Abdul Samad, 33, has been “living the life of nothingness,” since 2014. That was the year the refugee from Afghanistan came to Indonesia alone after witnessing many violent attacks in his home community.
Today a small, low-cost apartment in Kalibata City, in South Jakarta, serves as his temporary shelter as he awaits a permanent place to live in. A private sponsor is helping Samad with his basic daily necessities.
He relies on the sponsor, too, for medical care. Samad suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. He often gets panic attacks and suicidal thoughts.
But, with the endless wave of COVID-19 in Indonesia, Samad’s hope of getting resettlement is fast diminishing. “We hang on to nothing, to false hopes and false promises. I think you can fool yourself for about one, two, three months, maybe one or two years. But I don’t think as a human being you can have that energy, psychologically, to fool yourself longer than that,” he said.
Helping people in need
Samad is just one of Indonesia’s little-known 13,653 refugees and asylum seekers who fled their home countries—Afghanistan, Myanmar, Somalia, Iraq, and Sudan, to name a few—to escape armed conflict. As of July 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that about 28% of the refugees are children, some of whom were unaccompanied or were separated from their parents.
UNHCR pointed out that Indonesia is not a party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol, nor does it have a national refugee status determination system. Still, it has a long tradition of hosting refugees and people in need of international protection.
In 2019, only around 600 refugees in Indonesia were able to find a new home in a third country through resettlement. This was a sharp decline from previous years, where over 1,000 people were successfully resettled annually. Globally, less than 1% of over 26 million refugees get resettled.
Even before the pandemic, the resettlement rate for refugees and asylum seekers around the world has shrunk in recent years. This is mainly attributed to US President Donald Trump’s policy that slashed refugee admissions to the country, which used to be the world’s top resettlement country.
A bad example
Trump’s policy is believed to have set a bad example for other host countries. As of July 2020, almost all popular country destinations for resettlement are on track to accept the least number of refugees this year compared to the same period in the last decade.
Rizka Argadianti Rachmah, chair of the Indonesian Civil Society Association for Refugee Rights Protection, said the coronavirus outbreak has significantly restricted the mobility of refugees, including those who have been approved for resettlement. “Many of the refugees have had to postpone their departures,” Rachmah said, following the receiving countries’ move to close their borders at the pandemic’s onset.
Meanwhile, when border restrictions began to ease, travelers hailing from Indonesia still experienced difficulty in entering other countries, as doubts over the Indonesian government’s response to the virus linger. In September, the Indonesian Foreign Affairs Ministry confirmed that as many as 59 countries have imposed a travel ban against visitors from Indonesia. The largest Southeast Asian nation had a total of 282,724 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 10,601 deaths as of September 30, 2020.
Political atmospheres in European countries and the US also muddy the waters, Rachmah added. “There are many reasons [for not accepting refugees]. However, countries that have ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention still have a responsibility to open the borders for those who need international protection,” she asserted.
On top of their inability to migrate, many refugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia have to survive COVID-19 in difficult living conditions. About half of the refugees are residing in Jakarta, while the rest are scattered across several cities in Indonesia like Makassar, Pekabaru, and Medan, according to Jakarta-based initiative Roshan Learning Center.
Currently, less than 60% of them are receiving a monthly allowance and housing from non-profit institutions like UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration. Others rely on their own savings or charity, stay in temporary shelters provided by the government, or rent private rooms. Due to their status, they are not qualified to receive relief aid from the Indonesian government.
A makeshift shelter
Hassan Ramazan lives in an abandoned military command post since July 2019. The two-storey building in Kalideres, West Jakarta, has been turned into a makeshift shelter for over 230 refugees like him.
Ramazan has been stateless for more than 20 years. He fled Afghanistan in 1997, shortly after the Taliban took over its capital city of Kabul, and hid in Pakistan. In order to secure the future of his children, Ramazan needed to be a citizen of a nation. And so, in 2016, he packed his bags, left his family in Pakistan, and continued his asylum-seeking journey until he wound up in Indonesia.
To this day, UNHCR still has not officially recognized Ramazan as a refugee. This means that he cannot be resettled yet and, worse, can be deported back to Afghanistan.
Since the pandemic began, the bureaucratic process at the local UNHCR office has been extremely slow. “They told us to submit online forms. Since January, we have submitted hundreds of inquiries but none received any reply,” Ramazan said.
Ramazan’s current quarters have no decent sanitation facilities. People are crammed into tents—two or three of them to a tent—making it impossible to observe physical distancing. All the residents share only two bathrooms and toilets.
Before moving into the building in August last year, Ramazan and many others were sleeping on the road. The building was initially given as a temporary shelter, but the people eventually refused to leave even after officials cut their supplies, including their electricity. They simply had nowhere to go.
Deaf ears
Desperate, the community staged three rallies since July asking for permanent solutions to their situation. Their demands include financial assistance for those who are not covered, healthcare and counseling assistance, status elevation from asylum seeker to refugee, and resettlement for those with refugee status.
In response, officials have accused them of breaking social restrictions. Ramazan countered, “You don’t break the law when you put two, three of us in a tent. But when we come here with face masks and follow every rule, you call that breaking the law.”
As of September 7, 14 refugees in Indonesia have tested positive for COVID-19, according to Mitra Suryono, UNHCR public information officer in Indonesia. “So far, many of them have recovered,” she added.
Mitra declined to detail the locations of the positive cases, but she said that refugees will be tested if they showed symptoms of coronavirus infection. Those who tested positive are currently receiving assistance from UNHCR and its partners, she added.
Zuhal Aheen, 25, arrived in Indonesia in 2017 with her family after fleeing prosecution in her hometown in Afghanistan. She receives financial assistance from an NGO to rent an old house in Bogor and borrows money from relatives to buy food. Aheen said she was not convinced that she would be able to be hospitalized if she got sick with COVID-19.
No long-term solutions in sight
“I heard the Indonesian government said we should take care of ourselves because there’s no place to treat us,” she said. Indonesian hospitals are now at risk of collapsing, according to local reports.
Aheen used to work at a nearby center where she teaches math, English, and science to refugee children. Nowadays, said just stays at home and does not dare go anywhere.
“My mom is 67 years old, and I’m afraid that if I become sick, I will [infect her]. So my siblings and I do not go out,” Aheen said. “It’s really difficult. I’m getting tired, actually.”
To provide real and long-term solutions for the refugees—not just during the pandemic—Indonesia needs to consider an overhaul in policy, Rachmah said. There needs to be a human rights and social-based approach in handling the issue.
“We need a Constitution-level regulation to allow these refugees to get some kind of livelihood or, at the very least, some income for basic necessities,” Rachmah suggested. Currently, the 2016 National Refugee Law merely authorizes UNHCR to help protect and find solutions for refugees and asylum seekers in the country.
Indonesia needs a human rights-based approach to providing long-term solutions to the refugee problem.
It also allows the government to rescue refugees on boats in distress near Indonesia and help them disembark, but these are rarely enacted by Indonesian authorities. In June 2020, it was the local residents in Aceh Province who defied authorities to rescue around 100 Rohingya refugees stranded at sea.
“Maybe COVID-19 is here to remind us how it feels to be locked in and not be able to do anything—not even see your friends or your family members—how it really feels and how difficult it is,” Samad concluded. “It’s here to remind us to be better human beings.” ●
Antonia Timmerman is an independent journalist in Jakarta. She reports on topics such as migrant workers, LGBTQ communities, and art and culture for outlets such as The South China Morning Post, VICE, and The Diplomat.
