A tour of Indonesia’s detention centres
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The 255 asylum seekers docked at the port in Merak in West Java are still refusing to leave their boat and be processed by Immigration Officials. Meanwhile the Oceanic Viking , promised permission to dock by Indonesia after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s “breakthrough” talks on Tuesday is being towed to a port near Singapore and the latest boat to be picked up has been sent to Christmas Island. At least the Sri Lankans, led by spokesperson Alex, have made it back to dry land. So why won’t they get off the boat? They may have heard about the between one and 3000 asylum seekers currently being held in Indonesian jails, compounds and detention centres. Jessie Taylor is a lawyer, refugee activist and documentary maker who recently returned from Indonesia after interviewing over 250 asylum seekers in 11 different detention centres across the country. Taylor told Crikey that there’s a vast difference between the different centres. In North Sumatra they provide hostel style accommodation: “… nothing fancy but not appalling in terms of physical conditions. But there’s no medical care, education, or adequate food.” In other places, “… babies and children reside in maximum security third-world jails.” Taylor says she saw asylum seekers “treated like animals. There are beatings fairly frequently at the hands of Indonesian military and Immigration officials. If anyone escapes the rest who are left behind will be beaten as a warning.” Taylor continues:
Detention and case processing in Indonesia is managed by a combination of the Indonesian government, the International Organization for Migration and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) with some funds funnelled from the Australian government. Pamela Curr of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre told Crikey that there are currently 2107 registrations with UNHCR in Indonesia. “If they trigger a claim while in detention then IOM is to notify UNHCR and UNHCR is supposed to visit them. People are waiting months for those visits. Currently, UNHCR are only processing around 40 people a week.” IOM, as distinct from the UN, is an NGO with diplomatic immunity. It specialises in logistics and voluntary return. Kaye Bernard, another refugee advocate, was recently in Lombok, Indonesia and told Crikey she visited some “long term asylum seekers who are housed there by IOM with money provided by Australia.” Below is a picture she took of the ablutions in one of the facilities she visited. This is used by a large extended family group of 21 men women and children who have been in Lombok since 2003:
Bernard told Crikey that she was ”… advised by the asylum seekers who wake up to this every morning, that these ablution facilities are far more preferable to the Indonesian Immigration Detention facilities that they experienced after being randomly picked up by Indonesian Police and taken to at various times during their six years [on Lombok].” Spokesperson from Senator Evans’ office Simon Dowding told Crikey , “… the department has committed about $5 million over the next two years to provide community accommodation for intercepted irregular migrants in Indonesia. The Australian Government recently announced a further $1 million funding to provide ongoing detention support to Indonesia over the next two years.” “The IOM network, established in 2007, has offices located throughout Indonesia, from Medan in the west to Kupang in the east, adjacent to the main people smuggling routes,” says Dowding. “The new funding over the next four years will enable the IOM to continue to provide assistance to Indonesian authorities to monitor and manage irregular migration flows and gather information on people smuggling activity. It will also reinforce the cooperation between the governments of Indonesia and Australia to control irregular migration and ensure the suitable treatment of irregular migrants. The office network will enable IOM to continue to refer intercepted irregular migrants to community accommodation arrangements and refer irregular migrants with protection needs to UNHCR for assessment,” says Dowding. “From 1999 to January 2009, payments to IOM under these arrangements have totalled some $30 million.” But on the ground, says Taylor, “… no one is sure where the lines of power lie between IOM and Indonesian officials. IOM has a very marked presence … and IOM as an organisation does not have a protection mandate.” Taylor told Crikey, “… the bad end of the scale has people waiting 2 1/2 years. That’s the process between arrival, then registration, then an interview with UNHCR then status determination with UNHCR. There’s also the horror story of a young man whose been waiting more than nine years.” But just because people are determined by the UNHCR to be refugees doesn’t mean the wait is over. “The single most common question that we got asked when we there was, ‘UNHCR has found me to be a refugee. What am I still doing here?’,” recounts Taylor. “We would explain that you have to wait for a country to invite you, and that’s when they said ‘Oh.’ There’s a feeling that they’re going to be waiting a long time which is why they’re then getting on boats.” Most of the people that Taylor met were very reluctant to risk their lives on a boat journey to Australia. But increasingly, says Taylor, as people fell victim to depression, anxiety and hopelessness their language became “quite dramatic”. “‘Look I can’t stay here,’ they’d say, ‘If I get to Australia and live that’s great, if I sink in the ocean and die that’s fine too.’” The Rudd government has been reluctant to name a figure attached to the latest talks between Indonesia and Australia, but this morning The Australian is reporting that Indonesian immigration officials have told the paper that they would need about $50m to cover processing, detention and the cost of training. Meanwhile, IOM is coming under increasing scrutiny for its role in actively persuading asylum seekers to return home. Some asylum seekers refer to the IOM approach as “demotivation”, says Taylor. “What it consists of is a Good Cop/Bad Cop approach. People who come in and say, ‘Oh Indonesia is a bad place to live, they’re Sunni muslims and you’re Shia muslims … It’s taking 10 years for people to be processed. You can’t stay here … why don’t you just let us help you go home?’ “This is before UNHCR status determination and often before a UNHCR interview which mean no one has yet assessed the viability of safe return,” says Taylor. Taylor told Crikey that she witnessed one of these approaches. Taylor watched an IOM official convince a group of young Afghan Hazara men to return home after arriving in Lombok. The man said “in a caring and paternal way that it was not a good idea to stay here and they should just go home,” says Taylor. And they did. Most of them went back to war-torn Afghanistan with the help of IOM. “But two kids escaped,” says Taylor. “The last I heard they were heading for a boat.” “The worst thing is that people know that the best thing is to get on a leaky boat and make it to Christmas Island.” |
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28 Comments
I am sure that SIEs who are given a choice between the Indonesian Solution and the Pacific Solution, would unanimously vote for being sent to Nauru or somewhere similar, rather than the tender mercies of their Indonesian hosts.
But I thought the Pacific Solution was bad? The opponents of the Pacific Solution told me so.
Or was I just channelling those open borders types who believe anyone who gets here on a boat should be allowed to freely enter into Australia’s society, no questions asked?
“Or was I just channelling those open borders types who believe anyone who gets here on a boat should be allowed to freely enter into Australia’s society, no questions asked?”
yes, all zero of them you (Edit).
Michael, can I just say that I admire your ability to use every conceivable piece of information to prove you’re right. Exactly what you’re right about, I’m still not sure, except that it’s got something to do with the lefties always being wrong. My favourite was your tactical analysis of Wilson Tuckey and the “fact that sooner or later a terrorist organisation will use a ‘refugee boat’ to conduct a suicide attack”. Thanks for that, we’ll make sure the refugees all come in scheduled airline flights then. You’re kind of like a ninja, actually, who can win a fight even armed only with, say, a banana. I commend you.
There’s another “snake in the grass” even if an asylum seeker “gets lucky” in terms of being accommodated in a decent environment somewhere in Indonesia, and if their UNHCR assessment is “fast” and favourable.
In Australia the Immigration Minister Chris Evans recently introduced a model of “complementary protection” to cover those asylum seekers who otherwise would fall between the cracks under the Refugee Convention’s rather narrow definition of who’s a refugee.
See for example this: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/pdfid/435e198d4.pdf
Will UNHCR be able provide a guarantee of complementary protection to those who do not get protection under their assessment in Jakarta? Would in those cases UNHCR itself not become the organisation that, given they didn’t make the cut on the protection criteria, and then get sent back “into the arms of IOM” sends unsuccessful asylum applicants back to places of danger?
I can’t believe that funding refugee programs in Indonesia hasn’t been more of a focus for previous Australian governments. Perhaps the relationship wasn’t strong enough for this approach to succeed.
