Children refugees have an unfortunate, decades-long history in Southeast Asia, from children of the Vietnamese boat people during the mid-1970s onward to Rohingya children fleeing violence in Myanmar in recent years. This is part of a worldwide phenomenon. Every time a humanitarian crisis breaks out and results in internal displacement or cross-border exodus, children account for a substantial share of those forcibly displaced. Of the 25.4 million refugees around the world, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that half are under the age of 18.
With refugees in Southeast Asia projected to reach 140,000 in 2018, it is safe to say, as a consequence, that tens of thousands of children fleeing their homes currently live at the margins of Southeast Asian societies. Yet, only Cambodia, the Philippines and Timor Leste have signed the 1951 UN Refugees Convention. Moreover, institutional responses to the flow of refugees and asylum seekers, like the Bali Process and the 2011 Regional Cooperation Framework, continue to ignore the larger population of what the UNHCR calls ‘people of concern’, which includes internally displaced and stateless people.
The absence of a systematic response in Southeast Asia to the persistent problem of children refugees clearly motivated Indonesian feminist writer Julia Suryakusuma to pen the first article of this Spotlight edition. In this op-ed article that previously appeared in The Jakarta Post, Suryakusuma sketches a bird’s-eye view of the plight of refugees in Southeast Asia and how poorly their children fare in an Indonesia that refuses to do more than the bare minimum. In particular, Suryakusuma highlights the many ways the Indonesian state and society neglect children refugees.
Our second Spotlight article by PassBlue editor Barbara Crossette provides an update to the international and domestic politics of the decimation of Rohingya life in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. Years after the Rohingya began fleeing the violence in Myanmar in 2012 in massive numbers, it is clear that they cannot, and are not welcome to, return to their homes in northern Rakhine state. Despite the recently agreed framework to mitigate the crisis, Myanmar lacks the political will to let Rohingya refugees return while Bangladesh receives little international support to accommodate the refugees who remain there.
As a result of the impasse among Myanmar, its neighboring countries and the international community, the Rohingya risk following the footsteps of the Palestinians: a people mostly in permanent exile. The clearest tragedy here is that there now exists a generation of Rohingya children who has never known a life other than a refugee’s. Life is hard enough for adult refugees; it must be doubly so for children refugees. Are Southeast Asians so callous as to continue turning a blind eye to the suffering of children refugees in our midst?
