SCORES of anxious-looking people, including families, hang about outside the tall mesh fence of the compound of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees on a hillside near the royal palace in Kuala Lumpur.
Those at the front patiently present papers to uniformed security guards. Some are let in to the group of colonial-era two-storey wooden office buildings, where a dozen expert assessors determine their destinies.
No asylum-seeker deal has yet been finalised between Australia and Malaysia and, if details are under discussion between the countries, neither side is making them available, beyond the general outline of a swap of 800 people who arrive in Australia by boat for 4000 proven refugees from Malaysia.
The UNHCR will almost certainly be the key player in implementing any arrangement. But it will be entering new ground with the Australia-Malaysia swap deal. Nothing like it has been tried before. And while the Malaysian government is not speaking, and is ensuring the mass media it controls is not presenting the
issue either, the parliamentary opposition and the country's lively non-government organisations are uniting in opposition to
the scheme.
The UNHCR has asked, following the announcement of the deal by Prime Minister Julia Gillard, that asylum-seekers flown to Kuala Lumpur not become the first to be held in detention in Malaysia because the principal feature of Malaysia's refugee environment is that it has no policy, laws or regulations that even admit the existence of refugees.
Government politicians have claimed that even acknowledging refugees as a legal category will draw many more people to claim refuge in Malaysia, although two years ago a bald statement was made that refugees were allowed to work. Mostly, the work they do is dirty, dangerous or difficult: work that citizens won't do, including construction, cleaning and waste management.
Refugees are not a high-profile issue in Malaysia, though the criticism of the Australian deal by the parliamentary opposition as well as by many non-government organisations and refugee advocacy groups is now starting to broaden community awareness.
Nevertheless, about 94,300 people have made their way in to Malaysia seeking refuge, 92 per cent of them from Burma, where the election of a supposedly civilian government last year has not reduced in any way the grim conflicts in the country's hinterlands between its dominant institution, the army, and ethnic groups that claim cruel victimisation.
Malaysia is also the chief transit point for asylum-seekers coming by air from further afield, chiefly from Afghanistan and the Middle East, who enter legally with a three-month visa but may then seek to come to Australia by obtaining passage on a boat from a people-smuggling agent. This probably means travelling first to Indonesia, again by air or, more likely, by boat.
The Burmese sometimes come to Malaysia by boat, especially the Muslim Rohingyas from the Bangladesh border, but more often by land through Thailand, where agents sometimes take them on foot through jungle border crossings. The biggest group in Malaysia is now the 36,200 largely Christian Chin people.
Of the group in Malaysia, the great majority -- about 84,000 -- have already been found by the UNHCR to be genuine refugees. A further 10,000 are registered with the commission but are still awaiting final assessment. Another 10,000 to 20,000 people may be living in Malaysia who have been displaced from other countries but have not sought registration with the UNHCR.
The verification process usually takes four to five hours a person and is done by an assessor who is experienced in dealing with the community they come from, and who has developed techniques to expose invention. Further checks will also be made behind the scenes, probably including back in the country the person has fled.
The UNHCR is short-staffed in Kuala Lumpur; about 130 staff care for the welfare, including housing, work and education, of 94,000 people. They placed about 8000 refugees in Malaysia in other countries last year.
There is no queue. The commission assesses individuals' needs on the basis of vulnerability, and the receiving country usually also sends staff to examine them, including for security issues. The US took more than any other country last year.
The UNHCR has a list of approved refugees that it presents to countries that are offering to resettle some refugees towards their annual quota. That resettlement country can then make a final selection based on interviews and other information. The deal involving Australia would increase the number of people that could be resettled under those quotas.
The alternatives for those remaining are to return to their country of origin once the causes of concern diminish (this has happened with people from Bosnia and from Aceh in Indonesia) or integration within Malaysia itself, which the government there has from time to time offered to refugee groups, for instance from southern Philippines and from Cambodia. (Children born to asylum-seekers there are not entitled to Malaysian citizenship or even residency.)
These latter options are the most likely for most refugees. For of 11 million refugees in the world, fewer than 80,000 are resettled in third countries annually.
Refugees in Malaysia almost all live in or near Kuala Lumpur and are mostly well-connected to groups organised by the communities from which they come. Refugee children are not allowed to attend government schools, so NGOs teach the 13,000 of school age at learning centres. And refugees are charged 50 per cent higher fees for health services.
Work is the key, the UNHCR finds. Everything else fits into place if people in the family find jobs, although they are rarely jobs with any security.
The complicated, layered environment in which the asylum-seekers from Australia will arrive, and from which the refugees from Malaysia will come, includes about two million migrant workers, who comprise about 20 per cent of the nation's workforce.
