The transit of people through Indonesia is not a new phenomenon. Because of its geographic configuration and location, Indonesia, an archipelago with more than 17,000 islands linking Asia and Australia, has always attracted migratory movements. The impacts of foreign influence in the archipelago, some temporary, some permanent, are widely visible in its languages, customs, architecture and many other aspects of society.

This chapter investigates what it has meant to be a transit migrant in Indonesia in the recent past. First, attention is given to Indonesia's experiences with Indochinese (mainly Vietnamese) transit migrants between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. By outlining the political constellations that led to the establishment of the refugee processing centre on Galang Island in 1979, the reasons why the Indonesian government agreed to receive transit migrants temporarily are explained. Shedding light on daily life on Galang Island helps clarify reasons for the use of island camps as a special tactic in migration control, or, in Alison Mountz's words, as a “broader enforcement archipelago of detention” (Mountz 2011a, p. 118).

Using official UNHCR reports, witness accounts and other sources, the chapter provides an overview of the general conditions on the island that became a temporary home for tens of thousands of Vietnamese, many of whom stayed there much longer than expected. Although hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were resettled in the West, subsequent flows continued to crowd the regional refugee camps. Given the reluctance of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia to become permanent settlement destinations, the international community, under the auspices of the UNHCR, agreed on the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) in 1989. The CPA put an end to the outflow of people from Vietnam by implementing for the first time a new scheme for determining refugee status and by relying on both voluntary and forced repatriation of those who did not qualify as genuine refugees. Despite the forced returns, the CPA is still heralded as a great success in UNHCR-led international refugee cooperation (Betts 2006).

TARIQ's JOURNEY

In January 2012, in a mountainous village near Bogor, West Java, I met a young man who had just turned eighteen, whom I will call Tariq. He had just been released from immigration detention and was eager to share his story with me. Unlike many other youngsters I had met before, Tariq's English was almost faultless as he had studied it for almost three years in a private language school in Quetta (Pakistan). Tariq's family were originally Afghani Hazara, and his father's activities for the Hizb-e-Wahdat (Islamic Unity Party of Afghanistan) compelled his father and then his entire family to flee from Afghanistan and find shelter in Pakistan. Tariq had spent about six of his eighteen years in Quetta and had had little formal education, except for the English classes, which his parents considered an indispensable investment for the family's future. The idea of migrating overseas was therefore not entirely new, but several events had triggered its premature realization.

In mid-2010, after witnessing some gruesome incidents targeting fellow Hazaras near his home in Quetta, Tariq approached his father to ask his permission to leave home for Australia, arguing that “if I can reach it, we all can be a bit safe”. Tariq's father did not try to stop him. His mother cried when she found out, but she had no part in the decision-making. Tariq's father contacted a smuggler to arrange his son's journey. To pay for his travels, the family took out a loan of US$7,500 from an acquaintance who charged them high interest rates, even though that is not permitted under Islam. Unable to fly to Australia on a direct commercial flight in order to launch his request for asylum there, Tariq had to accept a longer, more dangerous and much more expensive trip. Not long after Tariq left Quetta, his father had a heart attack and died, leaving his mother to repay the remaining debt of US$4,500 by taking in laundry.

Tariq's reasoning seemed to indicate that, for him, Australia was more an abstract idea promising a better, safer life than a real location. His geographical knowledge of the country was vague.

“STRANGERS” IN “PARADISE”

In April 2012 a wooden boat with thirty-four Somalis on board was stranded on the tropical island of Sumbawa in the geographic heart of the Indonesian archipelago. After two days of a disastrous journey headed for Australia that started on the island of Lombok, the boat had not moved very far from its initial point of departure. While other departure points for clandestine journeys to the “lucky country” have come under stricter border control in recent years, people smugglers have chosen Lombok as an alternative, despite the greater distance from Australia which makes the voyages even more dangerous. Not only are the boats that the asylum seekers use usually overcrowded, unseaworthy and crewed mostly by young and inexperienced Indonesians, but they sometimes even lack appropriate navigation equipment. The Somalis did not have good luck. On the very first day of the journey a storm hit and treated the boat — twelve metres long by three metres wide — like a nutshell in the ocean. After the engine and the pumps failed, people on board had to bail water to prevent the boat from going down. Unlike the many before them who had drowned on similarly dangerous passages, the Somalis were lucky in one respect: a larger Indonesian ship discovered them and towed them back to the shore, where the police arrested them not long after.

