LIKE any other 6-year-old, Mark (not his real name) is active, precocious, and loves asking questions. He enjoys cycling, swimming, dinosaurs and cars — not necessarily in that order. Those are the kind of things that can excite Mark to no end. He’s also looking forward to school and the endless possibilities (and adventures) that lie ahead of him. Yet, the future for Mark is somewhat uncertain.
Unbeknownst to many, Mark is stateless.
He’s neither a citizen of Indonesia — where his mother was born — nor of Malaysia, where he was born. He was given up by his mother when he was just 10 days old and subsequently adopted by Malaysian parents less than four months later.
This should have been a happy ending for both his loving parents and the child who had come to be under their guardianship legally. But there were unforeseen snags casting a damper on what should have been a new beginning for Mark.
In this country, the citizenship status of a child generally follows the citizenship of the biological mother. In cases where the child is born out of wedlock and the biological mother isn’t a citizen of Malaysia, the child will automatically be rendered stateless. The Malaysian Adoption Act 1952 doesn’t address the citizenship of adopted children. As a result, the nationality of stateless children adopted has been placed under the arbitrary purview of the National Registration Department (NRD) in registering orders granted by the Malaysian courts.
“Mark’s adoption was approved. His birth certificate was issued with us registered as parents. But his citizenship still doesn’t reflect his new status,” recalls his mother Lee, who confides that they applied for citizenship to the NRD in 2013 and received their first rejection two years later in 2015. “There was no reason given,” she says, adding that they reapplied in 2015 and have not received any response to date.
By refusing citizenship to many adopted children, the NRD had forced the aggrieved parents to subsequently apply to the Minister of Home Affairs for citizenship for their adopted child, where decisions are discretionary and beyond judicial review. “We’ve submitted to the Home Ministry. I’ve called the number given to me. There was no answer. And no response to the email to date,” shares Lee.
The silence is unsettling. And with the recent change in political governance, it seems that the struggle to obtain Mark’s citizenship may have to be put on hold indefinitely.
“Stateless children are invisible children because according to the law, they don’t exist and are therefore not recognised as being citizens of Malaysia,” declares Dr Hartini Zainudin, co-founder of Yayasan Chow Kit, a 24-hour crisis and drop-in centre that provides meals, activities, therapy, case management and educational programmes for at-risk children of Chow Kit. Hartini herself is mother to two stateless children — Khairy and Zara. Her heartrending message on social media was what caught my eye. It was an open letter she wrote during the aftermath of the momentous GE14 elections.
‘Dear New Government’, she wrote. ‘People who know the work I do, know that I’ve been fighting to get children, including my children, citizenship. Every week, I get letters and text messages from distraught parents and young adults, asking for help and advice — “What do we do? Our child is stateless. She needs to go to school. I’m stateless and already 21 years old.”’
She goes on to articulate the anguish that her children and people condemned to statelessness go through: ‘Lives are ruined or are on hold as they wait and wait. You cannot even begin to imagine the anguish and torment of a child from the day he or she is born. Stateless. Condemned to a life of invisibility! Zara has waited 10 years. Khairy has waited 12. Some people have waited 75 years. Other never receive their citizenship and they die, stateless.’
PASSIONATE ACTIVIST
For all her fiery activism and doggedness in protecting at-risk children, Hartini exudes a calm confidence as she walks into the New Straits Times lobby in Bangsar, clad in a black jubbah, hair tousled. She apologises for being slightly late, her accented English belying the two decades spent in the US, studying and working with inner-city children there.
“I’ve always loved children. I communicate better with them than with adults,” she exclaims with a hearty laugh; a laugh that’s both madcap and cacophonous, a startling contrast to her quiet, almost gentle conversation. I can tell almost immediately why children might gravitate towards her. “Oh can you?” she asks, breaking into laughter again. The receptionist across the hall looks up and smiles.
“I’ve always wanted to be a teacher since I was 6,” she confides. A teacher? I look quizzically at her. She shrugs her shoulders and reveals candidly: “Because I was really naughty back then.” There were teachers who were really kind and tried to understand her, she shares. “Oh you know... troubled youth!” she quips, grinning and rolling her eyes. And there were those teachers who wouldn’t have any of it and couldn’t deal with her.
“My childhood was wonderful but my school experience wasn’t. I was determined to become the kind of teacher children like me would love. I was going to change the system,” she recalls.
She studied as an educator but she didn’t become a teacher. “I ended up mentoring and protecting children!” She goes on to add: “I gravitated towards children who were the naughtiest, the most vulnerable, the most marginalised and the most misunderstood. I guess I felt I was one of them, growing up.” She goes quiet, before adding softly: “I cannot bear a child being hurt.”
After 20 years, she returned home to Malaysia and volunteered as a teacher to work on a children programme organised by Yayasan Salam Malaysia, a local NGO which looked at connecting volunteers and corporates to community projects and community needs. “I was sent to Chow Kit. because of my work with inner-city children back in the US.”
