The Harrowing Road to Asylum

My friend Naqsh fled Afghanistan and has been living in Jakarta the past few years. Here's a very brief overview of his journey to date from the weekend New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/22/opinion/the-harrowing-road-to-asylum.html

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By NAQSH MURTAZAAUG. 21, 2015

On Jan. 2, 2013, my mother, two brothers and I got into the taxi and left Kabul just after 1 a.m. At 3:20 a.m. our driver slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the men who suddenly appeared in the middle of the dark road. I could see the silhouettes of the Afghan turbans, the signature dress of Taliban militia. A young man, barely in his 20s, with a long beard, approached the car and peered in.

My facial features, especially my flatter nose, give me away as a Hazara, an ethnic minority in Afghanistan despised by the Taliban. I pretended I could not understand the Talib’s questions to our driver, trying to appear uneducated.

The driver said they were going to search us and the car. He was as frightened as I was. I tried to hide my fear from my mother and brothers, Abbas and Ali, who were 10 and 7 at the time.

I remembered that I was still carrying my wallet with my official government ID. I had worked as an adviser for governance and development for the government of the central Afghan province of Daikundi. This could be a death sentence — proof to the Taliban that I was an enemy.

The driver was still talking to the militiaman, and I managed to surreptitiously take my wallet out of my pocket and slide it beneath my seat without attracting any attention. Then, with no warning, the Talib came over to the passenger side of the car, opened the door and yanked me out.

Another young Talib came out of the darkness and pushed the cold barrel of an AK-47 against my forehead. In a glance I saw the fear-filled eyes of my mother and my brothers. My cousin, a high school principal and also a Hazara, had been murdered recently on this very road by Taliban in similar circumstances.

As one Talib searched the car, the other ordered me to take off my shirt. They wanted to see if my shoulder was tattooed with the Afghan Army or police insignia. My shoulders were clear. Then they ordered me to take off my boots. They were looking for the tell-tale calluses of a foot soldier. Years of wearing dress shoes had left my feet clean. Then they checked my hands.

“Your hands do not look like the hands of an ordinary Afghan man.”

I shrugged.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I have a grocery store,” which is a very normal-sounding job; most streets in Afghanistan have at least one little grocery.

The questions kept coming for at least 40 minutes, a long time given that the highway was normally patrolled by government soldiers.

At some point, the Talib fighter with the gun, finger still on the trigger, whispered something to the one who was questioning me. I was sure they were about to kill us. Instead, for reasons I still do not understand, they shouted at us to go. I slowly climbed back into the car. With the gun still pointed at us, we drove away.

I sat quietly for some time before I turned toward the back seat of the car.

“Is everyone O.K.? We are going to be fine. Do not be afraid, nothing is going to happen to us.”

Despite assuring time and again that we were out of danger, my brother Ali kept asking: “Are they going to follow us? Are there more Taliban militiamen ahead of us?”

This is the dread that seeps through all of us in Afghanistan, even the smallest children. I felt my anger rising. A seven-year-old should not have to fear for his life.

As Hazaras, we have long been seen as enemies by the Taliban, but my job made me a special target: I had worked for years as a television news presenter and a journalist at a magazine, before becoming an adviser in 2009 to a female mayor and then to a governor of an unstable, Taliban-ridden region.

I was luckier than most Afghans. I come from a wealthy, well-connected family. To avoid the Soviets, we emigrated to Pakistan in 1981, where I had the opportunity to attend school and university. We returned to Afghanistan in late 2001, after the American-led toppling of the Taliban regime. Like many Afghans, we were excited to be part of the peace-building and reconstruction effort. It seemed like a new day for the nation.

After that harrowing drive, having left our home for the second time in our lives, we made it to Quetta, Pakistan, where the security situation was worse than we had expected. The Pakistani Taliban was resurgent

I had a close call with a terrorist attack. I was in a café when suicide bombers attacking Hazara blew themselves up, killing more than 80 people and wounding dozens more. I had minor injuries.

My family didn’t have the financial resources for all of us to leave Pakistan, and my mother was too old and frail to embark on another big journey. She convinced me to flee. I felt I had no option but to go.

Finding a people smuggler isn’t difficult — you just have to ask around. Plenty of men are making a business out of the outrageous insecurity in the region. But going through with it, paying a smuggler to leave your family behind, is a gut-wrenching decision that you can’t imagine until you have to.