If the refugees are processed in Indonesia, humanely and quickly, we can save lives lost on the perilous boat trip.
All of the problems in the article could probably be fixed for a fraction of the cost of the Pacific solution, or even Christmas Island.
I don’t know of anyone who openly advocates an open door policy where anyone can just come in, no questions asked. There is a well established procedure under Australian and international law that anyone can come to Australia and make a claim for refugee status. That claim is then tested by Immigration officials (who are not known for being left wing bleeding hearts) against established procedures and criteria. Those who are found to be genuine refugees are allowed to stay. Those who aren’t are returned to their country of origin or kept in detention if there is no country willing to take them. Most of the people who come by boat are found to be refugees and allowed to stay.
This process has been in place for years and no one is seriously suggesting that it be changed in principle. The issues in dispute are where the asylum seekers are held while their claims are processed ie off-shore, eg Christmas Is or Nauru or now Indonesia, or on the mainland, and if on the mainland, in detention centres or community facilities, and the length of time held in detention for processing to occur.
Of course there is the issue of Temporary Protection Visas where claimants had to reprove their claims every few years. Apart from a few extremists on the right no one wants to see TPVs again.
Thank you Rossco. Some sanity for once.
The logistics, the legality, the criteria for admission (apart from some refinements such as Jack Smit mentioned above), the resources, the security requirements, the ethicality, the means of deporting unsuccessful applicants, and the labour market utility … of processing refugee applicants including boat people, are not difficulties for government and are not being debated in parliament.
The only aspect that has vexed the government is how best to deter more boat people from coming, by making life tough for those who have already come. That’s all. Anyone objecting to boat-people policies other than deterrence measures is weighing in to a debade that does not exist.
The main thing “SIEs” would vote for is some certainty.
Comparing the conditions in detention/accommodation in Nauru and Indonesia is pointless, not least because both places have major variances depending on time or place.
The same approach of “you’ll never be accepted so we’ll help you go home” was tried on Nauru and it worked with a few hundred who agreed to go back to Afghanistan, some of who were later killed. The main difference then was it was Australian government officials who were repeatedly doing the urging and paying the resettlement costs and ‘bonus’.
The conditions on Nauru improved over time and I hope/expect they will improve on Indonesia over time as well. These places has been there for years and Australia has been funding them (at lower levels) for years. What is most problematic is that there has been little attention paid to what the conditions for asylum seekers and recognised refugees are like, as well as to how many of them they have a realistic chance for secure resettlement in the foreseeable future.
Congratulations to both Jessie Taylor and Kaye Bernard for making the effort (and wearing the expense) of shining more of a light on this. If there is one positive to come of the latest overblown frenzy about small numbers of people arriving in boats, it is that it should lead to much more attention and resources being paid to how these people are treated in (and by) Indonesia. It might even have the benefit of lifting overall standards and practices in Indonesia.
The treatment of people in Malaysia is a far bigger problem, and much more attention needs to be directed there as well.
It seems to me that if western democracies “intervened” in countries which engage in human rights abuses and brutal dictatorships instead of only those with oil reserves, then people wouldn’t need to flee their country of birth and endure such horrible conditions out of sheer desperation and we wouldn’t be having these ridiculous debates about asylum seekers.
Yes, I know the whole oil arguement is a big generalisation, but it is true that wealthy nations are very selective about which struggling countries they ‘help’ or ‘intervene’ in and which ones they do not. The welfare of our fellow human beings seems to be the lowest of priorities when making such decisions.
Its a pity that the aboriginals didn’t have the same policies when John Howard and Kevin Rudd’s ancestors turned up in Australia. What is it about Australians that its alright for their ancestors to turn up in boats? But the line stops there. And the other irony is the electricity that we use to turn on our televisions wasn’t built by Australians but refugees, be it the Snowy mountains scheme in NSW or The Hydro Electric Commission here in Tasmania. Let as many of the refugees in as it takes to reduce the liklyhood of my children marrying the children of the scoundrels running the country.
