Submitted by crinadmin on
[KINARUT, Malaysia, July 26 2006] - Living in a foetid slum, eight-year-old Cynthia wants to learn to read and write, but in the eyes of the country of her birth, she has no legal status and cannot go to school. Things are unlikely to change soon for Cynthia, one of tens of thousands of stateless children in Sabah, the Malaysian state on Borneo island bordering southern Philippines and Indonesia's Kalimantan. The children are offspring of Filipino and Indonesian immigrants who failed to register their babies at birth. Malaysia does not practice the ancient legal principle of 'jus soli', whereby birth alone guarantees citizenship. And the authorities are helpless in tackling this decades-old but immensely complex human problem. In Kinarut, a squalid neighbourhood teeming with Filipinos outside Sabah's capital of Kota Kinabalu, Cynthia's mother spoke of how hard it was to provide an education to her six children. "The school authorities refused to admit them because I cannot produce my marriage certificate and my children's birth certificates," said Razjata Demang, who is in her forties and is married to a port labourer. Along with 5,000 others, she lives in the village of Kampung Pelarian, built by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for people fleeing from the war between the Philippines and the Moro National Liberation Front in the early 1970s. Here, small children play outdoors with their peers. Villagers say some teenagers and young adults, with no education or jobs, have turned to drug addiction and crime. Few outsiders venture into the slum. "In my 20 years as a taxi driver, I have been there only once," one said. "UNDOCUMENTED" There are an estimated 36,000 stateless childrenof Indonesian origin in Sabah alone. Their parents mostly toil on palm oil plantations, unofficial data showed. "For the Filipinos, we really don't have the figures unless we launch a registration exercise," said Mohamad Rosli Jambari, head of a government task force dealing with the issue. "Right now, we don't like to use the word 'stateless' yet. We use the term 'undocumented' children," he told Reuters. Sabah authorities launched a crackdown last October, rounding up about 500 street children, Rosli said. Unable to attend school, some children have turned to begging for food. Some of the children still languish in immigration detention centres, where they get three meals of rice and fish every day, but sleep in ragged clothes on bare wooden floors. "If I'm deported, I will return to work," said Sam Murshidi, a 15-year-old boy held in the Menggatal camp, just north of Kota Kinabalu. Enforced idleness is perhaps his worst problem, because there is nothing for the children to do in the camps. The illiterate teenager, born in Sabah, has been in custody since March last year, having initially spent 37 days in prison for selling lottery tickets before he came to Menggatal, which is home to about 2,000 immigrants of all ages. Youngsters like Murshidi should be given basic education while in detention, Philippine officials said. "Malaysia is considering our request that these children be taught how to read and write while we look for their parents," diplomat Antonio Morales told Reuters. DEPORTED Menggatal was intended to hold illegals temporarily until they could be deported. But authorities in their home countries often hesitate to accept them back, demanding proof of citizenship. The high numbers of unrecorded births and marriages among the immigrants makes the task of proving citizenship even tougher, Malaysian officials say. "When we want to send them back, their country of origin would not accept them, but we know they should be returned to their own country. This is a big problem," Malaysia's Defence Minister Najib Razak said recently. Immigrants often become indistinguishable from the local community because they share its language, culture and religion. Social unrest could grow if the problem of stateless children in Sabah remains unchecked, social workers fear. "Children as young as five years old were smoking while working hard to eke a living, were beginning to take alcohol and very young girls were becoming vulnerable to syndicates and human traffickers," the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants said. "If this situation is not addressed, Sabah will face a time bomb where the social unrest that will emerge will be difficult to control," the non-government group based in Hong Kong said in a statement. [source: Reuters]