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Dear friends

June 20th is World Refugee Day. The refugees from Burma are starting a letter writing campaign this week, to appeal to the Malaysian government to protect and assist them as they seek refuge here. We are seeking your support - every opportunity that you have to appear before a crowd, can you pick up one of these letters, and read them aloud to the audience that you are speaking to?

Please forward this request to your friends, and ask them to read these letters too.

I attach some of the letters I have received. I can give you more letters if you need them.

More information is provided below.

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Read a Letter for a Refugee (World Refugee Day Campaign 2008)

Background

There are an estimated 100,000 asylum seekers, refugees and stateless persons in Malaysia. As Malaysia does not have a legal framework in place that gives recognition to asylum and statelessness, most of them are treated as irregular migrants. The numbers are small compared to the overall number of migrant workers, of which there are 2.2 documented workers and about 1-2.5 million non-documented persons. Most of the refugees come from Burma, with smaller numbers from Sri Lanka, Africa and the Middle East.

The refugee communities have been suffering tremendously from the raids conducted by RELA, which have increased in intensity in the past several weeks. The raids are often violent, with RELA volunteers breaking doors down, cutting locks, running after migrants/refugees, and literally hunting them down. In their desperation to run away, the refugees have often jumped several stories from buildings and run through jungle terrain, getting injured. Some have died either directly, or subsequently as a result of their injuries. In these raids, pregnant women, children, babies, the ill and the sick often are unable to run away, and are terrified of getting arrested. Some pay ‘fines’ so that the RELA officers pass them by, but we also have cases where they are arrested and taken into immigration detention centres. RELA arrests those with UNHCR documents.

Access to medical treatment in detention centres is very limited. The detention centres are overcrowded, the toilets don’t work well for so many people, the food is cheap and insufficient (often rice and salt fish), and recently, with Prisons handing over detention centres to the Immigration Department and RELA this year (starting Jan 2008) as a result of a Cabinet decision, violence within the centres has increased. Ex-detainees tell us that they are often beaten by RELA, sometimes very badly, for minor things like asking questions. The incidence of psychological illness (depression, schizophrenia, suicidal thoughts) are high. It is constantly noisy, there is no privacy. There are no special provisions for children and pregnant women - no milk, no diapers, no sanitary napkins, not even bedding. Violence against children is particularly high in remand in prisons, as they they are locked up with fellow detainees who have committed criminal acts. I interviewed an Acehnese boy once who told me how he was punished in public by prison officials and also witnessed a Vietnamese boy get gang-raped by fellow detainees.

UNHCR has access to the refugees documented by them at the point of arrest, but they are not allowed to act for those who had no UNHCR documents at point of arrest. This fundamentally affects their right to seek asylum. These ‘undocumented asylum seekers’ go through the system without assistance, which means they get charged in court, sentenced to imprisonment (and often whipping), get sent to detention centres, and get processed for deportation at the Malaysia-Thai border. The pain from whipping is excruciating - some have told us how they pass out from the pain of the first stroke.

At the border, Immigration officials hand them over to human smugglers (who pay the officials for each migrant/refugee body), who further detain them unless they are able to pay the money demanded for their release. The price varies depending on where you go, around RM1400-RM1800 if you come back into Malaysia. if you are not able to pay these fees, you are sold to fishing boats (if you are man) or to brothels (if you are a woman). This directly contravenes the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act 2007, but this is a better alternative than getting officially deported to Myanmar.

The Campaign

From 1 May to 20 June, the refugees will be writing letters of appeal to several key individuals - Badawi, Zaid Ibrahim, and the Chief Ministers of states (and the equivalent Minister for Kuala Lumpur). They are committing to writing (at least) 3 letters a week for 7 weeks. If 500 hundred refugees write, this means 1,500 letters a week, cumulating in 10,500 letters over seven weeks. We are hoping more refugees will participate.

We are asking Malaysians to show their support for these efforts, by picking up one of these letters and reading them aloud every time they appear before a crowd. This only takes a couple of minutes of their airtime. We are approaching as many people as we can. We are asking prominent people - musicians, artists, singers, public intellectuals - as well as ordinary folk - those of us who meet in small groups, in churches, schools, etc. to read these letters aloud.

Reading their letters will give the refugees tremendous encouragement. As the weeks roll by and as we get closer to June 20th, we would like to escalate these activities by getting bloggers to post some of these letters on their blogs and websites. I am also going to ask civil society groups to commit to letter-writing as well - also (at least) 3 letters per person, over 7 weeks, so we can lend our voices to those of the refugees.

We hope that these ‘refugee letters’ will just keep appearing everywhere, out of nowhere, every time an event happens. Let us be witnesses to the suffering of those who live in our own cities.

For real stories of refugees in Malaysia see http://fiftyrefugees.wordpress.com/

Let me know if you have any ideas of how we can take this forward.