Living in Limbo: The Asylum Problem

By Krista Mahr / Tanjung Pinang Monday, July 05, 2010
    • Photograph by Kemal Jufri for TIME

    No way out An Afghan asylum seeker at Indonesia's Tanjung Pinang detention center recovers from a broken ankle — an injury sustained while trying to escape

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    A Change of Heart
    Kaienat, the daughter of Sayed and Sayeeda, may have come into this world as a refugee. Haweeya, a 20-year-old woman from Mogadishu, Somalia, left the world as one. On a late-January morning in central Jakarta, a group of Somali men stood around her freshly dug grave in Karet Bivak cemetery, molding clumps of red earth to make a pillow for her head. A few women hung back and watched them lift her body, swathed in white, off a metal gurney. Three years ago, Haweeya, whose name has been changed for privacy reasons, fled Somalia's chronic internecine warfare and ended up in Indonesia, where she was granted refugee status by the small Jakarta office of the UNHCR. A childhood bout of polio had left her frail and on crutches. Her condition worsened in early January, and she was admitted to hospital. Before her doctors could figure out what was wrong, Haweeya died. The waiting place became, for her, the final resting place.

    There was a time when more young Somalis like Haweeya might have sought refuge in Europe, much closer to home. But Europe is not the welcoming haven it was. Until 2008, business along the Libyan coast smuggling migrants across the Mediterranean was booming: boats were leaving each week for the small Italian island of Lampedusa. Thousands are believed to have drowned along the way, but many more made it — about 31,000 that year. Some 75% claimed asylum on Italy's shores, and over 10,000 men and women from violence-wracked countries like Somalia, Eritrea and Nigeria were eventually granted asylum by Italian immigration authorities.

    That all stopped in May 2009, after Italy's navy escorted a boat of Africans from the high seas back to the Libyan capital, Tripoli. It wasn't the first time Italy openly sent migrants back to North Africa — they had deported people by plane before — but it was a loud message that an accord had been struck. Sweetened by an official apology from the Italians for nearly three decades of colonial rule, and a $5 billion investment pledge, Libyan authorities became far more cooperative about stemming the migrant tide. Some 2,000 Africans now languish in Libya's detention centers. Applications for asylum in Italy dropped 42% last year, a political victory in a nation that — like Spain, Greece and Turkey — sees itself as under human siege from increasing numbers of those seeking work and safety. But, warns Christopher Hein, director of the Italian Refugee Council in Rome, "The problem is not solved only because you have erected a wall."

    Life for would-be migrants on the other side of that wall is bleak. In a half-built shell of a house in Tripoli, two young Nigerian men share a mattress on the floor, their few possessions in plastic bags in a corner. Ibrahim Ahmed Mohammed, a lanky 27-year-old, sold his land in Nigeria in 2008 and paid transporters $1,500 to get him all the way to Europe. By the time he made it to Tripoli, the boats had stopped. "I cannot go forward and I cannot go backward," says Mohammed. Shortly after he left for Europe his father was killed in an outbreak of Christian-Muslim violence in Nigeria's turbulent Jos state. Now he is still trying to scrape cash together for the trip back home. "It is better if I go back to my country, even if I die of poverty," he says.

    Mohammed's situation is being mirrored at borders across the globe. With more agreements like the one between Italy and Libya likely to be struck, asylum claims to Europe are dropping — down to 287,000 in 2009 from 445,000 a decade earlier. Since Italy started taking a tougher stance last year, the number of Eritreans taking an alternate route to Europe via Turkey to Greece, where asylum infrastructure is less developed, has doubled. "When you close the door, someone tends to open a window. If you close the window, someone will dig a tunnel," says Guterres of the UNHCR. "Smugglers are well informed."

    In the meantime, European states that have historically offered homes to a high number of refugees are wearying of their role. Of the 5,835 refugees resettled in the E.U. in 2008, nearly 40% — astonishingly — went to Sweden alone. (Finland was next with 749.) In 2007, Stockholm made room for half the Iraqi refugees who went to Europe. But even Sweden's generosity has its limit. Last November, the southern city of Malmo, which has resettled many refugees in recent years, tried to rent a hostel in the nearby seaside town of Vellinge for some 30 unaccompanied minors who had been given residence in Sweden as refugees. The plan eventually passed, but not before having to overcome strident opposition from the well-to-do folks of Vellinge. Vellinge councilman Nils-Ola Ruth says the town meeting to discuss the proposal was a "sad" affair. "They were worried about these young men coming from traumatized backgrounds and war-torn countries and being placed in the village," says Ruth. "They have daughters, you know."

    That reflects a shifting national mood. A Swedish court has ruled that the domestic situation in Iraq is no longer sufficiently dangerous to necessitate asylum. Deportations to E.U. states where asylum seekers first registered have been ramped up, regardless of the conditions they might face there. Stockholm faced criticism at home and abroad for deporting a group of children to Malta, where they had once refused to return asylum seekers for fear that detention centers were below European standards. These days, says Migration Minister Tobias Billstrom, Sweden "will not allow European countries with poorer standards to continue to escape their responsibilities."

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