| KOKO |
Posted
on 13-Aug-01 12:34 PM
THE SMUGGLERS on the road to Oz mislead their passengers from the start. The illicit travelers, mostly adult males from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, are desperate enough to pay from $5,000 to $15,000—often their entire life savings—for safe passage to a land of liberty, opportunity and prosperity. In Australia, the traf-fickers say, asylum seekers can go free while a sympathetic government processes their applications for official refugee status. “The passengers think the smuggler is a god,” a former trafficker told NEWSWEEK. “Foolishly, they trust him.”
They learn better when they reach the promised land—if they get there at all. Immigration and relief officials estimate that fewer than half the migrants complete the trek. The road—which generally leads across Asia and through Malaysia and Indonesia—is treacherous. Some travelers are abandoned to fend for themselves, thousands of miles from home and without friends or money. Others are betrayed to the local police. Hundreds have been shipwrecked and drowned. The ones who finally arrive in Australia are quickly caught and arrested. They are shipped off to remote detention centers and effectively imprisoned while the authorities investigate their applications for asylum. Some inmates have spent as long as six years appealing for refugee status. The wait sometimes turns violent: 20 asylum seekers were recently charged with inciting a riot at the Port Hedland camp, angry at the prospect of being deported.
The journey begins with a visit to the local “spotter.” Just about anywhere in Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s a local fixer who functions as a kind of travel agent for the underground network. For $200 or so, the spotter will provide a phone number to call. That may sound like a high price for a small service, but in many areas the spotter enjoys the status of a folk hero, defying the authorities to help people escape their lives of repression and want.
Most illegals travel from Malaysia to Indonesia in economy class—by sea, as Sharif went. He was herded aboard a small fishing boat at a coastal village not far from the Malaysian town of Melaka. The overloaded vessel slowly chugged for 20 hours across the Strait of Malacca until it arrived on the swampy Sumatran coast, near the oil town of Dumai. The Strait of Malacca route is doubly profitable for the smugglers. Their tiny boats make the return trip loaded with undocumented Indonesian workers seeking jobs in Malaysia.
Migrants who do reach Indonesia may wait months for the final connection to Australia. Their clothes, their accents and their air of constant frustration make them easy to spot. One of their favorite hangouts in central Jakarta, especially after 9 p.m., is the McDonald’s on Thamrin Street. They huddle over the tables, swapping gossip about boat schedules, crooked smugglers and the arrests of old friends. The smugglers occupy other tables, answering their mobile phones, always on the lookout for new customers.
The syndicates run two main sea routes out of Indonesia. The safer one leads from the eastern islands of Bali, Lombok and Flores. Passengers wait for weeks or months, never knowing until the last minute when their ship is coming. The captain spends days hopping from island to island, picking up groups of 20 or 30 travelers at a time, until as many as 300 illegal migrants are squeezed onto a vessel designed for a maximum of 50 to 70 passengers. Then there’s a 24-hour journey to the final destination: Ashmore Reef, a waterless, uninhabited speck 200 kilometers northwest of the Australian mainland. The passengers who reach the desert island rely on Australian Navy and Coastwatch patrols to rescue them and carry them safely to immigration authorities.
The western route is faster but riskier. The 18-hour, 200-kilometer trip links western Java to Christmas Island, an Australian possession almost due south of Jakarta. The weather changes fast in these waters, and the seas are notoriously rough. No one can say how many smuggling ships have been lost and how many passengers have drowned, but police and immigration officials know of at least one ship that sank last year with 220 migrants aboard. No survivors were found. “These smugglers aren’t nice guys,” says the IOM’s Danziger. “They have no regard for the passengers’ lives.”
Some 3,500 asylum seekers managed to reach Australia in the last 12 months. Their fate has become a hot political issue. Hundreds have been expelled; hundreds of others are still fighting against deportation. Nima Benshian, 25, never got that far. He’s an Iranian Jew who fled into exile in late 1999. Iranian police hounded him relentlessly because of his religion, his contacts with student activists and his computer skills. The smugglers took him to Lombok, where he paid a final installment of $2,000 for his passage to Ashmore Reef. The wooden vessel was barely out of port when the Indonesian Navy intercepted it, arresting Benshian and 285 fellow passengers. (Ahmed the poet was among them.) Back in Ja-karta, he stands out in a crowd with his long-sleeved dress shirt and orange dyed hair combed straight back. “Imagine,” he says, “the smugglers made more than $500,000 on a boat that went nowhere.”
Benshian and Ahmed are still in Indonesia because they both turned out to be eligible for refugee status (that’s one reason they were willing to talk to NEWSWEEK). Now they just have to find a permanent host country. Sharif, the Afghan architect, also finally won his case. He was arrested at a hotel in Bali as soon as he had coughed up his final $2,500 for the trip to Ashmore Reef. He languished behind bars for more than two months and staged a 12-day hunger strike before his jailers allowed him to contact the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Jakarta. He has been waiting since November for a Western country to accept him as a permanent resident. He scrapes by on a UNHCR subsidy of $50 a month, sleeping on the floor in a house shared by nine other Afghan expats in a Jakarta slum. Sometimes he wonders if the trip was worth it. “I don’t know if my wife and child are alive or dead,” he says. “I can’t sleep at night. I hear my child calling out to me.” His journey to freedom is far from over.
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