October 27, 2010
Half of my Fulbright is child mental health prevention research in Malaysia. I’ve met with many different non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) here and am now in the planning stage of collaborating with Harvest Centre, the organization that I blogged about previously – that held a soccer tournament for the refugee kids at their school. This blog is me giving you all my current knowledge about refugees here. I’m doing a separate blog entry for the more hopeful side of my research, the mental health work with the refugee kids.
But, I should warn you about this blog entry – it’s heartbreaking -- the worst stories of some of these refugees. It’s been an awakening for me here, opening my eyes away from my elite expat and academic world. I got most of this information from a minority Malaysian reporter who used to be at a major US magazine. There is no substantial written information anywhere about these refugees – they are completely invisible here. The government wants to keep it that way. Nothing is allowed to be written about them in the newspapers. And, no one’s written about them in academic journals. So, I have no hard, written information to start my research on them. It’s all word of mouth. But, this reporter was the best word of mouth I could get. This hardened, cynical reporter cried while telling me some of the refugees’ stories. I was shocked while hearing her talk, and just seeing how their stories affected her.
Refugee kids here are not your typical refugees. They don’t live in tents in refugee compounds. They usually have adequate food, since food is outrageously cheap here. They are largely from Burma (Rohingya Muslim Burmese) and about 15% are from Afghanistan. There are over 100,000 known refugees here so you can imagine how many refugees there really are here – way more than 100,000. They often live 50 people in an apartment, hidden away from view. But, most of the refugees hide in the jungle on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. They live under tarps and pool their money for food.
The head of United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Malaysia (UNHCR) told me that there’s a new kind of refugee – Refugees following the New Capitalism. In Asia, for instance, there’s huge, developing capitalist markets. In Kuala Lumpur, there are high rises being built 24/7. It seems like there is no worldwide recession here. It’s booming! And, the people who help build those high rises are usually refugees or illegal immigrants from Indonesia. Some of them sleep and eat in the buildings they are building. Women begging in the streets are refugees. People working in the back of restaurants are refugees. Men working the vast palm plantations here are refugees, often locked at night into little cells, left to sleep and defecate in their cell, on the floor. But, because they are not refugees living in glaring tents, UNHCR is not given as much money here as other places, given the huge number of refugees.
You can see Malaysia relies on these refugees but Malaysia refuses to be a signatory to the 1951 UN treaty for protection of refugees. So, they provide no schooling, health care, really anything for these refugees. But, it gets worse. The government has called RELA, a quasi-governmental group of citizens with guns. Imagine the US citizen groups patrolling the Mexican border, but, yes, worse. RELA raids are famous and there’s even an NGO who specializes in “RELA raid debriefings” to help with the post-traumatic syndrome afterwards. RELA swoops in and brings the refugees to detention centers. There, if they are lucky, they can bribe their way out. Sometimes they remember to keep $25 on them (a lot of money for these refugees). They call it RELA money. Then they can bribe and get out.
But, if they don’t have the bribe or there’s no one to bribe, they are often kept in the detention center and only fed rice and dried fish once a day in awful conditions. That’s for the lucky ones. The unlucky refugees are sold by the quasi-governmental RELA soldiers to middle men who then sell them into a vast human trafficking network. The refugees are usually sold into forced slavery, working on fishing boats off the coast of Thailand.
The refugee women and children are also vulnerable. Often, the refugee mothers feel they can’t afford to keep their babies, so some sell their babies into what they think is adoption. But, really, the babies are sold into a baby trafficking network. These babies are sold for high prices for adoption, but often they are returned to the trafficker, if there’s even a small flaw in the baby. These returned babies and those who couldn’t be sold into adoption are then locked in a run-down home for over 6 years, until they are sold into prostitution at the age of 6. The reporter handed me a video she took interviewing an actual baby trafficker and of a trafficked baby. It’s been sitting on my desk untouched. I keep on waiting until I’ll feel brave enough to watch it. In fact, I feel bad for not having watched it because the reporter’s so frustrated with feeling like there’s not enough media interest out there on the very real problem of baby trafficking here.
