will the process be untainted by the ever present corruption in that part of the world? Are you sure?
Does Australia’s responsibility of them end with a Serco/AFP handover to the Malaysian Government, or will they be delivered into the care of UNHCR, our off shore processing agency? In which case, how much more funding are we giving UNHCR to enable them to do an adequate job? No not just for the 800 but for ALLl the asylum seekers rattling around in Malaysia, their sort of slave class to be exploited and abused.
How much more we could do to help the world’s and our region’s asylum seekers and potential refugees if we stopped the unnecesary detention of asylum seekers in Australia and faced up to the fact that their arrival by boat is no big deal or security threat. Huge budget savings and faster processing AND increased refugee resettlement ?
Why does the world not deal with the Burmese military government in the same way the north african governments have been. When Cambodia was invaded by the Viet military for the treatment of their people the world looked on with relief. Our foreign minister seems blind to the Burmese problem even though he urged the NATO forces to bomb Libya. May be he should look after the people in our region first if he is to be taken as a respected foreign minister in Asia.
When people bring up the subject of refugees or “boat people” I always comment, “Aren’t we lucky that we were born in Australia, if I was living in a country such as Burma or any other war torn country with my children, I would be looking for any possible way to get us to a better land, wouldn’t you?” For kids like Swe and Tan at aged 15 to leave their families and trek to Malaysia with a dream to come and work in Australia someday, I find that courageous, and I have to comment that at least these kids want to work. The Burmese refugees in Malaysia take up illegal work that the Malayans don’t want to do. Australia recently talked about bringing refugees to Australia particularly for rural and regional areas because there is a shortage of laborers and there have been some quiet whispers about “because there are jobs Australians just don’t want to do”. It is appalling that Australia wants to send 800 refugees to Malaysia when they have 90 000 existing refugees waiting to be processed!! And to add to that Malaysia will not sign the United Nations Refugee Convention…..what are we doing even thinking about this. The state that these people are living in in Malaysia is inhumane and Australia is considering sending more people to this region. We should be ashamed, we are a country that does ok, we are a developed nation, Malaysia is not, we need to stand up and take responsibility and act like human beings, where is our compassion, these are people, it could easily have been you or I born in a different land that suffers.
This is another aspect of a “beautiful friendship” between two nations that are uncomfortable about race. As I’ve said elsewhere, if people are so worried about conditions in Malaysian detention camps, why is it that there’s been more focus over the past month than the preceding decade – and do you think that scrutiny will increase, or decrease, as a result of this arrangement?