Galang's refugee hell

Stephen Fitzpatrick

Reporter Sydney

Galang's refugee hell

"NOW we are the only ghosts here." The question had been how many Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees committed suicide waiting for the UN to determine their refugee status on this tiny Indonesian island 30 years ago.

The answer is frightening. Hundreds died here, either by their own hand or from natural causes; vastly more died at sea trying to reach this place.

Abu Nawas Tanawolo, an eastern Indonesian who grew up in the shadow of his country's contribution to the great diaspora that followed the end of the Vietnam War, is in tears as he tells his truth.

The past weighs heavily on Abu, as it does on Jakarta's leaders; none of them wants a return to the chaos that was Galang Island, the UN-created solution to the world's first modern boatpeople crisis, when hundreds of thousands fled war in the hope somewhere else, anywhere else, would be better.

"On those trips they were so tightly crammed that they were forced to urinate and defecate where they sat," says Abu's boss at the surreal and deserted tourist park where the two men live out their shared past, remembering the arrivals at Galang's UN-built port during its years of operation from 1980 to 1996. "The smell when they docked, after weeks at sea, was incredible. Sometimes you couldn't even go close to them."

Mursidi, the boss, is a grandfatherly Javanese man who used to tend to the diesel generators that supplied power to the camp. These days, retired, he sits in a museum housed in one of the few remaining intact buildings on the 80ha site, carefully rolling cigarettes of rough tobacco, one after another.

Now almost entirely forgotten, the Galang camp is only a few nautical miles from where Australian Customs vessel Oceanic Viking lies off the port city of Tanjung Pinang, waiting for a resolution to the faltering "Indonesian solution" Kevin Rudd so desperately desires.

The structures at Galang are mostly in ruins and the hulks of abandoned UN vehicles rot in the tropical rain, but the camp is an eerie reminder of the Indochinese diaspora that brought it about.

A beautifully maintained Buddhist pagoda, still used by the area's Chinese community, speaks of the living; all else, including a desperately sad ramshackle cemetery full of tiny graves and a monument to "those refugees who died while travelling by sea to their freedom", reeks of decay.

Just a handful of the 250,000 people processed through Galang in those years, many of them now Australian citizens, have been back to visit.

Those encounters are tearful times, with bitter memories of escapes by crowded fishing boat, of disaster, death and pirates on the treacherous South China Sea, of squalid conditions in the camp and, for the lucky few, resettlement in the US, Australia, Canada and select European countries.

Suicide by hanging or self-immolation was frequent as the years went by and the camp filled to bursting with those who, having had their refugee claims rejected, refused to be repatriated. Escape attempts, focused on sailing directly to Australia, were punished by the Indonesian Brimob police guarding the camp. Violence and rape - by refugees and guards - was a daily threat.

Melbourne newspaper publisher and editor Hong Anh Nguyen arrived in Galang in 1980, as the boatpeople surge following the end of the Vietnam War peaked.

Then 29, he spent 13 months on the island with his three younger brothers after their 12m fishing boat, with 154 people on board, was forced back to sea at gunpoint by Singaporean troops, firing rounds into the air. Nguyen and his siblings had travelled for a week from Saigon; his parents never escaped Vietnam. Nguyen says there was anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 people living in the Galang camp while he was there and, although he was not beaten, he knew plenty of people who were.

"Young people at that time who didn't have their parents, they don't have a good education, or something like that, so sometimes they behave no good, fighting between themselves, so the Indonesians, they treat them very harsh, they beat them," Nguyen says. "We had many problems over there because when you live in a camp with about 15,000 people, so many problems. You had not very good facilities, especially the toilet, it was terrible."

Time and distance are a salve. Having made his life and become a citizen in Australia - as have all three of his brothers - Nguyen is able to look back on Galang with a degree of equanimity.

"In any country, any authority from the police in the developing country like Indonesia or even in our own country, sometimes they are very tough, harsh, and many times they are corrupt," he says.

For Indonesia the memories are conflicting, too: relatively few, aside from those working in the camp, know of the boatpeople's precarious existence in their territory.

