Fatima (not her real name) is an Iraqi refugee with three daughters (7, 16 and 17) and one son (12). Their father is now living in Sydney. He fled from political persecution in Iraq in September 1999, first to Syria and then on to Australia. His wife did not hear from him for a full year during his journey to safety. Meanwhile, in his absence, the Iraqi authorities harassed Fatima as to his whereabouts. Her children were thrown out of school in Iraq. At this point she decided to flee with them to Jordan - the only land route out of Iraq not requiring a visa in advance. "I was wealthy in my country, so why would I have left it only to find a job or a better life? I left because of the persecution," she said.
Fatima stayed in Amman for only two weeks, during which period she received word that her husband had reached Australia. She called him and said she wanted to join him there. He told her not to attempt to come because the hazards of the sea voyages from Malaysia to the northern Australian islands were too great. Despite being a fully recognized refugee, he had been granted only a "Temporary Protection Visa" which, in Australia, does not include the right to family reunion and so he had no way to bring his family to join him legally.
Fatima had a six-month visa in Jordan but saw no likelihood of the situation in Iraq changing within that time, so she thought, "why should I waste my time waiting for my visa to expire in a country where I knew I wouldn't be allowed to stay for longer." She therefore arranged with a smuggler in Amman to go to Australia via Malaysia and Indonesia. It cost US$4000 in total for her and the four children.
They flew into Kuala Lumpur and stayed locked in a hotel room for ten days. She herself never left the room, the smuggler frightening her with the risk of arrest for being an illegal alien, but sometimes she sent her son out on quick errands.
Before leaving Malaysia, Fatima asked the smuggler many questions about the trip ahead. He told her not to be so anxious, that the trip would be easy, with medical staff on board the boats, for example. "He told me women even have their babies on these boats." One evening (on or around June 15, 2001) he took them on buses to meet a third smuggler and the boats at the shore. When she saw the two tiny, rickety boats, she refused to board, but then was persuaded that they were just to shuttle them to a much larger boat, waiting out of sight. One smuggler finally threatened her children with a knife to make the family get on board.
After two hours at sea, with water lapping over the edges of the dingy that was overloaded with eleven people, the boat was intercepted by some Indonesian "police or pirates, who threatened us with swords." Fatima was by this time so desperate to get herself and her children off the boat that she begged to be arrested, but the interceptors refused and demanded dollars. It took a six-hour negotiation and a collection from the pockets of all the refugee passengers to satisfy them and send them away.
Because the boat was skimming the shore to avoid detection, the passengers were being badly bitten by mosquitoes - their faces and arms swelling. Finally, in the pitch dark of 3 a.m., the smuggler dumped them all on a narrow channel, telling them that a bigger boat would collect them. He disappeared into the jungle. Stranded on the shore, Fatima "tried to persuade the children to be brave but in fact I was thinking that nothing would now save us but God." The eleven refugees spent the night in the jungle, trying to hail other boats with fires, but whenever a fisherman came close and saw that they were Arabs, he would go away again. One fisherman agreed to take one of them back to the Malaysian mainland to find their "head smuggler" or to get other help. They never saw this envoy again.
Waving dollars at the fishermen, they were finally rescued by another one. However, he said he would only take them three by three. Fatima went to find their bag for a moment, and when she came back she saw that her middle daughter was on the boat, along with two other refugees, and that the boat was sailing off into the distance. At this she was hysterical, not knowing where the fisherman was taking her child and whether he would ever return with her. After half an hour he came back with an empty boat and picked up Fatima and her two other daughters. The other refugees forced her to leave her son behind with them, so that the fisherman would feel compelled to come back another time.
Fatima did not know where they were going with this fisherman; she did not even know whether they were in Malaysia or Indonesia. After a while another boat started following them which the fisherman appeared to think was the police, so he quickly pulled over at another small island and forced them to disembark. So now Fatima and two of her daughters were stranded on this island, while one other daughter had been taken to an unknown destination and her son was still back on the island where they had spent the night. The fisherman signaled for Fatima and her daughters to head into the undergrowth and hide, and he himself followed them. The jungle was dense and Fatima led the way by hacking at vines with a shoe. They went deeper and deeper into the jungle and were soon lost. She was afraid of the fisherman somewhere behind them, believing he was going to rape her. They wandered in the jungle for hours, stumbling and cutting their hands, crying and screaming, with her trying to carry each child alternately. The fisherman, apparently still afraid that the police were following them, threatened them with a knife to be quiet. He held one daughter tight with the knife against her neck. Later he disappeared on his own into the jungle.
When Fatima found the shore again, she saw the fisherman's boat and he was nowhere to be seen. She tried to make it start by herself, to escape from the island, but they only got a few feet before the engine failed, so they all had to jump overboard and wade back to shore. Then the boat that had been following them came alongside the shore. It was not the Indonesian police, in fact, but another fisherman who tried to calm them. At this point Fatima collapsed and this new stranger carried her, along with the two girls, into his boat. When she awoke, she had no idea where they were going, but she saw that this man was "merciful," giving them fresh water and food.
Having left behind the only person who knew where her missing daughter had been taken, Fatima became distraught trying to explain the situation with hand gestures. She was able to make the man understand about her son and they returned to rescue him and the rest of the original refugee group. The fisherman then took them all home to his own house, but Fatima refused to get off the boat because she wanted to go back out and search for her middle daughter. Eventually the man and her son did go back out and, after an hour, returned with the missing girl. The whole family collapsed with relief as soon as they were reunited.