Among these Somalis was a young man, Ali. I had befriended Ali several months earlier when I spent time in Cisarua, a mountainous village in West Java that serves as a reception area for asylum seekers, recognized refugees and other undocumented migrants. While Ali's story is in many ways unique, it also represents the more common experiences of asylum seekers in transit in Indonesia. Thus, it is worth introducing Ali in detail.

After losing a lawsuit, a group of vigilantes from another clan killed Ali's father in his shop in Jowhar (central Somalia) and threatened the rest of the family. Ali's mother decided that it would be best if Ali left the country as soon as possible.

While in transit in Indonesia, transit migrants generally view the ability to move on as one of their most important resources, being at a standstill uses up time and money, and the tedium of an indefinite wait gives rise to downheartedness. In her study of transit migrants stuck in North Africa on their way to Europe, Aspasia Papadopoulou-Kourkoula (2008, p. 14) found that “the time spent in transit is frequently time being wasted with the rebuilding of the migrant's life put on hold”. Similarly, Ghassan Hage (2009, p. 97) equates waiting with “stuckedness” and calls it a “sense of existential immobility”. As mentioned earlier, transit migrants in Indonesia often spend several years in limbo before moving on. Waiting, which may result from any of a number of factors, such as lack of regulation and law enforcement, slow processing of refugee applications, and limited resettlement options, is a means to an end.

The lynchpin of this chapter is the “politics of waiting” and their role in deterring other potential transit migrants. The chapter examines the nature of the time transit migrants spend waiting, often indefinitely, for registration as asylum seekers, for the outcome of the process of determining refugee status and for resettlement. Waiting for these outcomes puts them under great stress, and some threaten to harm themselves or commit suicide if their applications are rejected.

This chapter portrays the experience of transit migrants whose lives are put on hold. Based on the fundamental principle that “being in transit is a condition of increased vulnerability, characterized by poverty, insufficient protection, insecurity and social exclusion” (Papadopoulou-Kourkoula 2008, p. 142), the main foci of inquiry are the housing, income generation, access to health services and education of transit migrants. The chapter takes into consideration the ethnic background, class and gender of transit migrants and examines the extent to which these factors determine the length and the conditions of their time in transit. It does not, however, analyse particular ethnic groups of transit migrants and their experiences in transit, even though the experiences of different ethnic groups do vary in regard to housing, income generation, onward migration and prices for people-smuggling.

The Malayan Communist Party, formed in Singapore in 1930 to establish a Malayan Republic under communist rule, paved the way for an anti-colonial movement in Malaya and Singapore. The MCP's immediate intellectual origins lie at least as far back as the May Fourth movement of 1919, when Chinese students protested against their government's weak response to the way China had been dealt with in the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I. The student demonstrations, which were directed also against Japan and the Western powers, broadened into a critique of the feudal past that held the modern Chinese mind in chains. This intellectual and ideological ferment, which reshaped the Kuomintang and gave rise to the Chinese Communist Party, became the “seedtime of the radical tradition” that took root among the Chinese-educated in Singapore and “blossomed forth as the Malayan Communist Party”.

However, the MCP was also a local organization, its birth linked to widening nationalist sentiments in Malaya. The legendary Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who was instrumental in setting up the MCP, was keenly aware that to succeed it would have to act as a genuinely Malayan organization and not an appendage of the Chinese Communist Party. A proletarian revolution could not take place in Malaya without the participation of Malays and Indians, who hardly were likely to be attracted to any party identified closely with China. Acutely conscious of the racial divide in Malaya that would affect proletarian solidarity, Ho advised the leaders of the MCP, dominated by the ethnic Chinese, to learn Malay and reach out to Malays and Indians. Gerald de Cruz's membership of the party is significant in this regard. English-educated and non-Chinese, he was among those members of the intelligentsia who acted as a bridge between the Chinese-educated leadership of the MCP and the wider, multiracial world of Singapore.