“What is it about Australians that its alright for their ancestors to turn up in boats?”
Well, you see, the English colonisers of Australia were white…whereas the native inhabitants of Australia are black so I think you can see where I’m going with this…
Jenny, the US and others did intervene in some of those countries which engage in human rights abuses, for example Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, Kampuchea and East Timor.
Bloody little thanks do they get for it as well.
Instead everyone bleats about how the UN is the only body that can legitimately intervene, and we can see how well that has worked, in the Sudan, where ethnic cleansing goes on while the UN dithers.
The West in general, and the US in particular, can’t win, damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
A bizarre pronouncement, Michael.
Bosnia caused mass post-trauma-stress in UN soldiers forced to watch massacres month after month and do nothing but keep a tally of “ceasefire violations”. The only way they could help anyone was by putting themselves under fire and then calling in airstrikes “for defence of UN personnel”.
Cambodia was sold out to the Khmer Rouge and the British even assisted them, on the basis of being enemies of the NVA.
Tony Blair talked the UN Security Council into the Afghanistan invasion with a moving speech about fixing the country up once and for all; its history as a proxy warground for superpowers was to come to an end. One problem: he was lying. The military had already made it clear to him that the sort of occupation required to change its power structure was logistically out of the question. But he so liked the rousing speech he’d written that he went ahead and spoke it anyway.
Australia sold East Timor down the river for years until the whole world just stared at us aghast and Bush had to make it clear to Howard several times that this one was on our patch.
The of military success in Iraq has been underestimated by the media, however there remains the fraudulent reason for the invasion, the absence of Al Queda in the country before the invasion, and the moral downfall of the widespread use of torture with political approval.
Fortunately we don’t have to second-guess all those decisions before deciding what to do with boat people. The first principle of decisions on intervention is to do the least possible harm (including the harm of witholding intervention). For Bosnia, that was difficult.
For a few thousand boat people, it’s much easier than we’ve been led to believe. All we have to do is draw a line for ourselves between what is morally acceptable conduct and what isn’t. And to make sure that in our eagerness to create a deterrent for people considering “queue jumpers”, by rough treatment of the “queue jumpers” already here, that we don’t cross that line. If we can do that, the rest will be far easier than it looks from the volume of media hysteria about it.
We might even find that the need to deter them is not all it’s cracked up to be.
In addition to my previous note…How about the” Tasmania Solution”. So a condition of detention is that you have to live in Tasmania for 2 years , before moving to the larger centres. The reason for this is that the population is so small here(Hobart 200,000),that it doesn’t support sub-cultures. Large gatherings require members of the whole community, Greek, Pole , Dutch ,Hmong,Sudanese, Anglo etc. By being compelled to live here for 2 years the refugee gets to observe all the elements that make up an Australian society . Resulting in tolerance hopefully. Then they have a choice when they enter Melbourne or Sydney. Maybe 10% or so will fall in love with Tassie and stay, which is just what we need down here. Go back to what Tasmania was originally designed for …Detention
For the bleeding hearts it’s out of sight out of mind.
Just like how they don’t care about the REAL refugee’s sitting in famine and disease stricken camps in some god forsaken place having their positions stolen by safe cashed-up economic migrants from Indonesia, they don’t care about boatpeople unless they are in an Australian holiday camp with airconditioning, 3 chef prepared meals a day and pay TV.
Send em to a Indonesian detention camp where they get beat up by the guards though? No worries!
If I could wish for one thing for Christmas this year it would be for some of the left to start listening to their brains and start using logic, rather than constantly entering into a state of complete denial and make believe.
