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| In detention for seven months ... Thawng Lian Thang's ordeal began after a gang stole his refugee card. Photo: Saeed Khan |
Much depends on the asylum seekers deal with Malaysia, writes Kirsty Needham.
Immigration officers are waiting in a van parked in the shadows behind a busy kitchen off Kuala Lumpur's bustling night-time street food market. A question to the driver on what they are doing draws a disarmingly matter-of-fact reply: ''Catching girls and taking them to detention camps.''
Their prey work illegally in restaurants or as cleaners and come from Burma, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran and Afghanistan.
A card from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees gives them a get out of jail free card, however. ''We don't catch them, they are refugees,'' the driver says.
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Refugees can wait months to be registered by the UNHCR, and even if issued cards, they are not permitted to legally work in Malaysia. But confusion reigns over whether illegal workers are also refugees, labels the immigration men use interchangeably.
It will be the men in the van who will play a pivotal role in the success or failure of the controversial refugee swap agreement signed on Monday by the Gillard government.
The media and political storm that would erupt if any of the 800 asylum seekers to be sent from Christmas Island are caught in a Malaysian immigration raid - and wind up behind razor wire, sleeping on a bare floor for months, eating rotten food and punished by being made to stand for hours with raised arms, or worse - would sink Labor's efforts to cloak the swap deal with special protections.
The deal is signed but Australian officials admit the hard part will be what happens next. The 800 will sink or swim in Kuala Lumpur's sea of downtrodden foreigners.
The federal opposition has noisily warned of canings and human rights abuses, contrasting Kuala Lumpur's concrete jungle with the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, the Liberals' preferred dumping ground for asylum seekers.
''[Julia Gillard] is trying to give a fig leaf of human rights to something which is completely dodgy,'' the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, said this week, pointing out that the UNHCR had not put its signature on the deal.
Australia will accept 4000 refugees over four years from Malaysia in return for sending the next 800 boat arrivals to Malaysia for processing by the UNHCR, with Australia picking up all the $292 million cost.
The federal government says 80 to 90 per cent of boat arrivals start their journey in Malaysia, and sending them back will deter people smugglers and end potentially lethal boat voyages.
Human rights groups in Australia and Malaysia have slammed the government's own ''trade'' in people.
The UNHCR would prefer Australia to process boat arrivals in Australia, as expected under the Refugee Convention. But a UNHCR official stood on stage as the Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, signed a document that has been partly shaped by the UNHCR's insistence that key elements of the Refugee Convention are shadowed in the bilateral agreement.
A hostel-style transit centre will initially process ''transportees'' within 45 days of arrival in Kuala Lumpur. After being fingerprinted, they will be flown to Malaysia within 72 hours. Unaccompanied children will be treated as special cases. The International Organisation for Migration will do health checks, and then the 800 will move into the community. The Australian government will pay a month's hotel and living allowance.
Importantly, an identity document will show they have work rights and can stay legally in Malaysia for the years it takes for UNHCR to assess their refugee claim and for them to be resettled in another country.
Refugees, already scrambling to survive in Malaysia, say these protections for the 800 are unfair.
''They will be treated quite differently,'' says the vice-chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia, Khaw Lake Tee. ''There's definite discrimination. We would like the same treatment to be extended to all refugees.''
The executive director of refugee rights group Tenaganita, Irene Fernandez, says the harsh urban reality in Kuala Lumpur means women are sexually harassed by employers or refugees have wages docked, because employees with no legal status cannot report them to police. The Malaysian government is considering extending work rights to refugees as part of a program to fingerprint all foreign workers, but nothing has been announced yet.
Children sent from Australia will have access only to community-run refugee schools. Khaw Lake Tee says the lack of formal education for refugee children in Malaysia is a problem affecting entire generations of Burmese, and the commission wants the Malaysian government to invite NGOs to offer services.
Thawng Lian Thang, 34, was walking home from the Baptist church at the other end of the night markets when police arrested him because he was not carrying documentation.
Thang had only recently arrived in Malaysia, fleeing Burma when the military wrongly suspected the farmer was involved with a rebel army. Such was the urgency for him to escape, Thang left behind his wife and four children.
The Chin Refugee Committee, a community group caring for Malaysia's large population of Burmese refugees, had issued him a card. Often this, or a bribe, will get a refugee out of the police station before they reach the notorious immigration detention.
But Thang had been robbed by a gang, who took the card and his savings. He spent seven months in detention and says the small and rotten food portions barely kept him alive. Released just six weeks ago, he now clutches a dog-eared letter from the UNHCR that he is desperate not to lose.
Thang is anxious about his family and desperate to get out of Malaysia and resettle in another country.
The Chin Refugee Committee's Patrick Sang Bawi Hnin says it has noticed a fall in refugee arrests, and says the recent decision to pull the vigilante volunteer force RELA off the streets has been a tangible benefit of the international scrutiny the Australia deal has cast on Malaysia's treatment of refugees. The Malaysian government has said it will be judged by the results of the deal.
Dr Fernandez says she does not believe the assurances the Malaysian government has given to Australia for preferential treatment of the 800. The only reason for the swap is to solve a political problem for Labor, she says; refugees won't benefit.
The opposition spokesman for immigration, Scott Morrison, likes to spruik the latest tally - 230 boat arrivals since Labor was elected - across talkback radio, targeting listeners in the western Sydney marginal electorates that prompted the Gillard government's shift to toughen border protection.
According to the minister, Chris Bowen, as of this week: ''I think it's a very big call now for somebody to get on a boat and come to Australia.''
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