TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
No food, no water: Asylum seekers stuck in limbo at Kalideres camp
Refugees at the temporary Kalideres camp are facing an increasingly uncertain future as the Jakarta administration withdraws food aid and other humanitarian facilities.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
A Jakarta Social Affairs Agency official distributes bags of boxed meals to asylum seekers on Aug. 12 at a temporary shelter in Kalideres, West Jakarta. (JP/Nina Loasana)
S
cience has found that hunger can cause anger. This phenomenon may have been partly to blame for what happened on Thursday evening, when a group of refugees fought over food aid at a temporary camp set up at a former building that housed the West Jakarta district military command (Kodim) in Kalideres.
Muhamad Nashim, a refugee from Afghanistan, was left needing 10 stitches after he was hit on the head with a metal pole by fellow refugees at the camp.
The source of the violence was the packets of wafers the refugees had found in the on-site warehouse.
“We were hungry. Yesterday [Thursday], we had to share one boxed lunch with four other people. When the officials distributed the wafers, the Sudanese grabbed more than their share, which made a lot of Afghans angry,” Nashim told The Jakarta Post on Friday in Indonesian.
Kartiwan, an officer of the Jakarta Social Affairs Agency's disaster mitigation and emergency response unit (Tagana) that oversees the camp, said that logistical aid for refugees was stopped on Thursday. This had left the camp's 1,115 refugees hungry, exacerbating their already difficult living conditions due to the water shortage and lack of sanitary facilities at the camp.
“The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], which is responsible for the asylum seekers, stopped its financial aid on August 18, while the Social Affairs Agency was only able to provide food assistance for [the next] three days, on August 19-21,” said Kartiwan.
He continued that on Aug. 22, Jakarta-based Muslim philanthropy Dompet Dhuafa had donated around 400 lunch boxes to the camp, but this was not enough to feed all refugees.