The MCP gained significant Chinese support after 1936 by articulating labour discontent and Chinese patriotism stirred by the Sino–Japanese War.

Gerald de Cruz remains a larger-than-life figure to his three children by two marriages, to Coral in 1949 and to Maimunah in 1970 after Coral had died in 1965.

His eldest child, Judith Prakash, was born in 1951. She remembers him as a loving and warm father who knew how to engage children, tell them stories, and hold them spellbound. He was very welcoming of her friends, treating them as equals and talking to them without condescension. “He always respected them and talked to them as if they would have something interesting to tell him. I was very close to him because he was very communicative. Yes, he had a temper but, on the whole, he made life fun”, the Singapore Supreme Court Judge says. He also had a sense of adventure. She remembers travelling with him down Siglap Hill in his Morris Minor, with the roof down and her standing up. Once, a bee got between his glasses and his eye, causing him to lose control and the car to tilt to one side dangerously. Luckily, no one was hurt.

She remembers her father's kind-heartedness, from giving people a lift in his car to bringing home waifs, like a boy who had got into trouble with the law whom he tried to reform. She remembers as well the close relationship that her parents enjoyed. “He was rather patriarchal when it came to being useless at house work, and he was more of the decision-maker than my mother was”, she recalls with a smile. “But there were no intellectual differences between my parents. My father believed that women and men were equal. He had no hierarchy in him, no sense of being better than anyone else. He was a democrat at heart.” It was this belief in the equality of humans that enabled him to believe that he could actually visit Stalin in Moscow and convince him of the need to change Soviet strategy in Southeast Asia. His personality was such that he attempted in all seriousness what others would have dismissed out of hand.

Judith was thirteen when her mother died, and her father became an overwhelming presence in her life. He encouraged her in debating at school, and convinced her of the intellectual and moral joys of studying Law at university.

POLITICAL STUDY CENTRE

Lee Kuan Yew recalls in his memoirs that, even before the People's Action Party took office in 1959, Goh Keng Swee, Kenny Byrne and he had decided to set up a political study centre “to teach top-ranking civil servants about the communist threat and our social and economic problems. To be successful, however, we had to win their confidence and convince them they were not simply being brainwashed”.

Former History lecturer George Thomson was chosen to run the centre. He was an effective teacher “because he was full of enthusiasm for whatever he taught. He understood what we wanted and soon grasped the part he had to play.” Thomson chose de Cruz as his assistant. Lee opened the centre, situated in a colonial government bungalow in Goodwood Hill, on 15 August 1959. Its objectives, he told civil servants, were not only to “stimulate your minds but also to inform you of the acute problems that confront any popularly elected government in a revolutionary situation.… Once these problems have been posed to you, you will be better able to help us work out the solutions to them, by making the administration more sensitive and responsive to the needs and mood of the people.” In a message published in the first edition of Bakti, the centre's journal, Goh elaborated on this point. “The Civil Servant participates in the democratic state by contributing his skill and experience in running the administrative machinery. He can hardly hope to be an effective administrator if he is unaware of the political milieu in which he must operate or if he is unsympathetic to the long-term objectives which the government sets out to achieve.” Lee and some of his ministers visited the centre themselves, discussing situations that had to be dealt with immediately.

In his Oral History Interview, de Cruz speaks of Thomson as “a marvellous Scotsman who came out here with Mountbatten's forces, became our first Director of Public Relations, identified himself with the aspirations of the new Singapore and became trusted by every Singapore government — the British Government, [the] David Marshall Government and [the] Lee Kuan Yew Government.

