‘To begin, begin.’
William Wordsworth
A blast of hot air welcomed me at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. It was a steamy afternoon in late May 2013 and the place was swarming with taxis, bicycles, buses, cars, and what seemed like every one of Jakarta’s ten million residents. What I didn’t see was a single Rohingya. Ghost or otherwise.
Khaled and I had no idea what each other looked like. I bought a local sim card at the airport, phoned him and eventually zeroed in on a neatly dressed man standing still in the swirl of the crowd. He struck me as a good man. He appeared to be about forty and was approachable, easy-going and oddly familiar. We didn’t have to try too hard to get on with each other. Right away, I felt reassured.
As we drove away from the airport in a car he’d rented for the day, I had the strong sense of an invisible wall behind me, pushing me forward. Thanks to this unseen force, there was no turning back on a decision once it was made. I had to live with the outcome and keep moving. I’d first felt the presence of the invisible wall when I left Arakan for Rangoon three years earlier. Now it was close to my spine.
As we drove, Khaled told me some of his story. Scores of people in his family – including his brother – had been thrown into prison by order of the regime. One of his loved ones was sentenced to fourteen years because he’d been found in possession of a few coins of foreign currency. As violence tore through Rohingya villages near his home, Khaled managed to escape with his wife and two children, plus his sister-in-law and her young child.
They now lived in the slum outskirts of Jakarta, in a tiny apartment provided by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), a UN-aligned organisation that assists displaced people, migrant workers and refugees. Khaled apologised and said I couldn’t stay with his family until I’d registered with the UNHCR. If the immigration police of Indonesia discovered he was harbouring an undocumented migrant, he’d put his family in jeopardy. Having stayed before with a family who’d taken a great risk in housing me, I understood.
At the rundown dwelling that Khaled had found for me, he brought me some dinner – vegetables, rice and fried chicken, packed together in a single paper bag – and warned me not to go outside.
Next I contacted Shahed in Rangoon and told him I’d made it safely out of the country. A while later I was visited at my flat by some other Rohingya refugees who were living in IOM shelters and waiting to have their cases taken on by the UNHCR.
The first step in that process, I was informed, was to join a queue. The point of this queue was to get permission to join another queue. After a lifetime of being subjected to bureaucratic whims, the request struck me as normal enough, while also being annoying and dismally familiar.
After a few days lying low in the hotel, I was told by Khaled to be ready at four o’clock the next morning. We were to travel into the city so I could line up to get a token with a reference number that would let me meet with a UNHCR representative in a few months’ time. Only then could I make my claim or submit paperwork to begin a lengthy wait to be resettled in a third country.
On the drive into central Jakarta, through a sea of scooters, I had a feeling it would be a long time before I saw Burma again. The finality and fragility of my situation stirred strong emotions: melancholy for my lost home and for my scattered family, relief that I was safe for the time being, and guilt because I had escaped and survived while so many Rohingyas had died.
Arriving at the UNHCR offices I realised I was probably not alone. The sun was rising above the smoggy metropolis, and already hundreds stood in a queue that stretched more than two city blocks. Each person had his or her own story of displacement and loss, running from a horror that might never be addressed.
Welcome to the global refugee crisis. And now I was part of it.
I was dismayed to see so many women with young children in the crowd, many of them in floods of tears. I fell in at the back of the line, and within half an hour hundreds more people had queued behind me. For the first time since leaving Burma I realised how utterly exposed I was. A droplet in an ocean of lost souls.
Just weeks before, I had been a star student on track to an IT career. Now I found myself feeling small and defenceless. No home, no family and, worst of all, once again at the mercy of unseen bureaucrats, strangers behind the walls of a city office building.
This time there was no second path to take, or way to fix the situation. Without helpful relatives to guide me, my scope of decision making was reduced to a fine point, or rather a long line of other people in their own desperate need of help. And at the other end of the line lay a functionary who was empowered to decide my future.
After a wait of several hours, we learned that the office had reached capacity for the day, and that we’d have to return tomorrow. Khaled had heard that people often queued up overnight to ensure a place at the front of the line when the offices reopened.