Located within Kuala Lumpur is Chow Kit Road, a busy district flourishing with economic activities alongside a substantial number of street children roaming and liv¬ing off the streets. Chow Kit has generally been regarded by the public as a notorious hub of lower class brothels and prostitutes.
As the rest of the city’s skyline soar with luxury towers, beacons of a new gilded age, it is Chow Kit’s population that’s been left behind in the shadows. The ranks of the poor in this part of the city have risen with more families living near or below the poverty line. The children are the biggest casualties of all, Hartini points out.
They’re exposed to negative social upbringing either accidentally or unknowingly having been forced into these predicaments. These challenges are especially evident in cases of children with undocumented birth certificates. The lack of documentation excludes them from receiving social benefits from the relevant authorities as they have not been properly recorded as registered citizens. “This leaves children especially vulnerable to trafficking, prostitution, child labour. Nobody can trace them. They’re practically invisible in the eyes of the law,” says Hartini, her voice wrought with emotion.
It’s undeniable that she has steel, passion and a record of having bold ideas that, against the odds, she has turned into reality. Yayasan Chow Kit is one of them. Hartini admits it wasn’t easy, revealing candidly that her decision not to teach and venturing into NGO territory dismayed her late father. “When I told him I was going to work in Chow Kit, he was livid!” she recalls wistfully.
“What are you going to live on? What are you going to eat?” he demanded to know.
“I’m going to live on the blessings I receive for doing this!” she responded.
“You can’t eat blessings! Blessings aren’t going to get you anywhere! You’re going to be poor. I didn’t send you to school in America for you to be poor!” he retorted.
He couldn’t change her mind. Not long after, she confides that he suffered a heart attack. While he was on life support, she sat by his side and drafted a proposal for the centre in Chow Kit. “I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing. This endeavour became personal to me,” she says softly, adding that she sat down with the-then chairman of Suhakam, Tan Sri Razali Ismail not long after her father’s death and sobbed: “I want the children’s centre. You have to help me.”
Yayasan Chow Kit was birthed, and the rest is history. “I wanted a safe space for children; a sanctuary of sorts where they could find play, dream and be a child again,” she says. To date, she shares that there are 2,000 children registered with the foundation, with around 122 children coming to the centre daily. “Just last year alone, there were around 2,000 cases with just four social workers working crazy hours trying to protect children!”
ROBBED OF IDENTITY AND WORTH
That’s a lot of children, I exclaim. Hartini nods before replying: “Well, we just do what we can — one life at a time.” Still, she concedes, more must be done for children without documentation. “For me, as a child activist, a mother who’s adopted stateless children and someone who has worked with so many stateless children, it’s heart-breaking,” she says, adding emphatically: “Frankly I’m obsessed with it. If you asked me what I was doing this weekend? I was working on policy papers. What was I doing this weekend? I was comforting a child who’d been abandoned and stateless in another state, trying to figure out how to bring her here, to look for shelters and teachers so that she can go to school somehow.”
The consequences can be dire for stateless children, Hartini warns. A report issued by the United Nations in 2015 pointed out that in some countries, stateless children aren’t entitled to government-run immunisation programmes. In many, they cannot attend school — or go to university. In others, when reaching adulthood they’re barred from employment.
“There’s nothing more devastating than rendering a child stateless. You’re basically telling them that they’re of no worth. All children have the potential for good and to be the best. Einstein was stateless and so was Madeleine Albright!” she says vehemently.
Tens of thousands of children are born on the run from war, persecution and poverty; some in cities swelling with exiles, while others in forlorn refugee camps. They are those in transit as their parents cross the oceans for a new life in a foreign country.
In this country, many hail from remote communities living in jungle interiors while there are those whose forefathers have been here since independence, working in plantations and who were not aware of having to apply for citizenship back in the days, culminating in generations of state-lessness.
Experts say many parents are unaware that their children are stateless. Often the children realise they don’t have legal citizenship only when they reach adulthood and find they cannot legally work, marry, own property, vote or even graduate from school. The battle to prove then that they’re Malaysians can be a daunting and uphill endeavour.
Statelessness affects the enjoyment of all the rights which most of us take for granted — for instance, the right to work, the right to vote, the right to welfare benefits and a child’s right to education. It prevents people from moving, and increases their chances of arbitrary arrest or deten¬tion with no adequate remedies. In short, it marginalises and makes people feel worthless with no prospect of their situation ever improving, and no hope for a better future for themselves or their children.
“It’s our duty as a global society to take care of them,” says Hartini, adding: “I may not be the smartest person around, but isn’t it common sense to want to educate children? Children will give back a hundred fold, if you give them an identity and allow them to go to school.
A pause and Hartini concludes: “If we strive to provide the best future and opportunities for all children, we are, in the end, also providing the best future for us all.”