By Zach Hope and Karuni Rompies
The United Nations has decided to pull funding from the most desperate refugees stuck in Indonesia, including people with chronic illnesses and children without parents, because it is running out of money and prioritising other global crises.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has been pleading for more donations as humanitarian disasters unfold in Sudan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Middle East and elsewhere, leaving the body with impossible choices about whom to save among the 120 million global refugee cases and whom to ignore.
Bibi Rahimi uses her fluent Indonesian, learnt from scratch when she arrived aged 23, to volunteer as an interpreter for other refugees.Credit: Zach Hope
“Due to the funding situation … with deep regret we are forced to take this unpleasant decision,” UNHCR Indonesia office spokeswoman Mitra Suryono said.
Many of the more than 12,000 registered refugees in Indonesia, originally from countries such as Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, live in destitution as they wait years for resettlement in other countries. Indonesia does not let them work, so those without family support from home, or who have not been able to find meagre jobs in the cash economy, rely on internationally funded allowances that equate to about $4 a day.
The International Organisation for Migration pays for about 5000 of them. The UNHCR has a separate caseload of 1230.
The UN body stopped sending payments to the first group of 850 people after July. The remaining 380 refugees, whom the UNHCR considers the most vulnerable, will have their payments stopped in the new year. Suryono confirmed the group included unaccompanied children, single mothers with babies, the elderly, the sick and people with disabilities.
Rohingya women and children rest under a tent after landing on a beach in Kuala Besar, North Sumatra, Indonesia.Credit: AP
The latest funding report for the UNHCR’s Indonesia office, dated August 31, showed donors had so far contributed only half of the $US13.6 million ($20.2 million) needed this year. But the UNHCR has also made a choice not to top up Indonesia from its vast pool of unallocated funding.
The Australian government is currently 17th on the list of foreign donors to the UNHCR as a whole, having given about $US38.3 million so far this year. It has not earmarked any of that money for Indonesia.
The refugees given allowances by the UNHCR are generally those who have missed out on stipends from the International Organisation for Migration. While there are several reasons for this, advocates say a common one is that Australia, which provides the bulk of IOM funding, does not give the organisation money for refugees who arrived in Indonesia after March 2018. Australia also refuses to resettle anyone who arrived there after July 2014.
The reason given at the time was that it was an attempt to discourage more people from turning up at Australia’s doorstep.
Afghan refugees in Indonesia said they had sent two letters to the Australian embassy in Jakarta pleading for help and for the government to reverse its policies. They say 18 among them have taken their own lives, including a case of self-immolation outside the UNHCR’s Jakarta office in July.
“Hundreds have gotten chronic diseases owing to mental and psychological pressure,” the most recent letter, from August 26, read.
“Many of them [were] suffering a lack of medical treatment and passed away ... The children and teenagers of refugees and asylum seekers have been deprived of education.
“As you know, based on the Afghanistan situation, there is no option for voluntary repatriation.”
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had not replied to the letters, the refugees said. It also has not responded to questions from this masthead. Neither did Home Affairs.
Bibi Rahimi Farhangdost, from Afghanistan, is among those cut loose in Indonesia. In February, before these developments, this masthead visited her in the town of Ciawi, where she described her misery at waiting for resettlement – alone and barely surviving hand-to-mouth.
She fled the Taliban aged 23 after they came to kill her for refusing to quit working as a teacher and nurse. Her father, already grieving the murders of three other children by the Taliban, sold everything to get her out. Indonesia seemed like a reasonable first destination because it was cheap, majority Muslim, and the waiting period for resettlement to a third country at the time was a few years.
That was a decade ago. Her father died in 2020 without seeing his daughter again. Now, things have worsened.
“I have shared my concern [with the UNHCR], but still they cut my monthly money off. I was shocked how they could do that,” she said last week.
“For the rent, I could not pay. The room owner said if you cannot pay this month, you need to move.”
With the breadwinners in her family all dead, she has no money coming from Afghanistan and now nothing from international organisations.
Indonesia has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, so while it offers refugees safe harbour from persecution at home, they have few rights or opportunities to join mainstream society.
Rahimi said she recently went to the community health service with a toothache, but it could not treat her and gave her only painkillers.
Civil society groups in Indonesia are attempting to raise money locally until the UNHCR office is replenished, but there are no signs of that happening.
“Given that the refugees’ needs far exceed the available funding resources, the financial assistance to support the refugees’ lives in the countries of asylum cannot always be sustainable,” Suryono said.
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