There’s a strong oil component in the majority of countries mentioned by MICHAEL JAMES. The neo-cons planned to invade Iraq some time ago. Both Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice stated mid 2001, that Saddam Hussein was no threat to his neighbours let alone the US. The Clinton Administration had meetings with the Taliban(the ‘accepted govt of Afghanistan at the time) over the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Sea predicted to be valued at $16 Trillion. George W and his administration had a couple of meetings also, but the Taliban wouldn’t play ball. The US wanted to build a pipeline through Afghanistan to the West and do a deal for the oil. (Russia’s ‘war’ with Chechyna is also over huge reserves) The Bush Administration told Afghanistan and its neighbours mid 2001 that it would invade in Oct/Nov. This was before 9/11. After 9/11 they saw a great opportunity to invade both of them, hence the campaign of lies and propaganda, of which Blair and Howard etc played the same game. I used to comment to my mate each weekend when they’d hit the TV shows, both in this country and the other two, that they all were ‘singing from the same song sheet’? It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t for the death and misery they intended to cause?
Somalia has oil, and lots of it! The reason Indonesia wouldn’t allow East Timor to gain independence was the huge reserves of oil and gas - we robbed them(via Downer) instead? Why did the US help organise the coup in Venezuela in 2002? But they overplayed it, the people woke up to what was happening, and took to the streets - they won, and Hugo Chavez who’d been overwhelmingly elected by the people was restored to the Presidency. Huge reserves of oil. It’s been acknowledged, that Iraq could have reserves that haven’t been explored yet, and that’s why they’re(Coalition of the Killing) pushing to privatise the oil industry - this will make it different to any middle eastern country re their oil - they’re nationalised as Saddam did in Iraq?Paul Bremmer rewrote their ‘constitution’ before he left!
A good article is ‘From Afghanistan to Iraq - Connecting the dots with oil’? It ties in Karzai and many others in the Bush Administration, Pentagon etc - all with interests in oil over many years? Very interesting article! Most revealing!
With all the nonsense talk of the last few weeks, no journalist has suggested, that perhaps there’s more chance of would-be ‘terrorists’ arriving by plane, and yet the security is probably still pretty slack. What about the ports?
TTH, I was wrong about you! Here I was thinking you were opposed to a few thousand people coming in, but I see now it’s really the 10-million-plus others left behind that you want to save; it’s just a question of priorities.
Just a small matter of funding. Let’s see, the cost of the Indonesia Solution was estimated at about $50 million in yesterday’s papers, a significant saving on previous incarceration programs which reached heights normally reserved for serious infrastructure projects, but not exactly chump change either. Suppose we cancel that operation and divert the money to aid and resettlement projects in the Sri Lankan and other refugee camps instead. A few other countries join in and, hey! some of those people might not need to make a run for it any more.
What to do with the boat people no longer being incarcerated? Well we could always just take the el cheapo option, assess them for asylum claims as quickly as possible, send the dodgy ones home and let the fair dinkum ones with grounds to fear for their lives to try their luck at jobs from medicine to teaching to spin-bowling to fruit picking, while we conserve money for helping people where it counts.
But where would be the fun in that? We wouldn’t look so tough saying, “We will determine who comes into this country and the manner in which they come,” any more now would we. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Amazing. some one in our counrty is sent to jail for a crime. and then forgoten.
these boat people know its wrong to come here.
yet they do.
they know what will happen when caught.
dont care about what diseases they bring and spread to us.
Jobs they wqill take. Or how much it cost tax payers to find, rescue them.
Yet they get what they should as criminals.
what they knew they would in each counrty they have traveled though.
And we are crying fair go. When our own people go over seas to those places. are either murrdered, kidnaped, killed fighting for them.
And no one blinks an eye.
My 2-cents-worth, suppose a lot of people in the media had fudged the truth a bit … suppose it wasn’t a crime?
Suppose you rang up the immigration department and asked them: It is a crime or isn’t it, to show up in Australia without a visa, and apply for Refugee Asylum?
And suppose the Department told you, no it isn’t a crime?
… what would you say then?
The general information number for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship is 131 881. Go ahead, if you ring them up they will tell you the truth.
Dangerous extended trips in creaky boats over inhospitable seas should be compulsory for all Australians, can’t have these other people showing us how to battle through tough times.
