Malaysian lawyers warn of dangers in refugee deal

Renuka Balasubramaniam, Lawyers for Liberty (Malaysia). Photo by Peter Boyle.

Over three nights last week, hundreds of thousands of people watched something very rare: a Reality TV show that actually showed some reality! Australia’s public SBS television station showed a special 3-episode program called “Go Back To Where You Came From” about the experience of six Australians (with widely varying views about refugees and asylum seekers) when they are sent  on a 25-day trip to trace, in reverse, the routes that refugees have taken to reach Australia.

The  second episode focussed mainly on the situation of refugees in Malaysia, where Australia plans to deport some 800 desperate refugees who made it by boat to Australia. It confirmed, dramatically, what human rights activists and lawyers in Malaysia have been warning about.

Renuka Balasubramaniam, from Lawyers for Liberty (Malaysia), attended a conference on refugees at the University of NSW on June 14-17. She also addressed a June 19 rally in Sydney to mark World Refugee Day, at which she told Green Left Weekly she had little confidence in assurances by the Australian government that refugees deported to Malaysia will have special rights, including a special card that will ensure that they won’t be treated like the rest of the refugees in Malaysia.

“Off the bat you can see this is discriminatory. There are 90,000 registered refugees who have been in Malaysia, some for as many years, so how could this be justified? Is Australia promoting discrimination through this deal? What is the basis for this?”

She was also sceptical that such special treatment for these 800 refugees could be assured and recent reports confirm such scepticism.

“The Malaysian government has given assurances to the Australian government that these refugees will be detained for six weeks, processed and then released into the community.

“The problem is that once they are released into the community they are liable to be arrested for any reason because it is an offence merely to be in Malaysia without any valid documentation. Frequently, we even have registered refugees arrested.

“This is a daily occurence, due to the fact that the arresting authorities are unable to verify if the UNHCR card is an authentic one or not.  They are held in lockups until such time as the UNHCR gives a verification.

“My concern is less with those arrested in [the capital] Kuala Lumpur because the UNHCR office is right there. But if any of these 800 were to move to any city outside Kuala Lumpur,even in the outskirts or the rural areas where the authorities have not enough awareness about the situation of refugees and the cards that they hold, these refugees could end up being imprisoned or even convicted of illegal entry.”

Angeline Loh, a Malaysian human rights activist, lawyer and researcher with the Malaysian human rights organisation ALIRAN, explained to Green Left Weekly in an interview conducted in Malaysia in early June that at the heart of the problem was the fact that Malaysian laws simply do not recognise refugees and Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention.

“Asylum seekers in Malaysia have never had any guarantee of safety in this country as Malaysian immigration laws do not recognise those granted official UNHCR refugee status.

“Our immigration law only distinguishes between documented and undocumented migrants.”

A 2010 Amnesty International report “Trapped: The Exploitation of Migrant Workers in Malaysia”  pointed out that “irregular migrants are subjected to fines, imprisonment and deportation. Judges may and often do impose caning on migrants who are convicted of illegal entry: Nearly 35,000 migrants were caned between 2002 and 2008…

“Caning is deeply humiliating and extremely painful. It leaves deep welts on the buttocks that take days to heal sufficiently to dress and move ordinarily without re-opening the wounds. The practice violates the international prohibition on torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.”

ALIRAN declared in a June 20 a statement that the ” announcement by the Australian and Malaysian governments of a refugee–asylum seeker swap deal, pending further negotiations, sent a wave of anxiety among refugee communities in Malaysia. Another door had been slammed in their faces, dashing hopes of finding a safe haven.”

It added that “there are no concrete legally binding or lasting guarantees that asylum seekers and refugees will be afforded protection against human rights violations and deportation to countries where they will be at risk.”

Balasubramaniam explained that in her work as a lawyer she receieves regular complaints from refugees of harrassment, abuse or even extortion by Malaysian officials.

“It is a regular occurence. They all have experienced that at some point or another.”

Such allegations were documented in the 2010 Amnesty International:

“Some Malaysian immigration authorities themselves engaged in trafficking in persons by delivering immigration detainees to traffickers operating on the Thai border. Amnesty International identified over a dozen cases of individuals who were trafficked in this way, sometimes more than once, between 2006 and early 2009.”

In the second episode of “Go Back To Where You Came From“, the six Australians accompanied Malaysian immigration officials on a raid on “illegal workers” —  many of whom were refugees — living in miserable shacks on a construction site. They had a taste of the terror that refugees face in Malaysia at the hand of officials.

The 2010 Amnesty Intenational report explained:

“Migrant workers are regular targets for ill-treatment and extortion by police and agents from the People’s Volunteer Corps (Ikatan Relawan Rakyat or RELA). Police are authorised by law to investigate immigration status; RELA had the same authority until mid-2009. Both police and RELA agents frequently abuse that authority, treating stops as opportunities to make money.

