DECEMBER 17 — Memories I own. Standing outside Leytonstone train station. Sitting inside the old Greek legislative assembly. Looking out the window as my American airline flight cruises over a seemingly endless Pacific Ocean.

Equally, every time away, I think of home and when I’d return.  

I wonder how our thousands of stateless persons express their thoughts about Malaysia when abroad.

Mind the faulty syllogism. Our stateless cannot be abroad. If they had to imagine it, in their imagining they’d be worried sick about whether they’d be denied entry back into Malaysia.

Advertisement

After all, they have no home. Technically. Though sentimentally, home is where the heart is. 

A battalion of National Registration Department (NRD) staff members chime in unison, not really. Sentiments lack legal authority, they add. It’s about documents, silly!

Homesickness is terminal in their case. They have to stay to avoid the loss of their illegal status, because they are neither of here nor there. They are nowhere.

Advertisement

And it is what goes missing in the broader discussion about stateless persons. Emotions. Emotions felt.

Fear. Depression. Anger. Resentment. Rejection. A deep longing to connect.

Second, those experiencing these emotions are people.

Flesh and blood.

Often children.

How do they react throughout Merdeka season in their classrooms? “Children, draw how Malaysia looks. Crayons or water colour are fine. Even if you don’t belong.”

The clear nature of the problem

Migration and refugees challenge all countries, from Germany to Australia, but Malaysia’s predicament differs in that a substantial number of the stateless are beyond doubt from here — either by being born here or to a Malaysian.

This, the column addresses today.

For instance, Rohingya or Syrian refugees seek homes in a multitude of countries, and it’s complicated. Their issue is about getting away from trouble, their personal connection to the temporary shelter is absent or yet to be formed.

All countries struggle with migration and refugees of that nature. Right wing groups thrive on xenophobia, naturally, local objections mount. Opinions divide, tugged between national interests and human obligations.

The key presentation today does not involve them.

This is about unfortunate kids whose documents their parents failed to process, displaced children adopted by other Malaysians and deeply interior communities’ offspring.

They are nationals. They are from here. They can’t go back.

The system’s failure to recognise them ironically gets twisted to torment the victims for the rest of their natural lives. A bonus if the torment continues for the victims’ progeny.

NRD, ministers and papers

The minister informed Parliament that documents are necessary.

It’s curious that the very people who generate these documents demand those without the documents to present documents, when they are alarmingly well-informed the applicants do not possess the documents because they never received the documents.

The circular nature of the problem, and the technocrats’ willfulness to play blind and pass the problem along indefinitely and then defend indefatigably their position, astounds.

There are consistent patterns. They hide behind the law, point to others as solutions or next paths, and commit to legal defences.

Their ultimate fear? Precedence. Every time one clause or article in citizenship approval is interpreted differently or the legislative amends it, thousands may duly get in. One test case succeeds, a hole in the fence opens, forever. So, they fight. They fight hard.

Why?

The country is formed on negotiating identity and therefore shaping citizenship ratios is the unspoken crusade battled in administrative corridors. Furiously.

While government officials argue they have laws to back them, they hardly present a rationale why applicants are bogus.

They must remember, even the Gestapo and Red Guards had laws to back their butchery.

While the law is the bureaucrat’s tool, they have to be judicious. They actually have to try to do the right thing.

Because so much power is invested in them in hopes they are magnanimous.

If they know the cause is right but the subject lacks items, their job is to fill the gap... not to rip it further.

Voters can change

If parliamentarians trade their house vote for personal interest these days, perhaps conscientious Malaysians should inform their potential election candidates they must end cruel citizenship procedures.

I say this because blood is on our hands.

When Malaysia denies a child of this land her document, the government officials are doing it on our behalf. To assume the sin is not ours to bear reflects poorly on us, especially if we seek to present ourselves as better versions of ourselves or our collective past.

Few MPs believe it upsets us. If it has not upset you before, it should upset you now. When MPs are affected by voter fury on issues, they act quite differently.

A conscience is not the worst thing to grow, for the voters and the legislators.

Not Malaysia

If the NRD knows someone has roots here, and lived only here, what can they achieve by denying the person citizenship?

Or more pointedly, my question is, where are you going to send them? Stateless, infinitum?

Give the Penang boy a boat to live in the international waters of the Indian Ocean? Airdrop supplies every other month?

Tell the vulnerable children of illiterate parents that dropping out of government schools because they lack MyKads are blessings in disguise as they can retain their families’ culture of low literacy? 

Repeat to them if they could not commute to the NRD office as one-month-old infants they can’t possibly demand schooling, life or compassion 15 years later?

Or give the interior kids a compass and raincoat and ask them to trek to either Thailand or Indonesia’s Kalimantan, and try their luck there because they lucked out here?

The end game eludes me. More so the lack of one.

Or is it just better to state the obvious.

The NRD — and therefore the home ministry — does not want to risk political capital by choosing to care for thousands of vulnerable Malaysians without documents?

Reminds me of the bully who sits on a kid half his weight lying on the floor and tells the kid he can get up if he has the strength. And everyone else in the playground too scared of the bully whispers that at least the kid has a way out. As impossible as it may be. Like documents.

Tire not in a war without mercy

Tomorrow is Friday, someone will be walking up the steps in Putrajaya with a bunch of documents and a case file to re-present or pursue the application of yet another stateless person.

The number of times they have walked up and down. Them, and the individuals with their organisations supporting them. Each encouraging the other not to give up.

I can imagine the NRD staff at some point getting irate or flustered that these people who dare walk up repeatedly to bother them incessantly on the same damn thing. Why not give up?

Because this one is not a weekend pass to the theme park, or police permission to travel from Muar to Kuantan to visit a spouse. This one defines lives, or more precisely, whether real people get to live their lives like other people. Like the NRD people.

It’s a horrible thing to beg for. The right to live and love.

All they want to do is call home, home.

 * This is the personal opinion of the columnist.