That night we returned at 11 pm and slept on the cement. The following morning I was given a note to meet with a UN representative in two and a half months. The response gave me hope. I was on the books, which meant I’d be safe from the local authorities.
Now that I was on the waiting list to be registered with the UN, Khaled invited me to join him and his family in their tiny flat near the airport, which they shared with another Rohingya refugee named Shamsul. It was there, in a whirlwind of cooking and conversation, that I started to realise what I had gotten myself into by fleeing to Indonesia.
From the back and forth of chat and shared advice, it became clear that my view of the UNHCR as a paragon of justice and goodness needed an adjustment. Each new anecdote, relayed over coffee or a cup of tea, was like a thudding blow to the head, grapeshot aimed at a tilted balloon.
The UNHCR, founded to help the most vulnerable refugees around the world, came out sounding like just another broken bureaucracy. Despite its glorified history, which started in the world wars, it was compromised. In each country where it operated, it was essentially made to do a devil’s bargain. The choice was to take direction from the national government and its immigration policies, or to take its people-saving business elsewhere.
In countries that treated refugees fairly, that demand was no problem at all. In countries like Indonesia, it created a big mess indeed. Having never signed the 1958 Geneva Convention, Indonesia had decided it could make the lives of its wards as uncomfortable as it liked. Refugees were forbidden from studying, working or even opening a bank account in Indonesia – on pain of imprisonment.
The fact that the UNHCR had an office and staff to hear refugee cases meant little. It could not offer help in the short term, or even in the medium to long term. People could expect to wait up to seven years to be accepted into a third country, sometimes longer. A few years after I left Indonesia, representatives from the UNHCR declared that refugees there, particularly single men, would be lucky to be resettled in two decades, if ever.
With no way to get things started in the present and few prospects for a better future, refugees were caught in a trap. They may have been safe, relative to horrors back home, but many questioned whether it was a life worth living. The suicides that regularly took place both inside and outside the detainment centres – and that continue to take place today – were a predictable result.
My first few nights in Jakarta, I caught a glimpse of what it would be like to be stuck in that limbo. Sitting in an apartment in an impoverished neighbourhood, staring at the walls as the best years of my life passed by.
With my usual optimism, a family habit, I hoped for better.
When I was at school we were led to believe America was Burma’s number-one enemy, closely followed by Great Britain. These were amoral, corrupt, meddling bad actors that were not to be admired or trusted. It was classic grassroots propaganda – not to mention a textbook case of projection – on the part of one of the world’s most despotic regimes.
These lessons in hatred, however, did not extend to Australia or New Zealand. Whenever those countries were discussed, which wasn’t often, they were presented in a neutral light. I’d never given more than a passing thought to the Antipodes until I started hearing stories about the overall goodness of this large southern country, while staring at a bleak future from the apartment in Jakarta.
After a week or so of refugee limbo in Indonesia, I met two Rohingya guys who claimed to have found a boat that would take them to Australia – for a price. By then I’d heard stories about the compassion that Australians showed to refugees. One tale that caught my attention was about a woman who’d arrived in a part of Australia called Christmas Island with a severely ill baby. The child and mother were flown to the mainland where the baby received first-class medical care.
At first I thought these boat rides to Australia were the stuff of rumour – fairytales to give hope to the hopeless. Then the two Rohingya guys disappeared, just like they said they would. I wondered if maybe they had headed for the fabled Christmas Island. A few days later they phoned to let us know they’d made it: they had lodged claims for asylum and the Australians were taking good care of them.
Meanwhile I was holding a token that would let me speak to someone in two months’ time. Choosing between a life of seven years in a slum, or putting my fate in the hands of strangers, I decided to throw the dice again.
In daydreams about Christmas Island I pictured myself hopping into a small canoe paddled by a fisherman across a calm stretch of water under sunny skies. My imagination painted it as a remote, almost uninhabited paradise with a white lighthouse and a smattering of friendly Australian fishermen and immigration workers.
Today I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t even google the place. Had I done so – or had even the faintest clue how dangerous the journey could be – I doubt I’d have ever left Jakarta.
