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Kalideres Immigration Detention Center: A Waste of Lives

From the outside, the Kalideres immigration detention center does not look particularly grim. Granted, it is grubby and run down, but no more so than many of Indonesia’s poorly maintained public buildings. There is a guard post at the front gate, but that is also true even of many of the country’s hospitals and schools, to which this building bears a striking resemblance. Buried in an unobtrusive location in the satellite city of Tangerang, it is only the rusty barbed wire curled over the top of the boundary fence and the bars over the covered windows that hint at its special nature.

The guards at the front gate are unconcerned and casual, but not unfriendly as a car with a handful of visitors from the Jakarta International Muslims Society arrives. The driver begins to explain that the visitors have come to offer food, medical services and other small comforts to the detainees, but the uniformed official cuts him short and waves him through the front gate. It is clearly not the first time the group has visited, and the formalities are minimal or non-existent.

Luqman Lendy, the bearded, turbaned Australian who is the driving force behind the group, explains that the visits began after stories emerged that with Christian groups visiting the center, a Muslim detainee had abandoned his religion. Ashamed that there were no Muslim groups ministering to the needs of the detainees, despite the fact that a large proportion of them are Muslims, he set the wheels in motion for regular visits. He insists, however, that the Jakarta International Muslims Society is prepared to offer its services to all detainees, regardless of their religion.

The car pulls to a halt in the dusty yard in the front of the building. A few men are seated on hard wooden benches, while others saunter around aimlessly in the yard, which has a few sickly looking trees and a basketball ring marked by rust and disuse.

A few of the men glance at the visitors, but there is no apparent interest, no enthusiasm. The eyes of most are glazed over with the look of the deeply, terminally bored, the catatonic look of people waiting for a long, long time, without any real expectation of change. With their lives on hold for an indefinite period, the residents of the center seem to enter into a self-protective state of dull lassitude. It seems to require a conscious effort for the men to rouse themselves out of their torpor, even to meet visitors bringing welcome gifts of food, visitors who are prepared to listen to their stories. For some, these visitors provide the last tenuous link to the world outside, the world where time is not frozen and clocks still move.

The people who are locked up here are not described as prisoners. In many ways, they are not as lucky as the average resident of a jail. Usually, the inhabitants of prisons are people who have been convicted of crimes and sentenced to set periods of confinement. In general, they know that at some time in the future, they will be released and permitted to re-enter a society that may, perhaps, grudgingly tolerate their existence. They have not ceased to exist, or not forever.

The people at Kalideres are called ‘detainees’, not ‘prisoners’, in recognition of the fact that they have not been convicted of any crime. Detainees are those who have breached immigration procedures and are being held for the short period of time that it takes to process them. Or so the theory goes. In an ideal world, those found to have breached procedures will be held here for the days or weeks that it takes for their embassies to be contacted to have some sort of papers prepared so that they can be deported to their country of origin.

And often, it actually works like that. Citizens of the richer nations, of the USA, Australia, the European Community, Japan and Taiwan, can expect to receive some assistance from their embassies, with funds provided for repatriation in extreme cases. Even when they have committed crimes, or behaved stupidly, an effort will be made to ensure that they can return home.

The citizens of less fortunate countries are not always so lucky. There are people from Myanmar, from Pakistan, from several African nations, who have been held in Kalideres for years, simply because they are under a deportation order but do not have the funds to leave the country, and neither their government nor the Indonesian government nor anyone else will provide financial assistance to subsidize their departure. Planes leave, everyday, with empty seats, but these people stay behind on the ground. After all, airfares are not cheap.

But at least these people have a country to which, when they have solved the logistical problems associated with getting aboard a plane, they might one day return. There are also the stateless, people without papers, people with no right to papers, people who come from the wrong tribe or practice the wrong religion or say the wrong thing and can never go home. For every individual who can make a clear cut case that he or she is a legitimate refugee fleeing their country of origin, there may be another who fall between the cracks.

