Is This Freedom? Rohingya Children Locked Inside for Safety’s Sake

Karen Zusman, for the Pulitzer Center, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Published on August 11, 2010

Today I visited another Rohingya family from Burma who live in Malaysia: five young children and both parents. The father has a heart condition and he shows me his medicine: a small pile of tablets and bottles that he pours out on the floor, next to the family’s seven UNHCR cards, which were already laid out in display. The cards allow the father to receive his medication at 50% off the rate for foreigners (a price that’s exorbitant when compared to the nearly free cost of the medicine for Malaysians). And with that exception, I can see little else that the cards offer them, knowing that when Rohingyas get arrested—even as UNHCR card holders, they’re often left in detention for extended periods of time. As Muslims, their chances at resettlement are next to nothing when compared to other ethnic groups from Burma, most notably the Chin, a Christian community that gets resettled remarkably faster than any other group living in Malaysia.
This family lives in one small room on the top floor of a dingy shopping complex. The room has a concrete floor, one big mattress pushed up against the wall to make room for the family during the daytime, and one window, with bars on it.
During the day, the mother and father have no choice but to lock the children in the room as they go outside to seek work. They have no money to pay for caretakers, and it simply is not safe for their children to be outside where they are vulnerable to arrest by Malaysian police.
As reported earlier, the arrests in Malaysia do not spare refugee children, and the Rohingya seem to be the most at risk—both of arrest and of being lured away by traffickers with simple promises, such as the ability to play outside and have good food to eat.
Just like Zaida’s family, whom I interviewed previously (also Rohingya), there’s no school for these children, either, and they appear even more listless than Zaida’s kids, who at least can play in the foliage near the hut. The children of this urban family must stay penned up for the whole day and night in the hot and stuffy room.
Today the parents stayed at home in order to meet me. There is a bit of festive energy in the air because someone has given the family a bag of brightly colored balloons. The mother blows up the balloons and tries her best to entertain her restless children. Once a day, when the parents return, they can take the kids outside for a walk around the shopping complex. The rest of the day, the eldest, who is 7-years-old, looks after his younger brothers and sisters inside the one-room home.
There is one very old TV that plays two stations in Malay language. The children lie down in front of it and flip the channels but clearly aren’t watching. The littlest one, a girl aged 3-years-old, looks up into the ceiling longingly. It appears to me as if she’s willing it to disappear, so, at the very least, during all the long hours she spends locked up in the room, she could at least be gazing into the sky.
When I leave I feel all my usual conflicted emotions. I can’t help comparing these children with Zaida’s. When I left Zaida I had wanted to tell her not to let her children outside to beg in the street. But I held back, having no solution to offer her. In that moment of farewell, her son was already climbing on the roof of the hut, screaming goodbye to me and playfully tugging on a branch of a tree. But with these kids, who are not beggars, but cannot go outside at all, I’m too aware now of their reality and lack of choice—and nothing comes to mind that I can say to the parents. I can only shake the their hands and wish them the best of luck. I wave goodbye to each child and as the father escorts me out and down the stairs, I hear the echo of the door, which locks the rest of the family inside the room behind me.

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