“Much of Malaysia’s approach to migration is effectively to criminalise it, even though the country could not function without migrant labour. Large-scale public roundups in markets and on city streets and indiscriminate, warrantless raids on private dwellings in poorer neighbourhoods send the message that being poor and foreign—regardless of immigration status—is  automatically suspicious. An ‘arrest now, investigate later’ approach to immigration enforcement prevails. Too often, in fact, the government’s approach targets the victims of human rights abuses rather than those who commit abuses.”

Balasubramaniam said in her speech to the World Refugee Day rally that she has a refugee client who lives in a shack he built for himself in the jungle. “He is surrounded by snakes, tigers and all sorts of wild animals but at night he is most terrified of being raided by police or RELA”, she said.

I asked Loh how the refugees in Malaysia are supposed to survive if they are released into the community but not allowed to work?

“You either work illegally, you do odd jobs or you find a way to grow your own food,” she replied. “What else can you do? You either work illegally or die.”

“Some go into construction work and some work in small and medium enterprises doing menial work. Some are employed in plantations as cheap labour.  Sometimes they work and don’t get paid for the work.

“We’ve had such complaints and cases. But it is difficult to act for them because they have no legal rights whatsoever. We can’t take them to the labour ministry because they will be arrested for working illegally. Any contracts they make are not enforceable by law.”

Australian mining company plans to dump radioactive waste in Malaysia

Demonstration outside Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur on May 20, 2011, over the proposed Lynas rare earth refinery in Gebeng, Pahang. Photo by Bawani/PSM.

Public opposition to a plan by an Australian mining company, Lynas, to build a rare earth refinery in Malaysia showed itself in demonstration held outside Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on May 20. Lynas plans to ship ore from its Mount Weld mine in Western Australia, through the port of Fremantle, to Malaysia to be refined into rare earths. The refinery will also produce some 230,000 tonnes of solid waste per year, containing radioactive thorium and a range of heavy metals and toxic substances. This will be dumped in Malaysia.

Parti Sosialis Malaysia MP Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj, told Green Left Weekly that there was strong community opposition to the Lynas rare earth refinery plan:

“This whole Lynas deal has been done in a very non-transparent way. They’ve already made a deal to bring this ore from Australia to refine here in Malaysia, then export the rare earths and leave the waste here. It has been done without consulting people yet it is almost like a done deal. They have already built the factory and it is quite close to a highly populated residential area.

“The people of Malaysia have made their opposition to this sort of project very clear. About 20 years ago in Bukit Merah, there was a similar refinery set up to process [local] tin mine tailings and refine rare earths from it. The major issue is the thorium in the residue, which is going to remain radioactive for years. The local people went to court and finally stopped the whole exercise.

“So for Lynas to try and do this now in Gebeng, Pahang, without consulting people and without resolving the who issue of how to keep radioactive waste safely, is not on.

“People are going to mobilise. You can see this is an issue that is getting people very agitated.”

Mitsubishi forced to close previous rare earth refinery

Dr T Jayabalan, an environmental activist and an occupational health and safety consultant working at the National Poison Centre at Universiti Sains Malaysia told GLW that 55,000 signatures were collected for a petition against the Lynas rare earth refinery, precisely because of the earlier experience with a similar project.

“During the course of operations of the previous Mitsuibishi-run rare earths refinery in Bukit Merah (in the state of Perak), the local people suffred many health problems such as miscarriages, lukemias, cancers and lots of other illnesses. People mobilised, were able also to take the case court and ultimately prevailed after a 12 year struggle forcing the factory to close down. Mitsubishi was forced to clean up the whole area which was contaminated.

“Now the same sort of plant is being set up in the state of Pahang, very close to a residential area, using basically the same operation extracting rare earths but this time from ore imported from Australia.

“These rare earth are typically found in deposits with transuranics such as thorium, with a half-life of 14 billion years, uranium with a shorter life and radium. All these are found intimately bound with these rare earths. In extracting them what they do is get the rare earths and then leave a residue of concentrated thorium, uranium, radium and a whole lot of other highly toxic material, including lead and arsenic.

“The rare earths will be taken by Lynas to be sold and shipped off to other countries. This will be very profitable because 95% of rare earth refinery is done in China. No other country wants to experiment in this sort of process.

12-year tax-free status

“Somehow Lynas was able to sell this idea to Malaysia’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry which wants foreign direct investment at any cost. So they facilitated the setting up of this factory. In fact, the company gets a 12-year tax-free status. In other words, it doesn’t even have to pay royalties. And they will only create 2-300 jobs.

“Hasn’t the Malaysian government learn anything from what happened in Bukit Merah? We don’t need these few hundred jobs and we don’t need the waste.