Island fantasies aside, open water had never been my friend. Just a few years before, I’d nearly drowned in a pool in Rangoon while learning to swim. So much fluid had poured into my lungs I couldn’t walk, let alone breathe properly. My terror of dying in this way had a firm foundation. Water was strictly for bathing.
In the end naivety – even wilful ignorance – fed my decision to make a last-ditch run for Australia. Also urging me forward was the fact that Khaled had decided for his part that the costs of staying were too high. Life in a slum with no education was not a future he could tolerate for his children. Whatever the dangers that lay ahead, he would take his wife, his sister-in-law and the little ones across the sea to salvation. And if I shared his dreams of a better life, I could join them. It was more than just an idle prospect. Khaled had connected to a syndicate of people smugglers who had quoted a cost per person.
The cost was high, more than I could afford. With no ability to work, the only way I could finance the trip was with my family’s help. I phoned Shahed and Suu Myatt in Burma: they managed to pull together the funds and wire them to me in Jakarta.
Doing business with people smugglers was an eye-opening experience. While refugees tended to have their shit together – because our lives depended on it – the smugglers did not. I quickly discovered there was no shape or definition to the process: no contracts, no guarantees, no paperwork and no planning. You paid the money and you took your chances.
The smugglers reminded me of people back home who fixed watches. If you gave them a timepiece they’d tell you it was only a small fix and very cheap. When you went to collect it, they’d spin a story about what a big job it turned out to be and how the cost was now three times higher. They were exploitative and shameless, preying on the desperation of the weak, and I hated them for it.
I’d also started hearing stories about smugglers collecting their fees and failing to deliver. Refugees who tried to get their money back were told, ‘Oh, you’ll be going on the boat tomorrow,’ or ‘You’ll go next week,’ or ‘You’re leaving next month.’ False promises and equivocation. There were rumours, too, about syndicates taking money and simply disappearing.
Some choices are no choice at all. While the risks were significant, the alternative – a wasted life – didn’t really bear thinking about. We paid the money.
Khaled dealt with the syndicate and discovered there were different routes we could take to Australia. One was a relatively short trip to Christmas Island; the other was a longer, more circuitous journey that led south-east along the Indonesian archipelago to Darwin, a city on the Australian mainland. For whatever reason, the syndicate we chose decided to aim for Darwin.
On a rainy day in early June, we took a three-hour flight to Kendari, the capital of Indonesia’s South-East Sulawesi. We arrived in the evening and were taken to a building near the seashore where a large group of other refugees had already gathered.
We were rushed into the one-storey concrete bungalow – quickly, to avoid being spotted by the neighbours – to a room where the lights were kept low, and told to remain quiet: police had started cracking down on refugees moving through the area. The only sound was the rumble of a passing car, or the conversation of people walking by. I didn’t really sleep. Nor did anyone else, judging by the barely audible outpouring of whispers in various languages from those gathered around me in the dark.
Around 5 am we were ushered to a beach and told to board a flotilla of narrow canoes. Each boat fit eight to ten people. In the pale pre-dawn light I could put faces to the furtive voices from the previous night. Some were from the Middle East, some looked like they might be Afghans, and others appeared to have come from different countries in Africa. Depressingly, there were children too – four, five and six-year-olds – and some women were carrying babies.
It was time to board the canoe. Pressed together on bench seats, our bags at our feet and our lives in our hands, we set out east on the choppy green waters of the Banda Sea. Because there were police patrolling the waters, a bright blue tarp was thrown over our heads, keeping us hidden, as if we were a cargo load of raw fish or other produce. The smoke of the diesel engine, which propelled the skiff forward, filled the gap under the canvas. The overloaded canoe was close to the surface of the water, so each time a wave hit, the water struck our extended faces as we gasped for oxygen.
Just after midday, under a tropical sun that brought out the foul, rotten seaweed smell of the sea, we landed on the beach of a tiny fishing island. The local village was so small and primitive, it was unlikely to feature on any map of the area. We waded onto shore, where I rejoined Khaled and his family.
Surprisingly, the locals almost fell over themselves to be as accommodating as possible, in a show of warmth and hospitality that seemed entirely genuine. After the ordeal of the last twenty-four hours, the night in the dark house and the perilous canoe trip across open water, it was a relief to feel welcomed and cared for.
