Today is World Refugee Day, a day to take stock of our global efforts to help refugees and asylum seekers.
World Refugee Day isn’t a day in which refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia bring out cakes, streamers and playing party songs. It isn’t a day where they throw kenduris and lead prayers, or commemorate a special event. However, it is a day in which they hope that the bit of media attention they are given opens up more space for them to live, breathe, and relax.
Today, there are more than 400 refugees and asylum seekers detained in prisons and immigration detention centers all over Malaysia. Those that are in prisons are serving sentences for illegal entry into Malaysia. Those that are in immigration detention centers are currently finding the courage to stay incarcerated under harsh conditions of detention.
Whether Acehnese, Rohingya, Chin, or members of other ethnic groups, all of them have one thing in common. They are deathly afraid of being deported back to their homelands.
Indeed, over the past years, many refugees, stateless people, and asylum seekers have been deported. Those who have made it back into Malaysia tell us of the sufferings they have endured. They tell of their re-arrests, the fact that they have been beaten and interrogated, and the fact that some of their peers do not live to narrate of their own stories of deportation.
Whether or not Malaysia has signed the Refugee Convention, it is still bound to respect the principle of non-refoulement. The concept is simple: No State is to return (refouler) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his (or her) life or freedom would be threatened on account of his (/her) race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.
However, this is still done, despite attempts by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to put a stop to such incidents.
At this very moment, Acehnese and Rohingyas are languishing in detention centers. In a Malaysian system that does not recognize the fact that they cannot go ‘home’, their options are few: to be deported en masse along with other ‘illegal immigrants’, to opt for ‘voluntary deportation’, or to wait for resettlement, organized by the UNHCR.
Unfortunately, the third and most palatable option, resettlement, is available to Acehense only after months of detention, and is not available at all to most Rohingyas, because they are not processed for resettlement. Thus, many detainees are likely to stay in detention camps indefinitely, until such time as they decide, of their own volition, to brave the consequences of ‘voluntary deportation’.
Their circumstances are bleak. As we commemorate World Refugee Day 2004 today, let us keep them in mind, and work together so that more humanitarian solutions are found for them.
Editor’s note: This was written in 2004 to mark World Refugee Day. The statistics have changed: There are an estimated 100,000 asylum seekers, refugees and stateless persons in Malaysia now. The thoughts are still very much relevant today.
The Micah Mandate is a Christian-based public interest advocacy ministry that seeks a transformation of our nation through justice, mercy and humility.
