By Julia Suryakusuma, 25 July 2018
First published in The Jakarta Post and accessible at: http://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2018/07/25/we-are-all-children-we-are-all-refugees.html
Do you remember Alan Kurdi? Tragically, his claim to global headlines fame was having his lifeless 3-year-old body washed up on a beach in Turkey after he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on September 2, 2015.
Kurdi was the child of Syrian refugees of Kurdish descent, who trying to escape the civil war, had settled in Turkey but hoped to join family members in Canada. On that fatal day, he and his family boarded a small plastic dinghy filled to twice its capacity, and no life vest to boot. Doomed from the start, the boat capsized five minutes after it left the shores of Bodrum, a city on Turkey’s southwest coast.
Given the heartbreaking starkness of the image of Kurdi’s corpse, you’d have thought it would move anyone and everyone to actually do something. Yet a year later, in 2016, 200 children have drowned in the Mediterranean. How many more have died since in the same manner and in other ways through neglect, violence, disease, and suicide?
World Refugee Day is observed June 23 each year to raise awareness of the plight of refugees worldwide. The theme this year is ‘Now more than ever, we need to stand with refugees’. And with good reason.
According to the United Nations, 68.5 million people worldwide—a record high—have been displaced worldwide due to war, poverty and persecution. That’s more than the size of the United Kingdom and a little less than that of Thailand, and it would be the 21st largest country in the world!
National Children’s Day falls on July 23 in Indonesia, commemorated since 1984, so why not combine the two observance days to look at the plight of child refugees, who are the most vulnerable?
The theme of this year’s National Children’s Day, decided upon by the Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Ministry, this year is ‘Genius, which stands for gesit (‘agile’), empati (‘empathetic’), berani (‘courageous’), unggul (‘excel’, ‘superior’), and sehat (‘healthy’).
Does the ministry differentiate between Indonesian kids and kids in Indonesia? The law certainly does. Indonesian kids are supposedly protected by the Child Protection Law, which doesn’t apply to refugee kids. However, Indonesia also signed the Convention for the Rights of Children in 1990 by presidential decree, which doesn’t care about a child’s migration status.
Apparently, it’s the most widely ratified human rights treaty ever, signed by 192 countries. It includes four articles especially relevant to child refugees: the principle of non-discrimination (Article 2); best interests of the child (Article 3); right to life and survival and development (Article 6), and the right to child participation (Article 12). The question is: Can the Convention override the fact that Indonesia has not signed the 1951 UN Convention relating to the status of refugees?
There are about 14,000 refugees from 49 countries in Indonesia, over one-fourth of them are children. Because Indonesia has not yet signed the 1951 Convention, refugees in Indonesia don’t have any rights, including the children among them. They often suffer from trauma, have difficulty going to school due to language and financial barriers, or no access to health care when sick, which are basic human rights. So forget about the ministry’s ‘Genius’ theme. Never mind refugee kids, many Indonesian kids escape it too.
The fact that Indonesia ranks 105th (out of 175) on the recently released Save the Children annual global index, and that it is among the big five among countries with the largest number of stunted kids in the world (35.6 percent of under-5s) is hardly consolation for refugee kids.
There are three categories of refugee children: ‘unaccompanied minors’ who fled their country without any family members, ‘separated minors’ who came with someone they know but not immediate family, and children who came with one or both parents.
They live in a variety of circumstances, none remotely satisfactory: In tiny tents on the streets outside Kalideres Detention Center or on the sidewalk outside the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Central Jakarta, in detention centers or community housing with their families. The luckier ones live in Indonesian communities.
The conditions most of them live in are inhuman, overcrowded, lacking basic amenities and proper sanitation. It’s extremely difficult for adults and harrowing for children.
Unaccompanied child refugees are especially vulnerable to neglect, abuse, violence and sexual harassment.
Children in detention were brought to the world’s attention through Trump’s immigration policy. But it’s not just Trump. Indonesia has also faced criticism for the detention of refugees and asylum seekers, especially children.
Apparently even “short periods of detention harms children’s well being, health and development … (and is) always a child rights violation.”
This July, enter the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration to save the day! It “establishes a common agenda for managing migration and protecting the human rights of all migrants.” The final text was agreed upon by leaders of 192 UN member states, except Somalia and the US, this month. Under Trump, should we be surprised?
It’s a very child-friendly text: “The Global Compact promotes existing international legal obligations in relation to the rights of the child, and upholds the principle of the best interests of the child at all times.”
The implementation of the text will only be in December. “It’s time for governments to come good on their promises and really make a difference to the societies that they govern.”
But it’s not just about governments, it’s also about societies and people.
Indonesia is fraught with contradictions: On the one hand it’s a friendly and relatively open society; on the other hand, it’s also xenophobic. Children are central to family life, on the other hand children face many problems: Besides stunting, they face issues arising from poverty: high infant mortality rate (23 deaths per 1,000 live births), poor health, inadequate nutrition, poor sanitation especially in remote areas, and violence (psychological, physical and sexual).
Besides the complex interplay between national and international laws, the fate of child refugees in Indonesia exists in this context. Not easy to be a child these days, refugee or not.
Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children, said “Humanity owes the child the best it has to give.” Easy to say.
Problem is: What is the current state of humanity in the world today? If we go by what Nelson Mandela once said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children,” what a rotten soul—and humanity—we have!
Julia Suryakusuma is an Indonesia writer and author of Julia’s Jihad.