At the same time, Malaysia has about 600,000 illegal migrant workers, whose presence is sometimes tolerated, sometimes not. The official unemployment rate is just 3 per cent.
The immigration department conducts raids to track illegals, who are often fined, caned or imprisoned, before being sent to one of the country's grim detention centres. Sometimes, opposition politicians say, the illegals simply bribe the police or others making the raids and come back to work the next day.
The aim is to deport the illegals, but this is complicated when, as is usual, the government in the country of origin refuses to pay.
A volunteer militia group, RELA, set up to recruit peacekeepers during the communist emergency from 1948 to 1960, is now used for crowd control and sometimes to assist immigration officers to track illegal workers.
It has two million members, who do not require warrants to enter premises and check refugees' papers.
Nurul Izzah Anwar, daughter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and an MP herself, says that "lurking in the background" is the government's issuing of temporary identification documents to refugees, especially in Sabah where refugees and foreign workers outnumber citizens, resulting in a big pro-government vote, because giving ID cards enables refugees to use government services.
Thus, she says, the reluctance to allow the issue to be publicly discussed in the lead-up to an election expected later this year.
She says: "The government seems to be concerned that if it recognises the existence of refugees, that implies it will have to share the wealth of this country with foreigners.
"But we need to find a long-term solution."
Tian Chua, the vice-president of Anwar's People's Justice Party and also an MP, says:
"The executive doesn't have to be accountable to the elected parliament; they have signed a draft agreement with Australia without us knowing about it. And it affects more than foreign relations.
"They must come clean and reveal to the parliament what they have agreed. It's hard to have a rational debate about this otherwise, without a free press."
The swap deal, he says, is costing Australia the opportunity to re-establish its relationship with Malaysia on a positive footing, after the decades of difficulty under Mahathir Mohamad.
The questions involving refugees and migrant labour involve "layers after layers of problems", Tian says, including the value of maintaining markets for
cheap goods by employing immigrant labour.
Leading refugee advocate Irene Fernandez, executive director of NGO Tenaganita -- Women's Force -- says the government exercises its right to arrest and detain refugees at any time, even if they have UNHCR cards.
"They live in a constant state of fear and insecurity. Australia is saying it will make sure their rights are protected. I don't know how that's going to happen."
She says most live in cramped flats and, if they don't get paid by their employers, have no redress. Women are often sexually harassed by employers, she says, but are reluctant to complain to police for fear they will instead themselves become the target because of inadequate documentation. "How can Australia think of sending anyone in to such an environment?" she asks. "It's inhumane."
Fernandez says it is unknown whether the asylum-seekers sent from Australia will join existing refugees or will be held in detention. In any case, she says, "it would be wrong to give them preferential treatment".
An example of such treatment, she says, is that of Bosnian refugees during the Yugoslav civil war, who were given government assistance and allowed to work. Most have now returned home.
She says Australia should focus on persuading its neighbours in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to sign up to the UN refugees convention. Only Cambodia and the Philippines, of the 10 countries in the association, have done so.
* * *
LEADERS DISCUSS CO-OPERATION ON PEOPLE-SMUGGLING
INDONESIA'S Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa tells The Weekend Australian this week that the asylum-seeker deal being hammered out between Australia and Malaysia should be forged within the regional approach to people-smuggling.
He says: "When Indonesia and Australia began the Bali asylum-seeker process back in 2003, the idea from the very beginning was that this was an inclusive process."
The unique feature of this approach, he says in Kuala Lumpur -- where he is participating in the annual Asia-Pacific Roundtable -- is that it includes "the countries of origin, of transit and of destination".
"It aimed to do away with finger-pointing as to which was to blame, by including all three elements."
There is room within this approach, he says, for bilateral, trilateral and truly region-wide ways to tackle the dilemma.
"We mustn't be too precise in trying to define the process. As long as it's part of the overall regional architecture, and people are not cancelling one another out by taking opposite courses, it's all fine."
Natalegawa says: "Australia and Malaysia are negotiating some kind of bilateral arrangement, which will no doubt become an important element of that regional architecture, as long as it's not simply deflecting the problem away elsewhere."
In the absence of the Bali process, the situation would be different, he says. "But if it's within the regional context, it is completely fine."
Association of Southeast Asian Nations secretary-general and former Thai foreign minister Surin Pitsuwan says: "ASEAN certainly sees people-smuggling as an issue.
"Countries like Malaysia and Thailand and the Philippines have a great deal of interest in this. Asylum-seekers need to be protected and helped.
"Indonesia is very concerned because it has become a bridge to Australia, and that's why the Bali process began."
He adds: "We are all concerned about human trafficking . . . Countries of origin are probably more reluctant to see agreements or controls or the imposition of responsibility, while those on the receiving end are more worried."
Rowan Callick
Rowan Callick
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