23, refugee, detainee
ETHNICITY: Karenni
BIRTHPLACE: Karenni State, Burma
INTERVIEWED IN: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
We met Tan Htay the day after he was released from a detention center in Malaysia. Tan Htay fled Burma after SPDC soldiers confiscated his family’s land, shot and killed his uncle, and took Tan Htay to do forced labor at their military camp. Although he was able to run away from the SPDC camp and escape over the border to Thailand, he was accused of being a Karenni Army rebel and found himself unable to return to his country. Tan Htay decided to migrate to Malaysia, where he knew some friends from his village were living; he soon became one of more than 83,000 (according to the UNHCR-Malaysia) officially registered Burmese refugees in Malaysia. The Malaysian government actively employs three branches of its enforcement agencies to arrest and detain illegal immigrants. There are also no refugee camps allowed in Malaysia. According to the UNCHR, there are some 10,000 additional Burmese refugees in Malaysia still unregistered, but others put the number much higher. These men and women survive on the margins as illegal migrant workers, without any protection.
I was arrested in April 2009.
At the time of my arrest, I was working in a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur, washing dishes. There were about thirty Burmese people working there. When the police and immigration officers came, they asked us to sit down in a line and show our passports—all of the customers could see what was happening. They checked our passports with a machine. Out of thirty of us, only three, including me, held a UNCHR card.
I had been registered by the UNCHR in August 2008. When I arrived in Malaysia, a friend who worked with a Karenni community organization asked me whether I had any documents to stay in Malaysia. Since I didn’t, he promised to help me get a UNCHR card. I gave him all my personal details, and he helped me start the process of applying for refugee status with the UNHCR. After my friend submitted my information, I was called by the UNHCR to undergo an interview. When I finally got my UNHCR refugee card after undergoing several interviews about why I left Burma, they told me to contact their office whenever I was sick or if I got arrested by the police and immigration.
When the police raided the restaurant, the other two UNCHR document holders and I were separated from the other Burmese people under arrest. They took the UNCHR cards and put them in a small bag. The immigration officials told us that UNCHR cardholders are not allowed to work. We replied, “If we don’t work, how can we get food to eat?” Then we were all handcuffed, and everyone was told to get in the vans. The immigration officials told us that they were taking us to the detention camp.
That night, I was taken to the Putrajaya Immigration Office. They checked my name and address and I was put in a cell for transfer to the KL camp.11 We arrived at the KL detention camp at 5:30 a.m.
There were only about 100 people held in each cell block. Some of the Burmese in that camp had UNHCR cards or Burmese passports, but some had nothing.
It was like prison there. We were not allowed to leave our building. There were four toilets there, but they didn’t have any walls or doors. The toilets were very disgusting because of a lack of water. Drinking water and bathing water were the same—as a result, many detainees suffered from diseases.
Three or four days after we were arrested, some officers came and took us to be interrogated. If we couldn’t answer their questions due to language difficulties, they hit our faces with books.
Two weeks after the interrogation, we had to go to our court trial, where the immigration officials submitted our paperwork to the judge. Eventually, after four weeks in the KL camp, they sent the verdict. We had to sign our verdicts, but I didn’t understand it when I signed it. I only learned what it said later, from other people who lived there. It said that if you were a UNCHR card holder, you had to stay in the camp until the UNCHR came to get you. If you held a Burmese passport or fake passport, you would be deported.
After I signed my verdict, I was given a green piece of paper that said I had already undergone a trial. Document holders and illegal migrants were separated, and I was sent to Semenyih camp. I was lucky I got to move to Semenyih camp because I had a UNHCR card; otherwise, I would have gone to prison.
THEIR MINDS ARE AFFECTED
The Semenyih camp is located in Kajang, a township in Selangor State. In the camp, there are five cell blocks that hold about 1,500 people in total. Each block holds 300 people and one of the five blocks was for women. Semenyih camp was bigger than KL camp, and it accommodated more detainees. Also, the people detained there come from different countries, including India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. In my block there were about 160 Burmese people.
Every morning while I was at Semenyih camp, I was told to clean the floor. We were not fed well—for example, on Tuesdays and Fridays we were given chicken curry as breakfast, but the chicken had already been left in the fridge for a long time and was rotten and smelly. The women and children were also not fed sufficiently.
