Ezat Najafi, an Afghan refugee, noticed something wasn’t right when Ahmad Shah, another refugee acquaintance, started acting strangely in front of the Indonesian Organization for Migration (IOM) building in the Indonesian city of Medan.
For the past month, a group of Afghan refugees — some of whom have been stuck in Indonesia for nearly a decade — have been conducting a 24-hour protest in front of the IOM headquarters, sleeping in tents set up in the forecourt.
The IOM is in charge of caring for refugees in Indonesia while they wait to be resettled in a third country.
“I tried to save him and talk to him,” Najafi, 30, told the news agency. He came to Indonesia in 2015.
“I said, ‘Please don’t do this’. Suddenly he poured petrol on his clothes and took out two lighters, one in each hand. I tried to talk to him and told him to be patient but he didn’t listen.”
Shah, 22, probably thought he had waited long enough.
Shah, who arrived in Indonesia as a teenager in 2016, has been waiting for five years to be permanently resettled, and his friends told the news agency that the uncertainty, along with a long-term health issue, has caused him to become depressed.
Najafi didn’t notice anything was wrong until he saw his friend, plainly agitated, pacing in front of the building and shouting incoherently.
As Afghan refugee Najafi surged toward Shah in a desperate attempt to save him, flames enveloped his upper body, and he was beaten back by the heat. Finally, with a fire extinguisher in hand, a security guard rushed to Shah and extinguished the flames.
“He was on fire for maybe 20 seconds,” another refugee, 25-year-old Mohammad Reza, told the news agency.
Afghan refugee Shah’s arms were seriously scorched when the flames calmed down. According to his companions, he was transferred across the street to a private hospital, but the IOM shifted him to one of Medan’s public hospitals the same day since the organization did not want to pay for his medical care.
At least 13 Afghan refugees have committed suicide in Indonesia since 2016. They had been waiting for between six and eleven years to be resettled.
The IOM declined to answer specific questions when contacted by reporters for comment but stated in a statement that it was “very worried” about the situation in Medan.
It went on to say that it was working with the hospital and other parties to provide care for the injured.
“IOM will continue to provide health, psychosocial, and protection programs to support all refugees in Medan and across the country,” the statement said.
The IOM, on the other hand, did not come to speak with the refugees after the incident and has not provided appropriate support in previous years, according to the refugees.
The IOM, on the other hand, did not come to speak with the refugees after the incident and has not provided appropriate support in previous years, according to the refugees.
“That’s why we left our usual accommodation provided by IOM and made this camp. We want to raise our voices,” Reza told the news agency. “We have been staying here for years and nothing has happened. We are stuck in the middle of nowhere at this precarious moment in time. We are all suffering from psychological problems.”
One of the main obstacles for refugees in Indonesia, according to Rima Shah Putra, the director of the Geutanyoe Foundation, an NGO that provides education and psychosocial support to refugees in Indonesia and Malaysia, is a lack of definitive answers about when they will be resettled in a third country.
“While they are still in transit in Indonesia, there are not many things they are allowed to do,” he said. “This can cause great stress for Afghan refugees and asylum seekers.”
“Why do they give us refugee cards? Why do they recognize us as refugees if they treat us this way? We are like prisoners. Prisoners also get food and water and a place to live too,” said Irfan Ali, who left Afghanistan in 2014 when he was still at university and is now 28.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Indonesia had over 13,000 refugees in May 2021, with almost all of the Afghan refugees being Hazara, a Persian-speaking ethnic group who are predominantly Shia Muslims and have been persecuted for decades in Sunni-majority Afghanistan.
Following the withdrawal of US soldiers in August, the Taliban seized power, putting an end to many people’s hopes of returning home.
Ahmad Shah is still in a bad state in the hospital after suffering third-degree burns over much of his upper body. His friends are trying to visit him in shifts to provide support.
“Refugees are fed up with this unfortunate situation,” Afghan refugee Najafi told reporters.
“At least the fate of a prisoner is clear and they will be released after spending a certain amount of time in prison. Our situation has been unclear for a very long time