“Apart from the radioactive wastes, there are also a lot of other chemicals that are used in the refining process and it uses large volumes of water. Dangerous gases and hazardous chemicals will be released into the land, air and sea. At the end of the day, nobody wil buy our palm oil, nobody will want to come as tourists here, the fishermen will not be able to sell their produce and a whole range of other things will be destroyed just to for a few crooked businessmen who cannot do the same thing in Australia because of tighter safety laws.

“There have been deception and lies. At first, this company said that the waste material was not radioactive. It is “zero radioactive, they said.   Then they changed their story to it is only radioactive to the workers and that it was just like background radiation.

“So we suggested that they send back the waste to Australia but they said there was no way could Australia take the waste back.”

Broader nuclear agenda

“The Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) thinks that this campaign feeds into the broader campaign against nuclear energy”, PSM MP Jeyakumar told GLW.

“The Malaysian government has a plan to open two nuclear reactors in the 2020s. They are allocating M$20 billion to do that. So we think this campaign is a precursor to a broader campaign for safe alternatives to coal and gas.”

More pics of the demonstration against Lynas outside the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur can be seen here and here.

Malaysian MP slams refugee outsourcing deal

Sungai Siput, Malaysia – “It is definitely not on for Australia to outsource their refugee problem to Malaysia – and for Malaysia to agree to it”, the Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) member of parliament Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj told Green Left Weekly at the PSM’s 13th Congress held in this town, which is the population centre of his electorate.

“Australia is sending refugees to a country that hasn’t ratified the refugee convention.

“In Malaysia there is no recognition of refugees as a separate class of immigrants. They are lumped together with other foreign workers without work permits.

“Refugees have a bad time in Malaysia. Even those who have the UNHCR card are still lumped together with foreign workers without permits. They cannot work legally but of course they have to work. When they work for companies and they get cheated they can’t go to the authorities and say I got cheated because it is illegal for them to work. They can get caught for working without a permit.

“Their children can’t go to schools. For health care they have to pay first-class rates.

“So if Australia wants to do this sort of thing then it has to put all this into order,” Jeyakumar concluded.

The PSM and the Socialist Alliance in Australia have issued a joint statement making the following demands on the Australian and Malaysian governments:

• The governments of Malaysia and Australia must stop their exchange of asylum seekers and refugees.

• The Australian government must accept all asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat and not send them to other countries which are not parties to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.

• The Australian government must abandon its mandatory detention of asylum seekers arriving by boat, its attempt to reestablish an offshore detention centre in Papua New Guinea and its attempt to do a deal with Thailand and other countries along the same lines as the deal with Malaysia.

• Malaysia must sign and ratify the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, and protect the rights of all asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia.

Afghanistan: Bring the troops home now!

Australian soldier in Tarin Kowt, southern Afghanistan.

Ten years of Western military occupation and war in Afghanistan has killed  hundreds of thousands of people (mostly Afghan civilians), created millions of refugees and paid billions of dollars of “aid” into the hands of brutal warlords who serve as a puppet regime for the occupiers.

In October 2010, Australian academic Dr Gideon Polya has estimated the human cost of the war on and occupation of Afghanistan to include 4.9 million “violent deaths or non-violent avoidable deaths from cccupier-imposed deprivation”. Polya noted that this is on a similar scale to the Nazi Holocaust against Jewish people in WWII.

Nothing good has come out of this war which was an unjustifiable act of revenge for the 9/11 bombings in the US. It has been a monstrous, dragged out imposition of collective punishment on people who were not the perpetrators of 9/11. Indeed, a recent survey found that the great majority Afghans have never even heard of 9/11!

We associate collective punishment of innocent civilians with barbaric regimes like that of Hitler and Stalin. But in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries invaded or bombed by the West in the 9/11 decade, the world has witnessed the governments of the so-called “democratic” West carry out an extended collective punishment of innocents.

These fine-suited, smooth-talking and smiling leaders of our governments are war criminals. If there was real international justice, they would be on trial along with the murderers of Sebrenica, Rawanda, etc.

Australia’s Labor government still refuses to obey the will of the great majority of Australians who want our troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. According  to a Galaxy poll conducted June 1-2, 62%  want to see all Australian troops home within six months. So far 27 Australian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan.

However, according to a June 8 story by Tim Dick in the Sydney Morning Herald even talkback radio, a bastion of conservative opinion, has turned against the intervention:

“An analysis by Media Monitors found 69 per cent of calls to talkback radio about Afghanistan were against Australian troops remaining in the war. Callers to the commercial stations 2GB and 2UE in Sydney did not want it, nor did those to the less conservative stations ABC 774 and 3AW in Melbourne, nor those to 4BC in Brisbane.”

Some Australian soldiers have begun to speak out against the intervention, the article also noted.

For the last decade Green Left Weekly has been a consistent opponent of the imperialist war in Afghanistan and has provided a valuable platform for anti-war activists. Now the tide has turned in our favour. But we won’t stop fighting on this till the last soldier in the army of occupation is withdrawn.

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