Then, these women and children refugees are very vulnerable here. Many tell of Muslim Malaysian men threatening the girls that they will rape them. One walks home from school and has the same men tell her every day that they will rape her. When she gets home, she and the women in the house push all the furniture against the door since men have been known to force their way in when the fathers of the house are gone. There’s even been an NGO created just to prevent sexual abuse of refugee children. They go from refugee school to school holding up pictures and demonstrating what’s appropriate and inappropriate touch. I’ve been told there’s no word for vagina in Burmese, which leaves the prevention workers flummoxed at times.
There are about 10,000 Burmese and Afghan refugee kids in Malaysia. They all escaped some sort of persecution back at home. Or, they were born here. Some are third generation refugee, with no hope of getting an education or a legal job in their lifetimes. Their Muslim Rohingya Burmese parents came to Malaysia thinking their Muslim Malaysian brother would take them in and protect them, especially after they were persecuted back in Burma partly due to their Muslim status. But, Malaysia was a rude awakening.
UNHCR promises to register them as official UN refugees and UNHCR has done an admirable job of registering 80,000 already. But, the reporter thinks the registration is a worthless piece of paper. Registering them will not repatriate them, necessarily, to another country. UNHCR has repatriated some, usually to the US or UK. But, the reporter firmly believes it’s a pipe dream for these Muslim Burmese refugees to ever get repatriated since they are Muslim, and Muslim refugees are not welcomed in the US or UK post-9/11. She also argues that the UN registration doesn’t protect them from RELA raids and detention. Sometimes, the refugees can call UNHCR during a RELA raid and UNHCR sometimes swoops in and has some influence, but they are largely on their own, registered as refugees or not.
There was a huge protest of refugees in front of the UNHCR headquarters here recently, and the reporter was furious as she saw the UNHCR official call the Malaysian police who beat the refugees back with sticks. Calling the police could also put them at risk for detention and worse. When she confronted UNHCR officials about calling the cops on the refugee protesters, they claimed some lame bureaucratic rule over how close protesters can get to UNHCR headquarters. And, let’s not forget that public protests, even candlelight vigil political protests like back in the US, are illegal here. You can go to jail for holding a candle in protest, much less for being a protesting refugee.
The reporter is fed up with UNHCR here. She thinks they don’t lobby enough for changes in government policy towards refugees. The government may not have signed onto the protection of refugee rights treaty but they have signed onto the Convention for the Rights of the Child. If they signed that, why can’t the government then provide schooling for the 10,000 children here? Absorbing the refugee kids into the vast governmental school system would not be that hard, she argues. Why can’t UNHCR put pressure on them? She doesn’t buy it when UNHCR tells her they are concerned they’d get kicked out of the country if they pressured the government too much.
And, she thinks the non-governmental schools for refugees are typically lame, at best. Often the schools are located in ad-hoc apartment kitchens or run-down alleyways with barely competent teachers. In some, the kids spend most of their day reading the Koran. In most, they just get a minimal education in Burmese. The parents often pressure the girls to marry by age 13 and drop out of school. And, the parents pressure the boys to drop out of school and work by age 10 or so. But, if the parents don’t get them to drop out of school, the refugee schools end at age 11. So, there is a huge number of preteen and teen refugee kids just out on the street, starting trouble at hot spots, like internet cafes. Funny, right? An internet café being a center for problem youth behavior, but it’s a common complaint. The reporter says the government has created a hypocritical situation where it blames the refugee youth for loitering and crime while it doesn’t allow them to go to school or get jobs.
Isn’t it odd that despite such sad stories, I’m feeling hopeful? Maybe it’s because the reporter agreed to meet with me because she thought helping refugees with their mental health was really important and sadly neglected. Maybe it’s because my eyes are wide open now, and I can more clearly see where change is needed, and maybe possible.