Ali, a skinny Iranian with tortured black eyes, regrets that he is not an Afghan. It’s easy, he says, for Afghans at the moment and they are processed more quickly. He claims to be a Sunni Muslim, and talks of the persecution of Sunnis in Iran. It’s been happening for decades, but it’s not on CNN this month, he says with a sneer, so no one will take it seriously. An officer from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) interviewed him well over a year ago, but he has yet to be granted refugee status. He has nowhere else to turn. Indonesia has not yet signed the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and the Indonesian government does not consider applications by asylum seekers. So, Ali cannot return to Iran, cannot legally stay in Indonesia, and is not welcome anywhere else. Perhaps, one day, a charitable organization will step in to provide him with a helium balloon so he can float over the surface of the earth. Until then, it is likely that he will remain in Kalideres.

Dr. Ridha is considerably luckier. An Iraqi doctor, a pediatrician, he fled Saddam Hussein’s regime with his wife and children more than two years ago, hoping to begin again in Canada. With his education, financial resources and contacts, he was able to make a convincing case that he is a legitimate refugee. His application is likely to succeed, eventually. After five days detention in the Kalideres center, he was released on parole and has since been granted temporary papers by the UNHCR, allowing him to reside in Jakarta until he is accepted on a permanent basis elsewhere.

Dr. Ridha looks pale and uneasy when he visits the detention center. From the tic in his cheek, it is obvious that he knows, better than most, under what conditions his patients live. Providing the only regular medical care that detainees receive, he is treated with great respect by the guards, one of whom sits down and has his blood pressure checked - 145/85, too high, higher than most of the inmates, says Dr. Ridha, allowing himself a small smile at the irony.

 Dr. Ridha has a device for checking blood pressure, a large bag of paracetemol, some fungicides, a few broad spectrum antibiotics and very little else. It doesn’t seem to matter. Awakening out of their lassitude, the detainees gather around, waiting for him to pay attention to their needs. Often, he does little more than take a man’s pulse or examine the back of his throat. Even so, it seems to be enough to make a difference. The patients break into reluctant smiles, the tension falling away visibly as he talks to them.

Dr. Ridha is frank about his role. “The detainees’ problems are mostly psychological. Most of them suffer from deep, clinical depression, with insomnia, high blood pressure, and disturbed behavior. There are a few cases of frank psychosis. All I can do is to make them feel that I am concerned about them, to let them talk about themselves,” he says. He pauses and then adds: “Actually, that’s the biggest part of what a doctor does anywhere. But particularly here.”

Dr. Ridha pays particularly close attention to ‘Abou,’ a Kenyan boy perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old, who has been held in the center under a deportation order for several years. As Dr. Ridha talks to him, he smiles with a sweet, shy smile that lights up his face. His story is difficult to understand, although apparently he arrived in Jakarta by ship. With no papers, no funds, and no friends to help him, no-one showed the slightest interest in his case. About a year ago, he went into a deep, suicidal depression. Locked in a cell for up to twenty-three hours each day, he lay down and refused to eat or talk. Without the intervention of the Jakarta International Muslims Society, Abou almost certainly would have died. Members of the group lobbied the authorities to have him temporarily released and raised funds for him to be hospitalized. As a result of this attention, his condition has improved. He is now back in the center. While his psychological state remains precarious, he now communicates regularly with guards and fellow detainees and has put on weight.

While he is not visible today, a visitor tells the story of the youngest member of this sad community. The child of an Indonesian mother, a former domestic worker, and an Arab father of middle eastern nationality, both his parents died while he was young. Despite his mother’s nationality, as the child of a foreign father, he had no automatic right to Indonesian citizenship. In his teens, he finds himself stateless, penniless, with no family, no one to take an interest in his case, and indescribably bleak prospects. He is a smart kid, and speaks both his parents’ languages, Arabic and Indonesian, and English besides.

 In an environment where bizarre stories are commonplace, the case of John Charles Showerd stands out as particularly unusual. Now a decrepit, toothless old man in an advanced state of senility, John Charles has spent longer in Kalideres than anyone else. John Charles first came to public attention when he was found wandering around Senen market, destitute, and dressed in a filthy sarong. Speaking only English, he claimed to be an American, a Native American of the Apache nation, who had come to Indonesia as a cameraman or a photographer (he wasn’t quite sure which), to cover the Asia-Africa Conference held in 1955.

