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Living 'ghosts': Afghan people share their ordeals as refugees in Indoneia
Many refugees live in a stateless limbo for years in Indonesia, with no certainty about even their basic human rights.
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Separated, but together: Two Afghan refugees show solidarity with their compatriots back home. (JP/Wulan Kusuma Wardhani )
W
ar and conflict have caused a massive displacement of people around the world. Having to escape your own country because of violence is a life-altering event for anyone, let alone a child.
Ali Mohammad was 8 years old when, along with his parents and brother, he fled his hometown of Behsud, Afghanistan, to Quetta, Pakistan. He and his family are of the Hazara ethnic minority.
Two years later, he had started school while helping his father sell ice cream. He had to quit school when he was 15 years old due to economic problems, so he could help support his family.
Frequent attacks against the Hazara people in Quetta prompted Ali in 2015 to return to Behsud, where he joined his parents who had gone back before him.
“My father asked me to come back. I moved back alone because I wanted to observe the situation in Behsud. If it was good, I was going to take my wife and three children back there,” the 35-year-old told The Jakarta Post on Aug. 24.
Tragically, his father, mother and brother were killed at home that same year by a Kuchi militant group. Ali was at a cousin’s house in a different village at the time. The event prompted him to pack up his wife and children and flee from Quetta to Indonesia, where he lives in Cisarua, Bogor, around 80 kilometers from Jakarta.
Mohammad Ali Mukhtari, 36, is also ethnic Hazara and lived in Behsud. Following the Taliban attack that killed his mother and brother in 2013, he sought refuge in Tehran, Iran, with his wife and children. He lived and worked there as a shoemaker, but was eventually deported back to Afghanistan three years later.
