Infected by wars and climate change is the other intractable issue: how to help _43 million_ refugees? More than 3,451 _pledges_ to change the mountain-size misery have been made worldwide by governments, NGOs, and individuals, including Australians. The issue is less about gathering signatures, more about turning words into action.

The Global _Compact_ on Refugees is a UN-organised agreement to improve the worldwide response to the plight of refugees. Governments, NGOs and individuals make pledges under the Compact at the Global Refugee Forum meetings held every four years. The US and Hungary didn’t sign. Australia provided $265 million and made some non-binding commitments.

Ponder this fact: One in every 67 people on the planet has been forcibly displaced, a victim of war and political policies imposed by crazed psychopaths, usually old men. That’s the equivalent of Canada’s population - desperately unhappy, homeless humans going mad as they seek escape from intolerable situations rarely of their making. Asylum seekers who arrived in Indonesia after 1 July 2014 hoping to reach Australia are now detained in the Republic, stateless and seemingly unwanted. Under the warped policy, asylum seekers “who arrive by plane are generally not subject to mandatory detention.” Australia does give refugee and humanitarian visas – 20,000 last year – but not to boat asylum seekers without a visa held in Indonesia who came after the cut-off date.

If you’ve been an Australian voter this century (that includes this writer), we share the blame for allowing the military-led Sovereign Borders policy of permanently denying resettlement to dominate the decisions of an independent democracy. We parked our morality to accept that we needed “the discipline and focus of a targeted military operation” to fix the problem. Last decade, a panic in the electorate about an ‘invasion’ of illegal migrants by sea pushed Canberra to enact a vile rule: Refugees caught following 1 July 2014 would “ never be able to set foot in the country under any circumstances.". It could have made the law temporary till the crisis had passed. Although the threat has been breached by refugees who’ve become NZ-Aotearoa citizens, the Sovereign Borders policy remains. Swiss public media Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen reported: “The Australian government’s justification for its policy towards boat refugees seems almost cynical. Officially, the measures are based on humanitarian reasons. The aim is to prevent people from dying on the dangerous journey across the water - hundreds have drowned in recent decades. But it’s also about politics, and probably also about racism. The Australian electorate supports the measures. Not least, critics claim, because most of the refugees are Muslims.”

There are now few known boat arrivals. Asylum Insight claims that between 1 May 2022 and 31 January 2025, 26 boats carrying 475 people were caught and either transferred to Nauru or returned to their departure point - usually an isolated Indonesian fishing port.

Indonesia isn’t a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but since 2017, it has provided temporary protection to stranded refugees under a Presidential regulation. This allows access to basic services, though not education, until the arrivals can be resettled or voluntarily return home. Indonesia reluctantly hosts 11,735 refugees and asylum-seekers (6,548 families) living primarily in urban areas throughout the archipelago. They’ve been in limbo for a decade or more, mainly single men who worked their way through Asian nations by land, air or sea and got to Indonesia in their teens. A few have suicided, despairing at the delays, or staged hunger strikes. Ten years? Australian citizen violent offenders get lesser sentences; the ‘crime’ these men have committed is wanting freedom. They haven’t bashed or raped, abused kids, or contrived to deceive or scammed the vulnerable. They sought help but arrived on the wrong date. Why is Australia, a nation that claims to act fairly and uphold the rule of law, torturing them through limitless detention in another nation? How can this wrong be tolerated in a country that prizes decency and the fair go?

Indonesia and Australia are different on almost every cultural, legal and social measure, as leading academics assert. One is considered a transit country, the other a migrant destination. Refugees stranded in Indonesia include escapees from Somalia, Iraq, Myanmar, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Palestine, Iran, Pakistan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Some have fled conflict that has since abated, so they may eventually return.

Aylum is driven by numerous factors, such as ‘the slow implosion of failed states’. A few women and unaccompanied children are among the detainees. Why focus on the Hazara? They’re more than 60 per cent of the trapped detainees, and they didn’t flee for money. They’ve suffered violent discrimination for historical grievances, including being Shia Muslims in a country where the standard faith followed is Sunni Islam, as in Indonesia. They fear jail, torture or execution by the Taliban. That’s the mob that denies women education and the right to live their lives without male control; two leaders could now front the International Criminal Court for persecuting women and girls. The Hazara asylum seekers in this story were interviewed in Jakarta, Cisarua, Yogyakarta, Bandung and Kupang face-to-face. They’re ‘detained’ in run-down construction camps and decrepit, shuttered hotels. Originally, they were jailed for years, young boys with older men, an offence in all civilised nations. Some have won limited local freedom where authorities have grown tired of supervising. Support is provided by volunteer agencies and the International Organisation for Migration. The UN agency reportedly gets an Australian government-funded monthly allowance of Rp 1,250,00 (AUD $116) for each detained refugee.

The Refugee Council of Australia is a nonprofit NGO funded by public donations and grants from government agencies and philanthropists. It helps organisations working with and for refugees. This year, it published a Complementary Pathways Vision and Roadmap brief. If you find much of this confusing, overlapping and illogical, don’t adjust your laptop; the faults are with the political pushers and pullers watching the paths trodden by public opinion but not signposting.

Earlier this year the trial Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot (CRISP) was made a permanent part of ‘Australia’s humanitarian migration programme.’ Two hundred places have been offered from mid-2026. It seems these count as one of the government’s 23 ‘pledges’ to the Global Refugee Forum.

Locals are helping: The Suaka Indonesian Civil Society Association for Refugee Rights Protection offers legal advice and ‘protects and promotes’ refugees’ human rights’. The Jesuit Refugee Service employs Muslims and has a non-discrimination policy. The Asia Pacific Refugee Rights _Network_ (est 2008) does much the same.

Hazara asylum seeker and incandescently bright author Ali Reza Yawari, stranded for a decade in Bandung and helping the APRR, offers a final word: “Perhaps our insistence on continuing to support refugees will lead to the resurrection of human beings. And what is more valuable than a human soul? I invite you to insist.”

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.