Gerald de Cruz was an intersticial figure in Singapore's history after World War II. As a Eurasian, a nationalist, a communist and then a democratic socialist, as a journalist and a writer, he represents the overlapping energies of these spheres which the politics of the time brought together, often in opposition and conflict. He never rose to high political office, but his commitment to progressive ideas and movements speaks of a man of integrity trying to stay true to the roles that he had chosen for himself. This book seeks to portray his place in time for a younger generation of Singaporeans who might not be aware of how political choices were made at an important juncture of Singapore's history.

This book is based primarily on material drawn from Gerald de Cruz, Oral History Interview, by Foo Kim Leng; the Gerald de Cruz Papers deposited at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore; and his book, Colliding Worlds: Memoirs of a Singapore Maverick, a re-issue of Rojak Rebel: Memoirs of a Singapore Maverick with four new essays. His books on Malayan independence, nationalism and communism — the latter two based on his numerous talks delivered as a lecturer for the Political Study Centre — have also been consulted extensively.

I would like to record my gratitude to the former Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Ambassador K. Kesavapany, who entrusted the writing of the book to me; and the present Director, Ambassador Tan Chin Tiong, under whom I completed it.

I would like to thank Mr Pitt Kuan Wah, Head of the ISEAS Library, and Ms D. Gandhimathy, Senior Manager at the library, for their invaluable assistance with research; Mr Ng Kok Kiong, Head of ISEAS Publishing, for his encouragement; Mr Stephen Logan, Editor – Special Projects, for his close attention to details of fact and nuances of style. This is a much better book than it was as a manuscript because of him.

Gerald de Cruz's family, particularly his daughter, Justice Judith Prakash; his son-in-law, Mr Jaya Prakash; and his son, Ambassador Simon de Cruz, provided invaluable help in fleshing out many aspects of his life. I thank Joshua de Cruz, a doctoral student at the University of London, for sourcing material on Gerald de Cruz's political activities from British archives.

Gerald Evelyn de Cruz was born in Singapore on 20 February 1920. He announced his arrival with a bang. To celebrate the advent of Chinese New Year, the family's neighbours were exploding thousands of red packets of firecrackers. It was a fitting start to a life that would be marked by one explosion after another — personal, national and global.

Gerald de Cruz was born to Cecil Thomas de Cruz and Evelyn Woodford, into a staunchly Roman Catholic family of Eurasian ancestry. He was the eldest of four children, followed by two brothers, Dudley and Guy, and a sister, Hazel. His ancestors had arrived in Singapore in 1824, just five years after Stamford Raffles had founded the city. “On my father's side, we were a mixture of Portuguese and Irish and Indian, and some people say, some Persian blood too, which perhaps gives me my Semitic nose. On my mother's side, we were a mixture of English and Dutch and Chinese”, he recalled.

De Cruz's family was a lower-middle-class one. The whole of the land from East Coast Road to the sea and between Chapel Road and Sea Avenue had belonged to his mother's grandfather, who had given a third of it to the Roman Catholic Church. It built the Church of the Holy Family in Katong on that land. Town Eurasians lived mostly in Queen Street, but outside town the community congregated in two main areas. One was in Katong, where there were the Catholic Eurasians, and the other was at Serangoon and Upper Serangoon, where there were the Anglican and Methodist Eurasians. The latter considered themselves a cut above the others because they were of British stock, whereas the Catholics were of Portuguese descent.

Eurasians were not only early residents of Singapore, Myrna Braga-Blake writes, but they also made it their home. Thus, by 1931, 77 per cent of Singapore's Eurasians had been born in Singapore — more than twice the proportion of the locally born among the Chinese, and five times that of the Indian community. “In the characteristically migrant population of the time, Eurasians stood out as a community with Singaporean roots.”

