Making Do: How a Somali Refugee Woman Experiences Social Mobility Amidst Precarity in Transit in Indonesia

Abstract

This article presents an account of Faduma, a Somali woman currently living in Jakarta, Indonesia, in order to illustrate the creativity, resilience and adaptability required to make do as a refugee with little to no formal support in a rather hostile environment. For Faduma, Indonesia presents such an environment. As it offers no formal protection for asylum seekers and refugees and only tolerates their temporary presence without guaranteeing them any fundamental rights, such as the right to work, it can be characterised as a ‘deviant destination’ for refugees in search of durable and effective solutions. This article analyses Faduma's strategies, embedded in the macro-political context of forced migration, the Global North's externalised border policies, the absence of safe pathways, and the lack of proper refugee protection in Southeast Asia, for finding informal employment, attaining new skills and education, and forming strategic friendships with Indonesians and expatriates as a means of dealing with racism, exploitation and multifaceted precarity. We selected Faduma's case from amongst a number of encounters that we had with Somali refugees in Indonesia because of her extraordinary involvement with the Somali community. While the current toleration of refugee activities by Indonesian authorities enables refugees to survive in transit, we argue that such unintentional and informal protection is not a durable approach for larger groups of refugees enduring prolonged periods of waiting.

In Search of Durable Solutions for Refugees in Indonesia: A State Security and Human Rights Protection Approach

“…Third, the existence of UNHCR is an attraction for foreign refugees who have money. Fourth, both Indonesian citizens and foreigners, even officials who make asylum seekers and refugees a business field (Missbach and Cameron, 2022). Based on the data I got from refugees in the Kalideres area, at least they have to pay around US$ 5000 -10,000 per person to get to Australia by first transiting to Indonesia.…”

“…Refugees face major challenges in accessing formal education, especially one that has a human rights curriculum in Indonesia. This causes non-formal human rights education to be crucial to develop in order to overcome the narrow access to increase awareness of the rights of refugees in Indonesia (Missbach and Cameron, 2022). Until now, efforts to increase awareness of rights specifically aimed at refugees have only been carried out by a handful of civil society organizations in Indonesia, including through Legal and Human Rights Training for Refugee Paralegals conducted by Suaka, advocacy and human rights training by Jesuit Refugee Service Indonesia, and Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) training by The Sisterhood in 2021.…”