I paid a smuggler about $3,000 in cash to arrange to get me to Indonesia via Malaysia. I took a flight from Islamabad, and after deplaning in Kuala Lumpur, before getting to the immigration control counters, I met up with a group of men who guided me to an immigration official they had presumably paid off. From Malaysia I took a boat to Indonesia, from where I hoped to move on to a safer place. I had Australia in mind.

Again, finding a smuggler to arrange a trip from Indonesia to Australia was not difficult. In the early hours of July 28, 2013, I boarded an overcrowded fishing boat with 100 or so others on the southern coast of Java. We were all refugees or asylum-seekers from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The plan was to head to Australia’s Christmas Island. This time I paid about $3,200.

Everything seemed O.K. — until the storm hit. Winds, rain and waves pounded our weak wooden boat. A vessel full of people who had escaped terror at home found that once again our lives were on the line.

We screamed and cried. Someone deep inside the crowd shouted in Farsi, asking if anyone could speak English. I yelled out that I could, and I was hustled forward to the bridge. The captain had already called for help. I was handed a satellite phone. Seconds later I was talking with someone from Australian search and rescue.

“Hello. Can you hear me? Hello? ... We are asylum-seekers in distress on a boat. Our boat is broken and we will drown!”

Rescue: “Could you read me your G.P.S. location?”

I didn’t know how to do that. I had never used a satellite phone before, but I was guided by a voice in my other ear.

Rescue: “What do you wish us to do for you?”

“We are in a real bad situation, sir. We will drown. Our boat is broken. We are nearly 100 people on board. Could you please rescue us?”

Rescue: “What do you wish we do for you?”

“We wish to be rescued, sir! I repeat, sir, we wish to be rescued!”

We stayed low in the boat, helpless, counting every second. They’d said 15 to 25 minutes. Seventeen hours passed. It appeared that the Australians didn’t believe our plea for help.

In desperation, I called an Australian journalist I knew in Jakarta to ask if he could alert the Indonesian authorities.

Nine hours later, a warning bell heralded the arrival of Indonesian search and rescue. We were given first-aid and water. It felt like a miraculous act of kindness.

Our voyage ended in Puncak village in Bogor, Indonesia, where many refugees, including myself, remain. I didn’t get my $3,200 back from the smuggler.

Indonesia is not a signatory to the United Nations refugee convention, which means that we refugees can’t work or settle here permanently. Migrants like me hope to be legally classified as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a process that takes years. After that, we must wait, for more years, to be resettled in a country that will take us in.

The waiting is soul crushing. It’s been more than three years since I left Afghanistan. It’s been more than two years since I arrived in Indonesia. And more than 10 months ago I was officially accepted as a refugee — and all I can do is continue to wait.

Once a week I go to the U.N.H.C.R. office to check on my case, and I’m told politely to wait more.

We refugees know that our plight raises many challenges for host countries. These issues must be acknowledged, understood and addressed through multinational action. The source of our problems may be local, but the solutions are global. The quest to satisfy basic human needs should not be victim to political expediency.

People and nations that aid us have done something our own countrymen were too filled with hate to do. For that, we are very grateful. But at what point does a protracted wait for acceptance and resettlement become a violation of human rights? Is it after three years? Five? Ten?

Leaders with the power to find solutions need to listen to our stories and put themselves in our shoes. We risk our lives to flee our homelands because we have no choice. In the end, we want only what everyone else wants: to live with freedom and dignity.

Naqsh Murtaza is a former television news presenter writing a book about his experiences as an asylum seeker.

The Survivor

I knocked out the following for World Humanitarian Day, Aug 19.
GoT

She’s survived al-Shabaab’s fatal attraction and the murder of her father, two-days crammed aboard a boat adrift in the Malacca Straits, weeks living off handfuls of rice, shattered dreams of safety abroad, years in limbo under IOM’s care in Indonesia and most recently, a bout with cancer. Unshakable in her faith, eyes forward and a smile on her face, Asma Mohammed Hashi is ready for what she hopes will be a final struggle, for health and safety and relevance in a foreign land.

Just 22, Asma has seen a lifetime’s worth of upheaval that began in the streets of her war-torn hometown, Kismayu, a gritty Somali port city where the Jubba River empties into the Indian Ocean. She grew up under siege. During the country’s prolonged civil war the city of 180,000 fell to Islamist militants who imposed their own austere brand of the faith on the population.

