In 2002, fifty nations – including Australia – set up the Bali Process to sort out the tragedy of boat people. Since then, hundreds of asylum seekers have drowned trying to reach Australia and Indonesia. The boats have stopped, but the refugees are still coming. Duncan Graham reports from Aceh, ground zero for people smugglers.
Abdu Solam wasn’t paraded for media sympathy. The chance encounter during an unchaperoned wander by the only Westerner among 233 traumatised asylum seekers came as the 11-year-old dragged himself past a torn tent.
Flapping blue plastic sheets flag the location in Indonesia of Rohingya Muslims, forced from their Myanmar homeland by a ruthless military junta bent on ethnic cleansing. Survivors then fled to the world’s biggest refugee camp (population one million) in Bangladesh after years of misery and squalor.
Abdu had been a cripple from birth, and his wasted legs suggested polio. In the West, he’d get prosthetics and training. Indonesia hasn’t signed the International Convention on Refugees, so has no legal obligation to help. Consequently, he’s unlikely ever to get the aid he needs.
Nor in Australia, where conservatives hostile to accepting ‘boat people’ would see a disabled child as a drain on ‘taxpayer-funded’ NDIS.