The Malaysian Insider

OCT 18 – Her eyes are empty as she stares into the distance. She balances a child on her body, wrapped in a sarong. His eyes are lively, piercing, looking directly at us. He leans forward, engaging with us, while all she wants to do, it seems, is disappear. She looks numb – tired of pain, fear, insecurity – it is clear she does not want to be here.

Next to her is a woman with glistening eyes. She looks worried, harried, preoccupied. Her child lies behind her on a makeshift bed, sick with malaria. They live in a basic wooden hut, afraid of the police, unable to afford medical care.

At least she still has her child. Next to her is the portrait of another woman in a jungle camp, whose desperate features tell us of the deep wounds in her soul. We are told that she was catatonic and traumatized when she first arrived. She lost her entire family while fleeing from Burma to Malaysia – she lost her children while crossing a river.

JUNE 20 — My first encounter with a refugee who sought safety in Malaysia occurred quite unexpectedly. I was 19 years old in my first week of university in the United Kingdom. An Asian-looking girl in my halls of residence sought me out, wanted to meet a ‘Malaysian’. I was curious.

In her strong American accent, she started telling me an extraordinary story. She told me of how she fled Vietnam with her family on a crowded, rickety boat. She was four years old.

She remembered being afraid of pirates and people hiding gold in their teeth. She remembered being worried that their boat would sink or that they would run out of food, and how relieved everybody was when they finally landed.

APRIL 24 — Last Sunday, a newspaper in Bangladesh reported on the case of 30-year-old Ikhtiar Uddin, a Bangladeshi migrant worker who died while being held in detention in Lenggeng detention centre after being punished, beaten, and tortured “severely” by Malaysian authorities.

On Wednesday, the New Straits Times reported that a 25-year old Liberian was found dead in detention, also in Leggeng detention centre. We don’t know his name, or the cause of his death.

MARCH 20 — In January this year, shocking news emerged of the mistreatment by Thai security forces of over a thousand ‘boat people’ travelling from Bangladesh and Burma to Thailand and Malaysia. Most of them were ethnic Rohingyas from Arakan State in Burma.

Graphic pictures emerged of desperate, skeletal men aboard old boats without engines. They bobbed aimlessly at sea for weeks, without sufficient food and water, after having been beaten, towed out, and abandoned. The Indian navy rescued about 400 in different batches; Indonesia rescued a further 391. The rest are missing, and given the timeframe, likely dead.

After weeks of denial, the Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva finally admitted the complicity of Thai authorities in pushing these boats out into sea. Malaysia’s response was ungenerous. In language reminiscent of (then Deputy Prime Minister) Mahathir Mohamad’s edict on the earlier waves of Indochinese boat people, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi called for states in Southeast Asia to respond firmly and to push back any boats carrying Rohingyas seeking asylum.

FEB 27 — Only a short time ago, many Malaysians took comfort in remaining “apolitical”. Those without affiliation to political parties and who felt estranged from politicians preferred to leave the work of governance to others. It is different now.

Malaysians — across ethnic groups, class divisions, religious affiliations and age differences — are becoming more engaged in social and political developments, more interested in reading the news, keener to follow events in society.

Slowly, but surely, we are finding our “voice”. We are learning ways of expressing ourselves peacefully, seeing that we can put aside old fears. We are exploring the strength in our hands, discovering that our opinions, no matter how small or tentative, count too.