‘It’s a miracle to be in Hong Kong’: a refugee’s tale, one of 70 million
- UN report reveals Asian nations host 11 per cent of the world’s displaced people
- Countries weigh up whether to open their doors to refugees, or shut them out
Abdul Patient was only 12 when his mother’s tribe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was murdered by his father’s over a long-running feud between Congolese and Rwandans. He fled with his younger brother and slept in a cinema for four years before arriving at the Kakuma refugee camp, one of the largest in Kenya with some 190,000 residents.
“Being a refugee, our life is like a movie – it has a lot of challenges,” he said.
Patient, now 27 years old, knows a thing or two about making films. After graduating from training programme FilmAid International, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) helped him travel to Hong Kong last week to screen his documentary Kakuma, my city, in honour of World Refugee Day on Thursday.
The film, which Patient made along with Australian director Harrison Thane, follows Anne Nyandeng, a young female basketball player and a visually impaired man from the Turkana community in a refugee camp.
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“It’s a miracle for me just to be here in Hong Kong,” he said. “It’s a big challenge with a refugee passport. Can you imagine all the procedures that I passed through to get this little chance?”
Patient’s struggle to gain permanent asylum in a host country is one that millions of people around the world face every day.
The UNHCR’s annual Global Trends report released on Thursday, revealed more than 70 million people around the world had been forcibly displaced from their homes by the end of 2018, escaping violence, discrimination, persecution and conflict. Half of them were just kids like Patient and his brother all those years ago. And hundreds of thousands of those refugee children were travelling alone, according to the UNHCR, leaving them vulnerable to being trafficked, exploited, and sexually and physically abused.
Sivanka Dhanapala, the UNHCR representative in China, said many Asian countries were doing their part for the global refugee crisis.
China, for example, which had hosted more than 321,000 refugees by the end of 2018, is in a unique position with its Belt and Road Initiative to really make a difference.
He said Beijing’s global infrastructure plan could help address the cause of forced displacement by boosting economic development in both refugee-sending and refugee-hosting nations.
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“In a post-conflict place, investment can help bring about development which can help address the root causes and ensure people might want to go back home,” he said.
Countries like Malaysia, which had hosted more than 121,000 refugees by the end of 2018 – many of whom were Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar – have taken a more local approach by implementing policies that support local refugee communities, such as work permits.
“The mere fact this is on the table is important,” said Dhanapala.
In the Philippines, thousands are now returning to their home country, according to the UN report, which showed 445,700 refugees or displaced people had come back by the end of 2018.
Many people forget that refugees had a life before becoming refugees. We didn’t leave our countries because of our own will, we were forced to
But not all nations in the region have been so welcoming to refugees in recent years.
UNHCR data showed Australia had hosted about 56,000 refugees by the end of 2018, with more than 60,000 asylum applications still pending – twice the amount pending in 2016 – with an application rejection rate of about 90 per cent.
The UN estimates that so far 3.4 million Venezuelans have fled the country with 341,800 of those starting the asylum seeking process in 2018.
But Australia’s reputation for hardline asylum seeker policy has made opening the country to more refugees difficult, said Dhanapala.
He said UNHCR is working with Australia on its refugee intake, but the relationship is “a difficult one”.
“It shouldn’t be looked at as ‘they’re coming to take our jobs’,” Dhanapala said about refugee hosting nations. “They’re fleeing for their lives, and they’re here because they have no choice. If they have access to the labour market and can be employed, they could actually contribute.”
Being treated as subhuman and stateless is something Patient has long had to deal with. He said part of his motivation for making his film was humanising the faces of refugees.
“We need the world to try to understand us, help us or at least put us in the same position as others,” he said.
“Many people forget that refugees had a life before becoming refugees. We didn’t leave our countries because of our own will, we were forced to.
“I just want people to see us and don’t push us away. We are the same human beings as you and we need help.”
Patient’s screening was cancelled last Thursday due to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong over the city’s proposed extradition bill with China.
Additional reporting credit by Meaghan Tobin