It’s there, in 2011 that al-Shabab soldiers, one of the patchwork of militias that had emerged over the years of conflict, arrived at her door. It wasn’t the first time.

“They told my father that I had to go with them to be married,” she recalls. “He told them ‘No, she will not go with you’.”

A short time later her father and uncle were murdered by al-Shabab.

Asma fled the city for an uncle’s home in Mogadishu but there was no safety there. The following year, the same al Qaeda-affiliated militiamen again came knocking, looking specifically for her.

“My uncle told me I could not stay there any longer; his own family was in danger. He found the smuggler who took me out of the country,” she says. “He accompanied me to Malaysia.”

She spent a harrowing, stormy two days aboard a small fishing vessel in the Malacca Strait along with roughly 20 other Somalis desperate to travel to Australia via Indonesia. Together they flew to Makassar where the smugglers promised a boat was chartered to take them to Australia. They waited together in a small beachside home for weeks, surviving on a bit of rice and a handful of water, terrified they’d be arrested if they ventured out, but no one showed up.

“It was the Eid, (Eid ul Fitri is the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan) and we had so little to eat,” she says, tearing up. “For us it is supposed to be a joyful time… but it was very hard.”

Dreams dashed and out of money, Asma and her companions reported themselves to the authorities and, after uncomfortable weeks sleeping on the floor of an office, were processed into the local immigration detention centre, where she first encountered IOM staff. A short time later she was released to stay in a rooming house.

“There are many Somali people in the detention area; we are a big group. We cared for each other,” is all she offers about that trying period.

It can take many years for irregular migrants like Asma to be resettled to a third country. Ultimately, she was determined to be a refugee and a cousin in the southern United States was located who was prepared to support her should she be approved for settlement there.

“We have never met but she sent me pictures of my room in her house on Viber (social media),” she says with a gentle smile. “I have learned not to lose hope. We must be patient and pray for a brighter future.”

Finally a light had appeared at the end of the tunnel only to be dashed when she fell ill in early 2015; the young woman who had endured so much was diagnosed with a malignant form of cancer.

With IOM’s assistance and donor support from the US Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, she underwent surgery at a leading Jakarta cancer hospital to have a tumor larger than a softball removed from her abdomen in July.

“Throughout these difficult times Asma received close support and care from her compatriot Ms. Sadiya who stood by her like a loving sister and helped Asma maintain her positive spirit, optimism, hopes and dreams despite her diagnosis,” says IOM senior migration health advisor Dr. Sajith Gunaratne.

“She’s a shining example for people affected by conditions that drain hope from life itself. She has shown a strength of human spirit that is boundless. With further treatment, she will hopefully have many more productive years ahead of her.”

Though she faces further treatment, her humanitarian resettlement to the US was approved. Just a week after her release, Asma was strong enough to meet the IOM escort who accompanied her on the momentous move overseas in early August.

“I always believed I have a future. I know only God can heal me so I relax and I pray and I don’t lose hope,” she says when asked how she has remained positive in the face of so many storms.

“I think when I get to America I want to be an oncologist… Math and science were my best subjects in school; now I want to help people like me.”

For more information about global migration issues please visit:
IOM Indonesia

http://weblog.iom.int/survivor

Hear My Train a Comin'

There’s an agonizing 45-seconds of something that sounds like Jimi fed through a steel drum, opening riffs setting up a “YEAH” and a…. “yeah..” before steering away from something that sounds suspiciously like Voodoo Child… I

t’s 910 and I’m hard right & immediately left by the kali lima and roadside tire surgeon, accelerating past the 3-in-1 suckers biding their time behind smoked glass.

Well, I wait around the train station / Waitin' for that train / Waitin' for the train, yeah / Take me home, yeah /From this lonesome place
Drop a gear and throttle seamlessly left onto an empty six-lane strip, ignoring the pack of cops’ spidery mirrored eyes, aware the DOT half-helm, Hendrix on the ear-buds and speed are all very haram: bite me, boys. Accelerating hard into the rise above the grungy Blora strip, past Sudirman Station, and now we’re four, running hard in formation, gatecrashing the Landmark Tower bottleneck.