The family recuperated for three days at the house of this fisherman until a wealthier Malay man came to pick them up in his car and took them to his home. When he asked who they were, most of the refugees told the Malay man that they were Saudi tourists, but Fatima thought that was impossible to believe, with their torn clothes and faces swollen from stings and bites. She confessed the obvious: that she was a refugee. At this the gentleman offered to help take them back to Kuala Lumpur and Fatima telephoned the original smuggler, telling him everything that had happened and threatening to call the police if he did not help them now. Therefore, after two days at the Malay man's house, Fatima's family returned to the hotel in Kuala Lumpur, back where they had started.
Fatima realized that there was no way for them to go except forward, to Australia, but she begged the smuggler for a safer way to Indonesia. So this time a bigger ship was arranged, not overloaded - only twenty other asylum seekers were on board. After twelve hours they entered Indonesian waters, and the "respectful" captain told them he would take them to Jakarta by land. They hid in the captain's home; police came to search the house but did not find them. They each paid US$250 to catch buses to Jakarta. She remembers that they still looked so sick and bedraggled that the officers at the bus station asked questions. She sensed that they were going to call the police and she warned the single men in her group of this. These men ran away before the police arrived and arrested the three remaining families with children, including Fatima's. She understood that they were going to be imprisoned but she was too tired to lie and explained that they were refugees trying to get to Australia.
The police left them in a small cell for one day before escorting them onto a ferry to Batam (a five hour trip). In Batam they were put into a detention center, locked behind iron bars, where they stayed for five months. There were about seventy people there, mostly Afghans and Iraqis. Her family was put with three others into one room, but the men were separated to another building - including her seventeen-year-old son. The men were always kept locked indoors and though she could see her son through the bars, she could not go to him, even when he fell sick. He has a rheumatic heart disease. "We suffered there very much. The guards would put our children against the wall and throw knives around them for a game. The food was disgusting - just rice and a small piece of chicken every day. My weight fell from 96 to 81 kilos. We were not even given a fire to make tea. We slept on the ground." Only one member of the family was allowed to leave the center at a time, while the others were "held hostage" until their return. There was no special treatment for children in the center. "The children blamed me," said Fatima, "My youngest daughter asked me: 'What have I got from all this? I still have no school and I have not seen my father. I have been half a year in prison for wanting to find a school and my father.'"
The family bribed the guards to make phone calls. By this means, Fatima was able to speak with her husband in Australia. He then tried to call the offices of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Jakarta on their behalf, calling several times a day. He told his wife that IOM knew they were there and, after one month, two representatives of IOM came to visit the detention center. [Fatima refused to answer questions about what these representatives told her, or to express an opinion about the services of IOM, because she feared it would hurt her chances of resettlement as a refugee.] IOM thereafter visited the center once a month, and representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) visited them shortly after the first IOM visit. UNHCR, however, seems to have come to the detention center only to conduct interviews with Afghans on a certain list. Fatima cried and begged "to get on their list" but they said "they had no information about my family," even though she is certain that she had told IOM she was seeking asylum. "UNHCR said they could not help [with release] until you are recognized as refugees. UNHCR was surprised at the conditions, I think, but said IOM was responsible." UNHCR did, however, interview Fatima subsequently and her family was recognized as entitled to refugee status under the 1951 Refugee Convention.
After she was recognized as a refugee she knew that she had the right "to be released from this nightmare" of the detention center, but she had to wait there for a further eleven days until IOM came to take her to Jakarta. IOM put the family in a hotel for five days and then told her that it would be up to her to find her own place, using the allowance paid to her by UNHCR. But the hotel was "unsuitable for a single Muslim woman" because it was full of prostitutes and drug-dealing so that she left even earlier. An Indonesian organization contracted by UNHCR contacted an Iraqi refugee spokesman in Jakarta who managed to get Fatima an apartment in Cisawa - a town about an hour and a half from Jakarta. She and her children had lived there for five months as of May 2002.
The children had had no school for three years and getting them into a new school system was Fatima's priority. Australia, to which her case has been referred for resettlement by UNHCR, was dragging its heels, she believed. The last she heard was that Australia would send another selection mission to Indonesia in January 2002 (she has already been interviewed by Australian representatives once, in December 2001) but in May 2002 she was still waiting.
A few weeks before being interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Fatima was hit by a motorcycle but, because she had no-one to look after her children, she had to come straight home instead of staying in the hospital. She had eczema all over her body from nervous tension and had been misdiagnosed by an Indonesian doctor as having breast cancer. She joked that she would like to be sick if that would help her get resettled more quickly - not understanding that it might well have the opposite effect on her chances. Her thinking is that the survivors of the ship that sunk ("SIEV X") were resettled quickly, proving that you have to "almost die to get resettled."
Her happiness when first recognized as a refugee has soured with so much waiting in Indonesia, without school for her children. She has been consistently unable to get attention from UNHCR, she complained. When a Saudi tourist was stabbed by local Indonesians in the courtyard of their building, which made her worry that there would be other attacks on Arabs, UNHCR did not reply to her telephone calls and did nothing to re-house her someplace safer. "I thought that the UN was a humanitarian organization. I still have not found the humanity. Why are the children guilty that they should be punished with this life?"
Postscript: Shortly after Fatima met with Human Rights Watch, an Indonesian mob attacked 146 Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers and refugees living in Cisawa on April 20-21, 2002. Fatima was among a number of families with young children who fled from this violence into the fields and jungle, where they hid overnight. Fatima and her children were able to safely return to Cisawa the following day, when order was restored to the town. As of April 30, they remained there, waiting for resettlement.
