GELUGOR, MALAYSIA —For Hasinah Ezahar, the three-week sea journey with three of her children from western Myanmar to Malaysia was an endless agony of anxiety, illness, hunger and threats from the smugglers they paid to spirit them abroad.
Now, she and thousands of other migrants who have recently fled their homeland and made it to Malaysia or Indonesia face another agony, waiting in an administrative limbo that could last years before they can live somewhere permanently and work legally, if ever.
"Even if we get the UN-refugee status, we still don't know how long we must wait before we can be resettled," said Ms Hasinah, 28, cradling her 2-year-old daughter. "Until then, our lives are just waiting."
More than 3,000 migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar have landed in Indonesia and Malaysia in the past two weeks, seeking to escape poverty and, in the case of ethnic Rohingya like Ms Hasinah, religious persecution. Thousands more may still be at sea.
Migrants from Bangladesh who came in on the same boats with Rohingya migrants from Myanmar bathe themselves at a refugee camp in Langsa, Indonesia, May 25. (New York Times photo)
Last week, Malaysia and Indonesia said they would shelter the migrants until they were returned home or resettled in third countries, which they wanted completed within a year. If the past is any guide, that goal is far-fetched; few countries are willing to accept them, there is already a tremendous backlog of applicants seeking resettlement and the agencies that deal with them are overwhelmed.
At least 200,000 Rohingya migrants are already in Bangladesh, and only 32,600 of them have been granted protection as refugees fleeing persecution. Far fewer, perhaps only several hundred, have been resettled from those camps in the past decade and allowed to begin new lives in other countries.
In Malaysia, those determined to be refugees and therefore eligible for resettlement, a process than could itself take years, would be joining more than 45,000 Rohingya who are already classified as refugees and are waiting to be taken in by another country. They receive no government aid while they wait, nor can they legally take jobs to support themselves.
About 1,000 Rohingya refugees were resettled in the United States in the last year.
"It's a bit of a dirty little secret, but that population going to the US is largely people in Malaysia who have been awaiting resettlement for 10-15 years," said Amy Smith, an executive director of Fortify Rights, a human-rights group focusing on Southeast Asia.
Children play sports at a temporary shelter housing migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh in Bayeun, Indonesia May 25. (New York Times photo)
While the refugees wait, they cannot send their children to government-accredited schools and are suspended in a social and legal limbo that local charities and off-the-books jobs can only partly relieve.
"It's very frustrating for us," said Anwar Ahmad, a Rohingya who has lived in Malaysia for 18 years and makes a living in the informal labour market. "We're grateful that we can stay here and grateful for the help we receive, but without a stronger official status, I have no future here in Malaysia."
Even the first step in that process, winning recognition as refugees through the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, has become forbiddingly slow, said Rohingya migrants, human-rights advocates and lawyers.
"I think the UNHCR is also a bit overwhelmed with the numbers, especially so many who have been here for many, many years have not been resettled yet," said Kamarulzaman Askandar, a professor at the University of Malaysia Sabah, who has studied the conditions of Rohingya in Malaysia. "The numbers keep increasing and increasing. Many of the newcomers, especially, are not being registered even after a few months of coming over here."
Priority to past migrants
Migrants in a makeshift hospital at a temporary shelter in Bayeun, Indonesia, May 25. (New York Times photo)
Ms Smith, of Fortify Rights, said the refugee agency gave priority to those held in detention. About 1,000 recent arrivals are housed in the Belantik immigration detention depot in Kedah state in northern Malaysia. (The depot declined requests for a reporter from The New York Times to enter.)
Those detainees, she said, may have their cases decided in seven to nine months. The others will wait even longer.
The classification process will not necessarily end well for most of the migrants. Migration experts say about half of the latest wave are economic migrants from Bangladesh, who do not meet the requirements for refugee status.
They will be shipped home as soon as possible, the Malaysian and Indonesian governments say, where their government may not welcome them with open arms.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh on Sunday called the migrants "mentally sick" people who harmed the country's image and said they would be punished along with their traffickers, the official Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha news agency reported.
The Rohingya, a stateless Muslim people who have long faced discrimination and been deprived of basic rights in Myanmar, are likely to meet the criteria for refugee status under international law, namely having "a well-founded fear" of persecution for reasons of race, religion or nationality in their home country.
They would be entitled to be resettled in third countries, and the United States said last week that it would take a leading role in any multicountry resettlement effort led by the UN refugee agency.
Such an effort, however, has yet to materialise.
According to the agreement hammered out last week by the foreign ministers of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, none of those countries agreed to host any refugees permanently.
Australia's prime minister, Tony Abbott, said Thursday that his country would not take any refugees from the current exodus.
Rohingya men pray at a temporary shelter in Bayeun, Indonesia, May 25. (New York Times photo)
Gambia said last week that it would take in all the Rohingya boatpeople, but experts questioned whether the West African state, whose own citizens have joined the deadly migration across the Mediterranean to Europe, had the capacity.
Europe is consumed with its own migration crisis, as more than 1,700 migrants from Africa and the Middle East have died trying to enter Europe by sea in the first four months of this year, and more than 26,000 have landed.
"It's going to be really hard," said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch. "You have to have a number of governments say we will take quite a few Rohingya, but we haven't seen that in the past."
Limbo a common state
Decades in limbo is not an uncommon fate for refugees. Somali refugees have endured in a camp in Kenya for more than 20 years, while generations of Palestinians have lived in camps in the Middle East since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Many of the refugees here are thus likely to join Malaysia's swelling underclass of Rohingya refugees.
The UN refugee agency says 45,910 Rohingya were registered in Malaysia before the latest influx. Richard Towle, the agency's representative in Malaysia, estimates that there were an additional 30,000 or more Rohingya who were not registered, either because their applications have not been processed or because they have not tried to register.
The Rohingya refugees here said that Malaysia had treated them better than neighbouring countries, but that their lives were circumscribed by the ban on work and schools, and by the difficulty in obtaining other permits for everyday needs.
"The most difficult thing is because the government law says we cannot work," said Sahid Mohammed, a Rohingya man who fled his village in 2009 and made the trip to Malaysia by sea. He and other refugees said they made an uncertain living by working informally on building sites, in restaurants and shops, and by recycling scrap and hawking small goods.
Rohingya migrants from Myanmar at a refugee camp in Langsa, Indonesia, May 25. (New York Times photo)
"We would like to work to make a contribution, and to send money to our families, but we cannot keep good jobs because the bosses look at our cards and say, 'You're not allowed to work for me?'" he said. "Some bosses use that to exploit Rohingya, because they know we are working without real status."
"Given global priorities and the size of the problem here you are not going to be able to resettle your way out of a refugee problem of this size," Mr Towle said. "It's not feasible. We think that if people are going to be here anyway we think it is good to regularise their status and give them the right to work."
Rohingya children in Malaysia attend privately run schools, often supported by volunteers, or they do not go to school at all.
"Some of the children work as well," said Dewi Karina Kamarulzaman, a graduate student who teaches at the Peace Learning Center, a makeshift school in a two-storey home here on Penang island that teaches more than 50 Rohingya children.
She estimated that more than half of Rohingya children in Penang did not attend school, often for lack of transportation. "They can't even afford the bus fare," she said.
Ms Hasinah, who is living with her husband and three of their children in a single room in a shared house, has a more-pressing concern: a 13-year-old son she left behind because she could not afford to pay the smugglers to take all four children.
Her family's most urgent priority is finding the means and the money to bring him to Malaysia.
"Wherever we go, it must be with my son," she said.