There is no offence coming to Australia to seek asylum, it is a right enshrined in law. Good grief we kill a lot of trees and waste a lot of money to break our own laws while pretending it is to save lives on boat trips.
Never mind the bloody wars people are escaping from, like the two we started.
Why do we bother.
Let’s be the first country in history to pull out of the refugee convention and prove once and for all that we are racist, cheap and pathetic cowards.
Last year our magnificent program “took” 1185 Afghans out of the 4 million refugees, 1.94 million of them are in Pakistan, 980,000 in Iran and the rest scattered to the winds but we then complain if another 700 or so Hazara come here for protection. Our “aid” to UNHCR in those countries amounts to 40 cents per annum per person in Afghanistan, 51 cents per person in Pakistan and $1 per person in Iran.
WE “took” 2200 of the Iraqis who fled the war we started for no reason, and that included 540 who worked for Australia over time - there are 5 million Iraqis as refugees. There are 1.47 million in Syria, nearly 1 million Jordan and our aid consisted of $1 per person per annum in Syria and $5 per annum per person in Jordan.
Thailand has 3.65 million mostly Burmese refugees, we managed to accept 3300 and our aid was 13 cents per annum per person.
It takes extraordinary manouvering to decide that so few of so many are worthy.
And why the whine about “leaky boats” is beyond me. All of them have arrived haven’t they?
They are the same boats the fishermen use for years on end so why the hell is the boat trip all that dangerous?
Especially as we traffic them 1750 km across the ocean if they get to Ashmore Reef.
Marylin I think there is a bit of a safety concern about some of the boats, and we don’t know how many have just sunk without trace. But we also need to ask how responsible we can be for decisions that people make for their own personal safety in places far from our control.
If we form a policy response based on the hazard of getting on one of those boats, we would have to weigh that hazard against the hazard of NOT getting on one of those boats. We can’t really prejudge either from this distance.
However the high approval rate of asylum applications for those who DO get on one of those boats — approval which is based on an assessment of the hazard of sending the applicant back home — tends to indicate that NOT taking steps to get out, such as getting on one of those boats, is very hazardous.
… for those individuals, that is. Bottom line, it’s very hard for us to judge.
Ummmm, didn’t Australia ‘white-man style’ ‘start when stupid white men sent silly boys and girls on ships without engines or a GPS from Britain across all those treacherous seas?
Get a grip, I say to all those Australians who vilify boat arrivals for want of knowledge about all the UN documents and conventions Australia has endorsed, ratified and codified in our laws.
Funny how one silly 16 year old in a pink boat that could sink without a trace is a heroine, while a 16 year old Hazara boy fleeing persecution or death is so much of a criminal he has to be arrested and thrown into a stinking prison in Indonesia while Smith and Evans gloat about not locking children behind razor wire.
He looked like a child to me. Brendan O’Connor is still spinning the yarn that IOM are legit, they are a pack of mercenaries who take money from fools like Australia so we can break our own law and pretend that we aren’t.
James, we give Afghans a choice in our cowardice. Stay and be killed, persecuted or tortured. Stay in Pakistan or Iran where you get the same treatment or deportation back to Afghanistan to be killed, tortured or persecuted.
A maximum security prison in Indonesia because of our “regional co-operation” which really means an abdication of obligations to a nation that we know well doesn’t protect refugees. We are currently importing 88 who have been there pre-2003. In other words the last of the people we pushed back in Relex days.
Now we have this absurd lunacy of a war ship taking one asylum seekers 3600 km across the oceans from the Timor Sea to Christmas Island.
Anyone want to have a guess at the cost of that exercise?
Everything about our policy is illegal, we break the law with impunity, DIC’s officers still tell bare faced lies in estimates, something Andrew knows very well indeed, and no-one is sacked for it.
And Jack, all my family came across the sea in silly boats with the stars as navigation aids, little food, dangers of sinking and so on. And that was in 1844, 1880 and 1920.
They were welcomed with open arms to white up the joint.