His case attracted the attention of the prominent journalist and writer, Mochtar Lubis, and a senior member of the police, both of whom were convinced that his story was true. However, when interviewed by an American consular officer, John Charles could remember only the sketchiest details of his life in America. When asked where he was born, he answered: “Colorado.” When asked where he went to school, he answered: “Broadway.” When asked his social security number, he answered: “One … two… three… four.” Smiling and shaking his head, the consular official washed his hands of the case. “He’s delusional,” he said as he walked out the door, and a psychologist who examined him agreed. Another senior journalist, Bondan Winarno, made thorough enquiries into John Charles’ claims, checking with birth registries and with putative former employers, and turned up no substantive evidence to support his claims. He, too, came away convinced that John Charles was disturbed or a liar or both.

Others insist that John Charles suffered head injuries and amnesia, and say that as a Native American of his era, he might not have gone to school or remember his social security number. His appearance definitely doesn’t help his case. Old, toothless, brown and wrinkled, John Charles could be Chinese, or a member of the South-East Asian hill tribes. But he could, perhaps, be Apache, instead.

At Kalideres, he is listed as American, the oldest and longest-term resident. After decades in detention, John Charles still insists that he is an American and an Apache. He still says he wants to go home to a reservation where his brothers live. But he says it without energy or hope. He is just repeating what he has said for years and years, over and over again.

***

There is clearly a hierarchy among detainees. Seniority counts for a lot. Old lags like John Charles are treated with a certain tolerance, and are allowed to wander around the yard and even into the markets and shops in the surrounding areas during daylight hours. The guard with the high blood pressure explains that detainees are held under tight security for an initial period during which they are assessed. If it appears that they are a low security risk, they are allowed to leave their cells. For those who have just been arrested, round the clock confinement is not uncommon. At present, the center is less crowded than in the past, and most cells originally designed for two occupants contain no more than three. There is no running water, and no toilets, although a bucket is provided. With the heat and the lack of laundry or bathing facilities, most detainees sit around in their underwear.

After dealing with the detainees in the courtyard, Dr. Ridha steels himself for a visit to the cells, to those who for one reason or another are kept under lock and key for the greater part of the day. There are as many different stories as there are inmates.

There is the African woman in a cell by herself. She wants to be left alone, and doesn’t look up from the floor. Today, there were no women in the group of visitors, although they have come in the past. Women inmates are unusual but by no means unheard of, and, while they are housed in separate cells, there are few special facilities or female guards specifically designated to deal with them.

There is a Japanese man who speaks only Japanese, who has been unable to communicate with anyone for the past several weeks. He’s okay, though, he’ll be going home in a week or two. He sits by himself, morose, ignoring his cell mates from China and Taiwan.

There is a Liberian with a horrific looking scar on each cheek. With the stories of the tribal warfare in his country, who knows what he is fleeing from or what he has suffered. In the cell opposite, a wild-haired, sweating Nigerian maintains a desperate attempt at joviality, although the corners of his mouth twitch and tremble as he tries to hold his smile. He presses a photograph on Dr. Ridha, and urges him to keep it. It is a photograph of himself with his name printed on the back. It was obviously taken in better times, and presents a stark contrast to his current appearance: clean shaven, several kilos heavier, and in a suit and tie, his eyes clear and his smile natural. It is not clear what he hopes to gain by handing out this photo. Like the women in black holding photos of their children in the public squares, perhaps all he wants is to keep the memory of a human face alive. The photo is a message in a bottle for God knows who from a man in grave danger of sinking without a trace.

***

The plea to be remembered is the cry of all detainees. They are treated not with deliberate cruelty. They suffer not from hatred, but from indifference. Healthy men and women are locked up in the prime of their life and left in a vacuum. Time passes, and nothing happens. As Dr. Ridha gets into the car and wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, he says: “It’s not that people are beaten, or starved, or treated badly by the authorities. It’s worse than that. People’s lives are being wasted. They are fading away in there. It’s a crying shame.”