De Cruz met Coral Phipps, a girl from Penang, at her cousin's house in Kuala Lumpur, fell in love with her, and asked her to marry him. She pointed out all the impossible-to-scale barriers. He did not have a job, any money in the bank, and could be picked up by the police at any time. Then, Coral had promised herself that if she survived the Japanese Occupation, she would travel around the world a bit. From Penang she had moved to Kuala Lumpur and then Singapore, where de Cruz had found her a job in the Social Welfare Department. A three-year courtship followed. He asked her to marry him and they would see the world together by working their way around. He told her also that he wanted to visit the Soviet Union to find out from the horse's mouth why the MCP had taken to the jungles. She made a bargain with him. This was August 1948. By the end of that year, one or both of them should have gone abroad. If he left first, she would join him. They would get married and make their way to the Soviet Union.

De Cruz began to look for a job to finance the trip. Doors in Singapore were closed to him because of his reputation as the leader of the Eurasian Progressive Movement, the MDU and the PMCJA. But, one day, he ran into Jacob Ballas, an old friend who was now working for the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, which had a large branch office in Singapore. Ballas gave him a job — selling life insurance to the Malacca millionaires whom de Cruz had got to know. He took up the offer and, in Malacca, again met Tan Cheng Lock, whose friends bought two or three large policies from him. Ballas was disappointed when de Cruz told him that he was leaving Singapore, but accepted his decision. It was towards the end of 1948. He decided to go to Karachi and visit his INA friend, Inayat Hassan, who had saved him from the pursuing Japanese soldiers at Saigon. Meanwhile, Coral continued working as confidential secretary to Sir Percy McNiece, the last Governor of Singapore. She planned to save enough in six months to join de Cruz.

Gerald de Cruz wrote to his daughter, Judith, on 17 November 1975, saying that he envied her watching again the film, “Man of La Mancha”. Don Quixote's face is “as pasty as used canvas shoes; his walk almost as faltering as a drunk's his spear always getting in the way of gates or bags of flour; and his sword, if it can be called that, looking like the first cousin to prehistoric man's first attempt at a corkscrew”. Unlike Superman, who represents escape from the times and from reality, the “feeble, often ridiculous and frequently derided” figure of Don Quixote enchants people because they can recognize something of themselves in him. Born into what his creator, Miguel de Cervantes, calls a discourteous world, Don Quixote embodies the need for humans to meet the taunts of discourtesy. Prisoner of illusions himself, as every man is, the “sad and silly Knight” tilts at windmills. But why? Cervantes, wounded and captured in war and sold off into slavery before his family ransomed him at the cost of its financial ruin, experiences evil first-hand. However, he is interested in knowing, not why men die at the hands of evil, but why they have lived at all. They live, de Cruz avers, to confront the “distortions of reality which make it difficult to become human”. By proclaiming what it was like to be human in the charged sixteenth century, Don Quixote the Castilian not only became the hero of a great literary creation, but also immortal. “It does not matter a tinker's damn that we are weak”, de Cruz says of Don Quixote's sentimentality and delusions. “What matters is the direction in which our lives are pointed.” That is the lasting legacy of Cervantes’ canonical creation, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha — The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.

The introspective intensity of de Cruz's engagement with Don Quixote suggests a degree of fellow feeling that could have come only from a shared experience of life preserved over four intervening centuries. Both were adventurous, astonishingly and sometimes dangerously so.

On arrival in London, Gerald de Cruz began to look for a job. He rang up a British Army officer, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who had made contact with him in Kuala Lumpur. Since he was a medical man, he asked de Cruz whether he would be interested in a job in the ancillary medical services. He got a job as an unqualified teacher in the Fountain Hospital for Mentally-Retarded Children in London. He also won a scholarship for a diploma in teaching such children.

The racism that greeted his presence at a course run at the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH) headquarters was unbelievable! His English colleagues resented the fact that he could speak and write English better than they could, although he was from a “backward” colony. Matters came to a head during lectures on child psychology given by a Hilda Clarke, the senior psychologist at the association. When she offered to test the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of any volunteer from the students, almost all his colleagues shouted out de Cruz's name. If he fared badly, their prejudice would be vindicated; if he refused to take the test, he would be branded a coward. There was a burst of ironical cheering when he accepted the challenge. During the three hours during which he underwent the comprehensive Wechsler- Bellevue Diagnostic Tests, his fellow-students copied down the questions and answers. Among those who did not share their hostility was a twenty-eight-year-old Dane, Nils Christiansen, a fellow foreigner.

