Street Children in Malaysia

Al Jazeera English recently did a piece on street children in Sabah, Malaysia. You can view the clip here. I visited Sabah in April while on mission in Malaysia to look at the humanitarian situation for Burmese refugees. Sabah is a beautiful part of Malaysia that attracts many visitors who are interested in eco-tourism. But it is also home to thousands of migrants from the Philippines and Indonesia whose children often do not have access to public services like health care and education.

Children of migrants in Sabah whose parents have been deported by immigration authorities, and who do not have any other guardians to care for them, often end up living on the street and are forced to find work at a young age. While in Sabah, I visited a fish market in Kota Kinabalu in the early morning and saw many children pushing heavy wooden carts for customers or sleeping on top of crates between the fish stands. According to local community workers I spoke with, these children are also targets for arrest and detention by immigration and police. The street children in Sabah are very vulnerable, particularly those who are without identity documents and may be at risk of being stateless.

If you would like to see more images of the conditions that the street children in Sabah live and work in, I highly recommend the photos of Greg Constantine, who has done some amazing work on Sabah, as well as on stateless populations throughout Asia. And for more information on street children in Malaysia in general, check out this blog on street children around the world.

Burmese Refugees in Malaysia

When I was on mission in Malaysia in April, we interviewed several different groups of Burmese refugees, including ethnic Mon, Kachin, Chin, Rakhine and Rohingya. All of these groups told us the same story - of refugees being arrested by immigration or police and the terrible conditions they have to endure in the detention centers. Young and old, men and women, and even those registered with the UN Refugee Agency - no refugee is safe from the threat of arrest in Malaysia.

Since our mission, the arrests have continued. Just this week, an appeal was made to stop the targeting of refugees in Malaysia. Refugees who are arrested and put into detention centers get little access to outside assistance. They are eventually deported to Thailand where they are picked up by traffickers and forced to pay for their release. If they cannot pay the traffickers then they are sold into forced labor.

Those refugees who have been able to avoid arrest live in constant fear of immigration raids carried out by a volunteer corps called RELA. The abuses carried out by RELA are well documented and calls have been made to disband the group, which would go a long way in improving the security situation for all refugees and migrants in Malaysia.

The most important thing however is that the protection needs of refugees in Malaysia become more widely known. There must be more international pressure on the government of Malaysia, which is a member of the UN Human Rights Council, to improve its treatment of these vulnerable people. Personal accounts like those featured in a new website called fifty refugees are an important step in this direction. The stories, gathered by a Malaysian national, powerfully illustrate the courage and resilience which sustains the refugees, despite the abuses they must face.

Trekking the Jungles of Malaysia

Before I left on mission, a friend told me to watch out for the leeches in the Malaysian jungles. But since my colleague and I were not traveling for eco-tourism reasons, I figured that I had little to worry about. The reason we came to Malaysia was mainly to look at the situation for the urban refugee population of ethnic Burmese in Kuala Lumpur. Little did I know that one week after arriving in Malaysia, I would be trekking up a path through the jungle with my colleague and two representatives from the Mon Burmese ethnic group.

We had been invited by the local Mon community organization to visit refugees working on a rubber tree plantation outside of Penang, about 4 hours north of Kuala Lumpur. After climbing up the path we came to a shelter with a tin roof, concrete floor, and one back wall. There we met a group of around twenty Mon refugees who worked on the rubber tree plantation. The refugees ranged in age from 16 to 41, all men. Most had arrived in Malaysia in the past few years, they had all had paid agents smuggle them into the country from eastern Burma. All had come to find work, but the reason they left Burma was because of the ongoing violence and human rights abuses in their home state.

They told us stories of active conflict in their villages, and of land confiscation and forced labor by the Burmese military. Clearly this group, like the majority of the refugees who have come to Malaysia from Burma, have legitimate asylum claims. But since Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, they are not given any special protection or assistance by the government, and they are instead classified as illegal migrants.

UNHCR has been able to register a fair number of the Burmese refugees in Malaysia, particularly those who are seen as the most vulnerable, but the agency is dealing with a large backlog of cases and inadequate resources. Groups like the one that we met with slip through the cracks, mostly because they are living in the jungle in makeshift shelters, afraid to leave the plantation for fear of being arrested since they have no documents. Many of them are also not familiar with UNHCR or the work that the agency is doing in Malaysia.

While we were speaking with the group, the thick humidity in the air gave way to pouring rain. When it rains, the refugees cannot work in the plantation, and they do not get paid. They also may not get food that day, since they depend on their employer for this as well. There is no assistance from their employer for health care, they instead rely on a local Mon contact who helps the most serious cases travel to Kuala Lumpur for medical assistance. If they were to go to the local hospital they would most likely be arrested, since they do not have any proper documentation.

The police and immigration officials have conducted several raids of the jungle settlements, and the refugees told us that while their shelters are usually destroyed, most of them are able to escape being caught. When asked, most said that they would like to eventually move to the city and find work in a restaurant or factory. Without any documentation, however, leaving the plantation means that they risk being arrested, detained, and deported, like so many other Burmese refugees in Malaysia.

After the rain finally let up, we made our way back down the jungle path. The refugees were left to hope for clear skies so that they could go back to work again. Their situation will clearly not improve until the Malaysian government recognizes the Mon, as well as other ethnic groups who have fled Burma, as refugees. However, in the meantime, increased assistance through mobile registration and mobile health clinics could help.