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In the laneway behind the UNHCR building in Jakarta, a small group of asylum seekers gathers around a young man called Murtaza. He wants to talk to me about his situation and why he has found himself living on the streets of a foreign city after fleeing persecution in Afghanistan, but first he has a request: ‘I will talk to you, but I want to talk to you alone.’
I agree that this is fair enough, so he and I follow our translator along one of the narrow alleys, past the mosque and through the houses to a busy street where we find a convenience store. ‘There’s a quiet room upstairs,’ says the translator. As we sit down—and while I'm preparing the microphone and recorder—all of the others from the UNHCR quietly file in and sit down beside us. Murtaza looks at them and then at me and sighs, as if to say, ‘oh well, I’m going to share my story anyway.’
Indonesian laws prevent them from working, so many become desperate—so desperate that some even resort to knocking on the doors of Indonesia’s 13 detention centres and begging to be allowed in, despite the fact that conditions inside can be appalling.
I want to know how much money they had paid their smugglers to get them to Jakarta. As they recite the amounts, I add them in my head. I can barely believe the numbers. These eight people handed over US$64,500 between them—nearly A$70,000.
Yet many have been lured to Indonesia on a false promise. While most of the group know that the boats to Christmas Island are no longer leaving, there is great confusion about what this means. Some were told by their smugglers that they should leave Afghanistan now because the United Nations office in Indonesia began processing refugee claims quickly after the boats to Australia stopped.
Read more: How Nauru threw it all away
This was particularly cruel, because any encounter with asylum seekers in Java suggests that the very opposite is happening. With people still arriving in Indonesia and the smugglers’ boats no longer leaving, the queues are growing. Most new arrivals now have to wait at least a year just for an interview to initiate their application for refugee status. Most will wait in Indonesia for at least three years, and even if they are eventually accepted as refugees, there is no guarantee that they will be accepted for re-settlement in Australia.
There are plenty of signs of despair. Under the old policy, asylum seekers came to Indonesia with enough money to last about four months. Before their funds ran low, many would board a boat for Australia. That’s no longer an option, and Indonesian laws prevent them from working, so many become desperate—so desperate that some even resort to knocking on the doors of Indonesia’s 13 detention centres and begging to be allowed in, despite the fact that conditions inside can be appalling. I met two ethnic Hazara boys who had done just that.
After a fruitless week of trying to get into the Surabaya detention centre, they returned to a village where they knew others were staying. Unfortunately they were spotted en route by traffic police, who detained and strip-searched them and stole almost all of their remaining money.
Related: The new untouchables
Then there are the smugglers, who prey on people desperate to leave their home countries, where they face continual danger. In Java I met an ethnic Pashtun man from Pakistan, who had been told by his smuggler that his money would be returned if his boat did not make it to Christmas Island. Unfortunately for him, he was intercepted at sea in January this year and held on a customs vessel for 10 days in sight of Christmas Island before being loaded on an orange lifeboat and sent back to Indonesia.
He asked his smuggler to honour his promise. He says the smuggler told him to ‘f*** off’. He’s now desperate because he can’t go back to Pakistan and can’t try again by boat. The smuggler took the last of his money and he’s not allowed to work.
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However, there are also signs that at least some of the asylum seekers are adapting to their conditions. In Cisarua, in the mountains near Bogor in southern Java, groups of Hazara men gather each afternoon to play football at an indoor arena. They have formed a vibrant competition and they cheer loudly when their teams score goals. There are 150 spectators on the day I visit. Zakarya, one of the players, tells me they go there to combat the boredom and depression that comes with months and years of waiting. ‘It’s a type of wasting time,’ he says.
As desperate as the situation is, the warning from some asylum seekers is that many more will follow, because it’s not enough to control the pull factors and make it unpleasant for asylum seekers in transit countries like Indonesia. There are also push factors that force people to leave their countries in the first place. Australian and allied forces have actively recruited ethnic Hazaras in the war in Afghanistan, making them targets of the Taliban. Now that western forces are leaving and the Taliban is reasserting itself, many Hazaras have no option but to flee for their lives, driving them to Indonesia in search of asylum in Australia.
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