Playing cards given to refugee children in Indonesia (Image: Supplied)

Nearly 100 refugee children in Indonesia have been given playing cards illustrated with people in a boat on heavy seas and stamped with the Australian government coat of arms.

The cards were reportedly handed out by three unidentified locals at the Cisarua Refugee Learning Centre in West Java earlier this month to kids aged between four and 12. It’s not clear if the three people have any affiliation with the Australian or Indonesian governments.

Staff at the centre said the cards are racist propaganda and further stoke racial tensions between refugees and Indonesian locals, upsetting children at the school.

The Australian Border Force and Department of Home Affairs have yet to confirm whether the Australian government had a role in printing or distributing the cards, but the Morrison government has distributed “Zero Chance” posters in the region previously.

Children were very distressed

Cisarua Refugee Learning Centre assistant manager Eiraj Kohistani was in a meeting with teachers on the afternoon of May 12 when security alerted him to the three strangers on site. Two men and a woman had been let into the grounds by students and were handing out decks of cards, taking photos of the kids holding them, he said.

“I was [in a] panic and ran barefoot to stop this happening,” he told Crikey. When he arrived, the three people — who he said were Indonesians — left the school grounds and drove away, ignoring his questions about where they had come from. 

About 80 children were given the cards (Image: Supplied)

The cards feature the logo, URL and a QR code linking to the government’s Zero Chance Sri Lanka webpage, warning refugees Australia’s borders are closed to illegal immigration. The Zero Chance campaign was launched in May 2019.

Kohistani said about 80 kids had each been given a deck and became very distressed after learning about its anti-refugee message.

“They did not know what the cards were for and when I explained, they were really offended and wanted their photos deleted,” he said. 

Kohistani believes anti-refugee rhetoric from international governments including Australia’s had caused tensions between locals and the refugee community.

He confiscated the cards and reported the incident to its parent company in Australia.

‘Political point-scoring’

The Cisarua Refugee Learning Centre is the first refugee established and managed school in Indonesia, running classes for 200 children and adults. Its parent company is Australian charity Cisarua Learning Limited which runs on an annual budget of less than $200,000. Federal Labor MP Tim Watts visited in 2017. Cisarua Learning said it wanted to wait until after the election to release details of the cards.

Co-founder and co-CEO of Cisarua Learning Limited Muzafar Ali told Crikey he was concerned the Morrison government was targeting refugee children ahead of the election.

“[Politicians] want to divide Australian societies to get some votes and, unfortunately, they use refugees as a political point-scoring,” he said.

Since 2013, Cisarua Learning Centre has worked with its older students to make them aware that Australian politicians may try to exploit their stories for political gain.

“We are all always in close contact with the parents and with the adult refugees and we keep telling them that they have to be very aware and vigilant that the politicians don’t use them,” he said. “But that they targeted children — this is exceptional that they’ve done that this time.”

Ali said the organisation had been in contact with several other refugee organisations, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), but did not expect to hear back. He said the cards were emblematic of the Australian government’s decade-long treatment of refugees in the region, and wanted an investigation into the incident so it never happens again.

“It’s not just distributing some cards … The government spent millions and billions of dollars on refugees, damaging them mentally, physically and psychologically,” he said. “So we want a proper, thorough investigation into the big picture of how the previous government spent taxpayers’ money to create fear and division in Australian societies and also for refugees, the most vulnerable group of people.”

The cards were confiscated (Image: Supplied)

First example of marketing to children?

Alison Battison, director principal at Human Rights for All, an Australian law firm dedicated to assisting asylum seekers, said if the allegations were true, it would be one of the first examples of direct marketing to children by the Australian government, and would not be “reflective of international law relating to asylum seekers and refugees”.

As of 2020, Indonesia had nearly 14,000 registered refugees living temporarily in the country, mostly from Afghanistan. Indonesia doesn’t have a national refugee status determination system and those who arrive are processed by the United Nations Human Rights Agency before being resettled in a third country. Some refugees have waited almost a decade to be processed — resulting in one man, Ahmad Shah, setting himself on fire in front of the Indonesian Organisation for Migration late last year.