The test results were released two weeks later. De Cruz did quite well in motor and manual dexterity, scoring 120, the average score being 100 and the best possible 180 and above. In memory, vocabulary, calculation, general knowledge and so on, Clarke was unable to give him a score because he scored a perfect 100 per cent, which meant that she was not able to find the limits for his intelligence! “I don't know his intellectual potential”, she continued.

“In April 1955, David Saul Marshall, a Sephardi Jew, came into Singapore politics like a shooting star and, as in the nature of a shooting star, filled the sky with brilliance and disappeared”, Chan Heng Chee writes in her biography of Singapore's first elected Chief Minister. Although Marshall was not to preside over Singapore's transition to independence, he became a popular hero, respected for his integrity, his sympathy for the underdog, and his “abiding commitment to a democratic civic culture”. Gerald de Cruz's work with Marshall forms an essential part of his political contribution to Singapore.

On his return to Singapore, de Cruz became the Labour Front's Organizing Secretary and Secretary of its Central Committee. He was given an office in which there were thousands of applications to join the Front. They went three-quarters of the way up to the ceiling of the little room. He was asked to check them, which he duly did by rushing around Singapore trying to locate the applicants. He soon discovered that the applications were fake, with fake names, fake addresses and fake identity card numbers. They had apparently been faked by the Lim Yew Hock group to make him President of the Front. Then, he met people like Mak Pak Shee who had strong secret society connections and were open about them. Mak said to him that he had been supported all his life by secret societies. So now that he was a junior minister, the least he could do was to pay them back for all that they had done for him.

All this occurred against the wider backdrop of David Marshall's fight for complete independence for Singapore. He explained to de Cruz later that partial independence would not resolve Singapore's problems because its strong Communist underground movement and the pro-Communists leading the radical Chinese middle-school students would portray partial independence as no independence. Only real independence could placate “the anti-imperialist sentiments of the pro-Communists”. Although half a loaf is better than no bread, Marshall felt that, in the volatile situation that Singapore was in, “the bread we needed was independence, and half a loaf of independence would be no loaf at all”.

Gerald de Cruz's association with the labour movement involved his friendship with C.V. Devan Nair during the MDU years. Nair, who was a teacher at St. Andrew's School, was impressed by P.V. Sharma and became his assistant in the Singapore Teachers’ Union. Nair asked de Cruz whether he should go into politics or into the trade union movement. De Cruz suggested that he consider devoting himself full-time to trade unions. But the friendship between the two took off only in the 1970s, when Nair was modernizing the labour movement as chief of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC). In his work and personal relationships, de Cruz said, Nair was an extremely efficient and inspiring person, a very generous and compassionate man. De Cruz admired his tremendous courage when he finally took a stand and stood beside Lee Kuan Yew against his former comrades like Lim Chin Siong and developed the trade union movement. De Cruz steered clear of this battle, but he came back into the picture when the unions had begun to work in partnership with the government and the management to build a new Singapore. De Cruz, who chaired the NTUC's information and publicity committee, helped with the modernization movement and was awarded a gold medal by the NTUC in 1970 for his efforts as a friend of labour. Later, he became the assistant editor of Perjuangan, the monthly journal of the NTUC, which he actually edited because the official editor was not a journalist. He also helped to edit the periodicals of the Singapore Industrial Labour Organization (SILO), the Pioneer Industries Employees’ Union (PIEU), and the Consumer Association of Singapore (CASE).

However, it was not only his journalistic skills that de Cruz brought with him to his work for the NTUC. His political instincts, honed during both his communist years and during his time at the Political Study Centre, enabled him to view labour issues in the light of broader social interests.

This is seen in his contribution to the NTUC's Seminar on the Modernization of the Labour Movement, held in November 1969. The times were dire. The British had announced in 1968 that they would withdraw their military forces from Singapore.