A young Hazara woman in Jakarta does household chores for the family | Jessica Sallabank/IRIN
At night they all escaped. Either Indonesian police had no interest in keeping them or some bribe exchanged hands. Another attempt in a boat was aborted after about 16 hours.
“Once I had to take this boat and I got stuck in the traffic and the boat left without me,” adds Shabbir. “In total I made six attempts and four years later, I am still here.”
While Hazaras were flocking from Pakistan to take the boat that promised to take them to safety, the Australian government changed its policy and announced that it would not accept any refugees arriving through boat. Their cases were now to be processed off-shore.
The Australian government also published advertisements in Pakistani newspapers and on internet portals, in half a dozen languages, warning refugees not to attempt the boat journey. In order to prove that they were serious about this new policy, they deported vulnerable individuals and minors who had boarded the boat and reached Australian shores.
The town of Bogor outside Jakarta and its surrounding areas have become a purgatory of sorts for Hazara refugees. All they can talk about is the status of their asylum case, even though there is little to talk about as most of them have no clue at what stage their case is. They can seek a counseling appointment with one of the UN officials where they are always told the same thing: “We are waiting, you should also wait.”
This waiting game can tire some people out. After spending three-and-a-half years in Bogor, Haji Shabbir decided that he had waited enough. “If I have to die I might as well go back to Quetta and confront my fate,” he says. He contacted the UN representatives and told them that he was withdrawing his asylum application. “If you choose to go back, the UN pays for your return ticket. I told my family and they said ‘Muharram is coming and people are trying to run away from Quetta, what kind of unlucky man are you that you are returning to Quetta!’” Haji Shabbir stuck to his decision. Then, in the middle of Moharram, when the security in Quetta is as tight as it can get, four Hazara women were shot dead while travelling in a bus. Shabbir cancelled his ticket and decided to stay put as a refugee.
KILLERS ARE US
What do Pakistan’s security agencies do when Hazaras are targeted? In Bogor I met Mama, a refugee who has been waiting for his fate to be decided for the past three-and-a-half years. He is a former security official from Quetta who insists on remaining anonymous and says that he should be referred to as Mama. He saw the unfolding of carnage after carnage from inside and felt utterly helpless.
Mama joined the Frontier Constabulary (FC) as a computer operator and served for four years. Later, his duties included managing the media for the paramilitary force that, along with the police and army, is tasked with maintaining law and order in Quetta city as well as the entire province of Balochistan. “FC probably has had as many people killed as Hazaras,” says Mama. “We were totally helpless. Every time Hazaras got killed, FC went after Baloch insurgents rather than targeting the actual culprits.”
He was part of many meetings and raids that took place after every major incident against the Hazaras. “In these meetings it was often said that Hazaras are rioting again rather than discussing how to protect them. After every major incident, we raided villages and rounded up dozens of Baloch youth who clearly had no hand in these attacks.
It became a vicious cycle.
First, Hazaras would be targeted and then Baloch communities would be raided. Even when they managed to arrest the actual suspects, they were handed over to the Anti Terrorist Force, they were held in lock-ups inside the military cantonment and they managed to escape these lock ups.”
Like Mama, many Hazara refugees and independent journalists believe there’s a nexus between Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agencies and the sectarian militias that have been accused of Hazara killings. A sub-inspector in the civilian intelligence agency Special Branch, who left his job to seek asylum after his police officer cousins were shot dead, claims he saw this complicity first-hand. “We chased two terrorists after a targeted attack in Quetta,” he told me. “They were on a motorbike, they drove up to the cantonment gate and disappeared. We told the military guys that two terrorists have just entered your area and we are chasing them. We were asked for our identity cards and then told in stern terms to turn back and never mention the incident to anyone.”
I had heard such stories second-hand before, it was the first time someone had claimed directly to have been himself involved in such an experience.
FC veteran Mama believes that ordinary soldiers have nothing to do with the sectarian attacks. “A law-enforcement agency cannot afford to have a religion. Ordinary soldiers have no clue what’s going on around them. It’s a section of intelligence agencies who patronise these sectarian groups. They are out of control. We have no idea where they take their orders from. It was obvious they [the sectarian groups] were taking money from Gulf [groups] who want to target Shias.”
THE PURGATORY
When Maliha Ali left Pakistan, she was preparing for her ‘O’-Level exams. For the past three-and-a-half years, she has been living in Cisarua, outside Bogor, with her family and has no way of continuing with her examinations. Her father, Liaquat Ali Changezi, a former TV actor and documentary producer, decided to leave Quetta along with his family when many of his close colleagues were killed.
“There came a time when the school administration told me not to send my kids to school because they were putting the entire school at risk,” says Changezi. He was also asked by the Quetta TV manager not to show up at the office because it put his other colleagues at risk.
Having spent more than three-and-a-half years in Bogor waiting for his asylum application to be processed, Changezi feels these are years that have been taken out of his life. His daughter Maliha feels the same.
“These were the most important years of my life, I should be studying, preparing for the future, but we are sitting here waiting for some country to take us in so that we can start a new life,” says Maliha.
The biggest challenge that Hazara refugees face in Indonesia is that they are not allowed to work and, even worse, they are not allowed to attend schools. A whole generation of Hazara children is at the risk of remaining illiterate. With the help of other refugees, Changezi has set up a centre where young children can be given elementary education by Hazara volunteers.
There are a couple of other such centres which have become community hubs where people can bring their families and seek counseling.
Maliha is a volunteer teacher at one such centre. “Sometimes I think it’s ironic that I am at an age where I should be attending a school myself but instead I have become a teacher.” Then she becomes wistful about her time in Quetta and tries to console herself. “At least we can play football here. We couldn’t play in Quetta.”
The writer is an author and journalist. His new novel Red Birds comes out in September 2018
Published in Dawn, EOS, October 22nd, 2017