Some people wanted to pray so the villagers cleared space and gave them mats, while others tended to the women and babies. While I couldn’t understand a word of what the villagers said, others in our group could communicate on a basic level. These refugees had spent time in Malaysia, where a similar dialect to Bahasa Indonesian – the language of the villagers – was spoken. Through these ad-hoc interpreters we learned the boat to take us to Darwin would probably arrive that night.
‘Probably arrive tonight?’ I said to myself. The uncertainty was starting to eat at me. Nothing felt organised or thought through: there was no proper time frame, no single person seemed to be in charge, there was no clarity and hardly any communication. We were relying on a trail of whispers being passed between one hundred desperate people and sifted through five or ten languages.
Around 10 pm the rumble of a diesel engine announced the next leg of our trip. As the fishing boat anchored offshore, we were ushered into knee-deep water and loaded into the canoes. It was a moonless night, with the only light coming from a torch and the screens of a few cell phones.
Once in the canoe, my anxiety turned to terror. As we pulled up to the large boat, the rolling swell caused our skiff to dance crazily alongside it. There was no ladder or rope to grab a hold of. We had to haul ourselves onto the deck using the strength of our arms alone. It was almost pitch black. Had I fallen, I most likely would have drowned.
The small vessel was already overcrowded when I made it onboard with Khaled and the family. Shortly afterwards people in the remaining canoes were told there was no more room and they’d have to return to shore. I couldn’t see them in the dark but I could picture the looks on their faces when they realised they’d been tricked by the shifty watch-fixers of the sea.
There were now dozens of people on the overburdened boat, all anxious to get going. But the motor wouldn’t start. Hours passed while the Indonesian crew banged away below deck to coax the tired machine to life.
At about one o’clock in the morning, the engine woke up and spewed out a cloud of acrid smoke. The anchor was drawn up and we lumbered forward. The relief of being on our way soon gave way to fear as the waves grew in size and the boat rolled from side to side. As someone who couldn’t swim, who had never spent time near the sea, I found it a long and difficult night. I squatted on the outer edge of the main deck until my legs went numb.
First light revealed that we weren’t on the open ocean but cutting a course that hugged the surrounding islands. As the sun rose, we were also able to get a good look at the boat. It was a weather-beaten wooden hulk that had seen too many days. It stank, was deafeningly loud and constantly blew smoke. Oil seemed to seep out of every crack.
We were permitted on the main deck and on the roof of the wheelhouse and cabin. While the engine room below decks was off limits, we were allowed to stow our bags down there to make room above. Even so, space was so tight we had to sit with our knees pulled up to our chests. Beyond the roar of the engine, there was a constant chorus of children crying.
After forcing down a packet of dry instant noodles, I decided to risk climbing onto the roof where there was a little more room to stretch out. While marginally more comfortable, the roof was a precarious place to be. There were no railings to stop a passenger from sliding straight over the side should the boat roll too far in the surge. It was nothing but a large, flat, painted wooden platform. By the time I realised how dangerous it was, I was trapped: a fellow traveller had climbed down and taken the spot I had just vacated.
Late in the afternoon some men placed a bamboo pole down the length of the middle of the roof. This at least gave us something to grab onto. As the sun began to sink I spotted another Rohingya on the roof. We talked for a while, each of us revelling in the chance to use our own native tongue. A well-built man in his mid-thirties, he told me his story. He was on the run from the carnage back home, having fled Arakan with his extended family, who were on the boat below. After comparing notes on our respective plights, we deduced that we were in fact distant cousins.
‘What,’ I thought to myself, ‘are the odds of that?’
Night fell quickly that close to the equator. I took off my belt, looped it around the bamboo pole and joined arms with my new companion to make sure we didn’t slide overboard. I wasn’t looking to fall asleep but after two days and nights with barely any food or rest, it was easy to drift off.
I awoke in the darkness in a blind panic. I was soaked and shaking from the cold. Water poured onto my face and it seemed that my lifelong terror of drowning was about to come true.