Dig / The tears burnin' / Tears burnin' me / Tears burnin' me / Way down… in my heart

Scooter girl’s lime green jilbab is streaming beneath her Hello Pussycat dome as she forces the wedge between the Metro Mini idling across two lanes and the army green TLC who’s hard against it’s bumper, and we compress to follow her, one-two-three-four, zip-zip-zip-zip… swarm theory in action.

Well, you know it's too bad, little girl / it's too bad / Too bad we have to part (have to part)

The posse splinters as the KTM climbs into 3^rd and 4^th. A middle-aged moto bekek wingman pulls into my blindside in busted flip-flops and GoJek green as we hit the dangerous patch of busted cement and gravel by Plaza Marein where a Kopaja shark’s magic hand signals the rusted green beast is gonna take us out and I run outta room and testicular fortitude trying to break right and watch the GoJek force the bus to a shuddering stall & sail on through to the other side. Dahm…boy can ride; must be something about the whole ‘surrender’ thing…

Dig / Gonna leave this town, yeah / Gonna leave this town / Gonna make a whole lotta money

Past the stalled bus, the road opens and I click up fast through the gears, 0-60 in three seconds “…hear my train a’comin/ hear my train a’comin” carving sweet lines through the puttering 125s and aging Road Kings. Wismet and WTC coming up fast on the left, an ugly, angry 100m strip where bankers inch into the parking lot, Beemers inch-out into bike & bus traffic and try to break right to enter the fast lane.

Gonna be big, yeah / Gonna be big, yeah / I'm gonna buy this town / I'm gonna buy this town /An' put it all in my shoe

A cherry red CBR250 whistles past on the right, the rider’s palms are hard on the bars to keep ‘er steady as the front end catches and wobbles, caught in a nasty seam in the road; “Get yer eyes up, man,” I’m thinking, as he locks up the rear and starts to slide. “Look where ya wanna go or you’ll end up smeared on the back of that cube truck”.

Counter-steer into a fast left up the hill behind the Sampoerna tower mosque just as twin Sukhoi, wing-to-wing, split the sky above, working out the kinks ahead of tujubelasan, Independence Day fly-over next Monday. Past warung city a side-street falls away beneath a neighboring tower into a dimly lit corrugated cement parkade choked with lines of parked bikes. The KTM finds her berth in a far corner; she’s lean & ticking, shaking off the heat as I pull off the dome & shades and head for the elevators.

Might even give a piece to you / That's what I'm gonna do / what I'm gonna do / what I'm gonna do

Over 500 New Human Trafficking Victims Identified in Indonesia since Benjina ‘Slave Fisheries’ Exposed

I knocked out this blog a while back but it was never posted for one reason or another. Now updated to July 31, it timelines the work done to date bu IOM and the government to assist victims of trafficking in the foreign fisheries in Indonesia.

http://weblog.iom.int/over-500-new-human-trafficking-victims-identified-indonesia-benjina-%E2%80%98slave-fisheries%E2%80%99-exposed

Hunt for "Slave Ships" Continues

Nice to be back in the 'game'.
The stories out of Benjina, Ambon and PNG are pretty awful. Glad the Guardian/Observer picked up for the Saturday edition.
Ambon is where it is all happening; PNG was just the news peg.

 Benjina facility, Eastern Indonesia

Hunt is on for 33 slave ships off coast of Papua New Guinea

Immigration officials seek trawler fleet crewed by 1,000 trafficked Burmese men that is thought likely to be supplying the UK with seafood

A fleet of at least 30 fishing trawlers crewed by slaves is being hunted off the coast of Papua New Guinea as the true extent becomes apparent of the trafficking of Burmese men by a massive Thai-run criminal syndicate operating throughout the East Indies.

Immigration officials have so far intercepted one of the fishing vessels, called the Blissful Reefer, and rescued its trafficked crew. Another 33 Thai trawlers thought to be crewed by slaves are being tracked in fishing grounds off the south coast of Papua New Guinea, known locally as the Dog Leg.

The trawlers are thought to be linked to a huge trafficking operation that was disrupted on the isolated Indonesian island of Benjina in March, liberating hundreds of enslaved fishermen – although a large number of boats loaded with slaves managed to escape.

Analysis of the trafficking operation reveals that the fish, which were originally heading for Thailand’s huge export-oriented seafood trade, are entering global supply chains, with some almost certainly destined for Britain.