Those refugees accepted for resettlement in third countries - after what was in many cases effectively a lottery conducted on-site by UN staff, outside the building where Mursidi sits smoking his handmade cigarettes - were taken immediately to Singapore. In the Nguyen brothers' case, that was followed by a flight to Adelaide.

But for those Indonesians who do understand - and they include many of the bureaucrats negotiating with Australia over how to deal with a new wave of sea-bound irregular migrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere - Galang is a thorn in their side. Talk of an Australian-designed Indonesian solution to the present surge only stirs anxiety over the idea of a new internment camp on its scale.

"We are living in a different era," insists the Foreign Ministry's Teuku Faizasyah. "That was the Cold War. And opening a processing centre now would be like a pull factor for those coming to our region, expecting that they would be processed and find the best country as a final destination."

Instead, Australia helps Indonesia maintain its system of 13 detention centres nationwide, run by the Immigration Department with skeleton assistance from the International Organisation for Migration, and refugee claims that are processed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

It is a shaky arrangement. Australian-trained guards, for instance, are on trial for corruption in Tanjung Pinang, accused of having accepted up to $US15,000 ($16,500) from six Afghan detainees at the centre there to let them escape.

The Afghans were caught and thrown back in the centre, a forbidding new razor wire-ringed prison that Rudd hopes he can persuade the 78 Sri Lankans on the Oceanic Viking to voluntarily enter.

With many of the 78 having already lived in the Indonesian immigration system for several years, experiencing firsthand its inefficiency, brutality and venality, Rudd's officials on the ground have been fighting an uphill battle during the past three weeks trying to pull off the improbable. And their Indonesian counterparts, while gracious, are quietly determined not to let Australia impose on the country another Galang.

It was the UNHCR that established the internment camp in 1980, after nearly five years of boatpeople fleeing the fall of Saigon had overloaded facilities on the nearby Indonesian islands of Batam, Bintan, Natuna and, especially, Kuku.

In a way it was a win-win arrangement for the businesses ranged around Indonesian president Suharto, who came to power on the back of a vast anti-communist bloodletting in 1965 but also understood the value of capitalism's quiet logic in the years that followed. The UNHCR provided the funds for Galang; Indonesian corporations, many allied to the Suharto machine, built and ran it.

An Australian-funded hospital on the site was opened in 1980 by ambassador Tom Critchley, the great pioneer of the modern Indonesia-Australia relationship; other countries and international organisations also contributed to Galang's operation.

Shutting up shop was a different matter altogether: it took from 1989, when the world decided to stop accepting Indochinese boatpeople as refugees and forced them to register as asylum-seekers, until 1996 for Jakarta to get rid of the foreign visitors it never really wanted. Most were repatriated, unwillingly. In the end, the Indonesian navy was deployed to force them out.

"It's easy to open a processing centre, but when it comes to closing it you face a lot of difficulty," Faizasyah says, with no irony.

Abu, 32, now a guard at the tourist site the camp has become, grew up here, after his Flores-born father abandoned his Sulawesi-born mother and she obtained employment as a cook for the camp's guards.

He describes, with untouchable tears that turn to quiet sobs, the phantoms of the past he sees at Galang, but admits there is too much of him in the place to leave.

"Now we are the only ghosts here," he says, indicating himself and Mursidi. "It's all just memories."

He lights incense at the grave of an infant in the miserable cemetery, one of the few still tended to in this rundown expanse of death. The Vietnamese government wants Jakarta to shut down the Galang site altogether, worried the place unites the diaspora against it. "The regional officials have told us they won't do that," Mursidi says. "This is important."

On the hill above, a shrine to Dewi Kuan Im, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, watches over Galang. The shrine, like the pagoda nearby, is lovingly kept, a tribute to the faith of those who built it.

In the distance, the Oceanic Viking sighs heavily on the swell of the South China Sea.

Stephen Fitzpatrick is The Australian's Jakarta correspondent.

Source : http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/galangs-refugee-hell/story-e6frg6z6-1225794834269?nk=b9ababeacd5fcfc349c4a1a38bae41f4