In each block there were fewer than ten toilets, without walls or doors. There were two tanks with a little bit of water. The water was like in the KL camp—used both for drinking and bathing—and was located by the toilets.
The opportunities to see a doctor were very limited; I think there was an NGO that diagnosed the detainees and provided medicine. Only ten people from one block were allowed to visit the clinic at a time, though there were always more than ten people who were suffering from sickness. People were exposed to diseases, especially skin disease, because the place was not hygienic. Quite a lot of people suffered.
One time, twelve people from our cell block wanted to go to the clinic, but the number allowed was only ten. Two of the sick people were taken to a room and punched by the guards instead of being sent to the clinic. Their eyes were bruised and their legs were burned with lit cigarettes. The rest of us were not happy that they tortured the detainees like this, so we refused to squat with our bottom up in the air like we usually had to do five times a day.
We had to stay in a squatting position five times a day while they checked the cell blocks. Each time took at least an hour and half because they counted all of the detainees. If we asked questions while they were interrogating us, they kicked us. We frequently faced torture in the camp—sometimes we were beaten by the officials. They reminded me of the soldiers in Burma.
Police and immigration interrogators wearing yellow helmets searched for cell phones and cigarettes in our cells two or three times a week. Everyone had to stand outside in the heat. If the police found any phones, or if they found we’d made contact with people from outside, they beat us seriously. If they found anything forbidden, the owner was taken upstairs and beaten at least ten times with a pipe on the soles of his feet. One time, a friend of mine who was about twenty-one years old was ordered by the interrogators to look for phones in a rubbish bin where people also frequently spat. He refused, so he was seriously beaten right in front of us. His mouth and arms were wounded and bleeding.
If the police found any cigarettes or cheroots, they would call the owners over and beat them.22 Then they would force the individuals who’d been caught to stay with the insane people who were all kept together in one cell. There were six people who had gone mad during their time in detention. They got no medical treatment.
One day the interrogators found out that my friend and I smoked. They took us upstairs and then beat and kicked my friend until his feet were bleeding. They even forced me to hit my friend’s face. Then they beat the soles of my feet ten times with pipes. I was also forced to sleep with the insane people for one night.
I was in the Semenyih camp for two and half months. The UNHCR tried to take all the Burmese people—there were nearly 650—out from the detention camp, but it is more difficult for them to help those who don’t have their UNHCR card. In our group there were only about thirty Burmese people registered by the UNCHR. Yesterday I was finally released.
There are more Burmese people than any other nationality at the Semenyih Camp. In general, there are more Burmese in the camps now because of the continuous arrest of Burmese people in Malaysia and the fact that the Malaysian authorities are no longer deporting Burmese to Thailand, as they did before.33 The Burmese have been staying at the camps for months, and the number of detainees continues to rise.44
Those Burmese people in my block who had no UNHCR registration were sent to another detention camp. The Burmese government said that it would not help the Burmese people in the camp unless they held Burmese passports. People of other nationalities got help from their embassies. Some people did get help from the Burmese embassy because they found ways to pay them, and some other people paid the Malaysian immigration officers and got released.
A BETTER FUTURE
Now I am released, so I feel a little happy. I am going take a rest for a week and look for a job again.
I am married, and I don’t want to be illegal here in this country anymore. It is not safe to stay here, so I want to resettle to another country where I can study. Now I don’t have any children, but I want to have two—a boy and a girl—and I want to see my them become educated people, like doctors. I want them to have a better future.
1 KL Camp is the Kuala Lumpur International Airport Immigration Detention Center. The KLIA Immigration Detention Center has a capacity of 600 detainees but usually holds an average of 1,200 prisoners at one time, with many refugees detained for months at a time.
2 A cheroot is a cheap form of cigar made popular by the British during colonization.
3 In part as a reaction to a U.S. State Department report on trafficking in Malaysia, the Malaysian government has reduced the number of deportations; in turn, the detention centers have become more crowded as people are detained for longer periods of time.
4 See appendix pages 484-485 for more information about the refugee and detention situation in Malaysia.