It has also emerged that another, much larger, fleet of fishing boats crewed by slaves has been identified on the Indonesian island of Ambon – 1,200 miles to the west and once an important destination in the region’s spice trade. Officials from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) believe that a further 240 Thai fishing vessels are moored there, along with a total of around 1,000 slaves. To date, the crews of around 70 fishing vessels have been interviewed by IOM officials on the island, resulting in the rescue of some 350 Burmese slaves who will be repatriated to Burma (Myanmar). Accounts from a handful of former Burmese slaves who have already arrived home say hundreds of men remain unaccounted for.

Paul Dillon, a Jakarta-based IOM official, told the Observer: “We’ve interviewed the men from over a third of the 240 vessels in the port and discovered over 350 victims of trafficking, virtually all of whom are from Myanmar. If the pattern holds and we’re finally able to get access to the remaining men, we could be looking at up to 1,000.”

However, Dillon said local corruption had obstructed attempts to examine the remaining boats: “We are hoping they will see the light, understand that we are on a humanitarian, not a law-enforcement, mission, and let us get in there, assess and rescue these men and get them back home to their families.”

The findings and potential scale of slavery in Ambon has prompted the IOM to look at extending its investigation to ascertain how many other slave fishermen are being forced to work in Indonesia – an archipelago of more than 17,500 islands, of which just 922 are permanently inhabited.

“The Ambon experience has stirred us up to want to look at other parts of the country,” said Dillon. “Currently we don’t know where else in the country there are large numbers of fishing vessels standing by. Many of the islands are very remote.”

Meanwhile, the hunt for the Thai fishing vessels in the narrow, dangerous straits of the Dog Leg will continue this week as the Blissful Reefer is impounded in the port of Daru in Papua New Guinea. The eight crew members of the vessel, rescued on Monday, have been found to be trafficking victims. George Gigauri, the IOM’s chief of mission in Papua New Guinea, said: “They are trying to locate an approximate area where the vessels are, and then narrow it down exactly. The search is becoming more targeted, although it is difficult.”
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The boats are suspected of being part of a massive transnational Thai trafficking operation that until recently operated from the Benjina fisheries weigh station in eastern Indonesia.

In November, an investigation by Associated Press discovered hundreds of forced labourers, mainly from Burma, on Benjina. Some were filmed trapped in a cage, and many of those interviewed said they had been abused or had witnessed others being beaten – or in some cases killed.

Almost all described being kicked, beaten or whipped with toxic stingray tails if they complained or attempted to rest. Despite working 20- to 22-hour shifts and being forced to drink unclean water, they were either paid a pittance or went unpaid.

The discovery by AP led to at least 300 men managing to escape but, before help arrived at the island, boats loaded with slaves fled the region for new fishing grounds – some to the island of Ambon, others apparently to the Dog Leg.

The Burmese slaves are recruited to work in Thailand’s seafood business and are usually lured or tricked into leaving their country to go to Thailand, where they are then taken south and put on boats in Indonesia. Others, though, are kidnapped and forced to work.

Once in Indonesian waters – some of the world’s richest fishing grounds for species including tuna and prawns – the ships’ names and flags are changed to escape the authorities’ notice, although the captain of the trawler is usually a Thai national.

Thailand’s seafood industry is worth around £5bn a year, with the vast majority of its produce exported globally to satisfy the global appetite for cheap fish. The catches are deposited with a huge refrigerated “mothership”, which transports the fish back to Thailand. Dillon said: “Look, It’s a billion-dollar business. There are powerful interests out there who have been making a lot of money for many years off the backs of these men, through acts of great cruelty. It is not going to disappear overnight, but in Indonesia at this time there appears to be the will to break their business model.”

However, little is known of the size of the Thai criminal syndicates, of their connections or of how they manage to coerce and recruit so many slaves. Investigators are still searching for the nerve centre of the operation.

Gigauri said: “It’s still not clear to us how this operates. Where exactly are these boats registered? To which company do they report? Who does the recruiting? Where is the headquarters of this operation?”

Last year another Guardian investigation tracked the supply chain of prawns produced with slave labour to British and American supermarket chains. Another more recent inquiry linked Thailand’s fishing industry with the trafficking syndicates profiting from the misery of Rohingya migrants.