Stateless people

Aceh follows as the ethnie nationalism most threatening to the Indonesian state. Chapter 5 demonstrates that the strength of this ethnie nationalism, by contrast with the stateless examples that follow, is precisely its memory of state. Acehnese may be less distinctive as a minority than Indonesia s Bataks or Malaysia s Kadazan, but they inherit an unusually strong sense of state resistance to outside control. The Batak and Kadazan cases, in chapters 6 and 7, reveal the different paths of political identity formation and assertion of previously stateless peoples that were possible in Indonesia and Malaysia respectively. The different outcomes are largely set by the gulf between the two state nationalisms with which they contended post-revolutionary, centralising civic nationalism in Indonesia evolutionary, federal and ethno-nationalist Malaysia. 

Refugees. There are 20.5 million international and internal refugees, returned refugees, internally displaced people, asylum seekers, and stateless people (UNHCR 2003). 

Whilst protection gaps do exist in relation to internally displaced persons and stateless people, this chapter focuses on cross-border displacement... 

Central to the application of any legal standards is agreement about what or who they appty to. Where statelessness is concerned, this most basic of questions has been a matter of ongoing debate. The major sticking point is what obligations exist towards so-caDed de fecto stateless people and when, in fact, a person can be deemed to be de facto stateless. As explained above, those who meet the definition of a stateless person provided by the 1954 convention have commonty been described as de jure stateless. The premiss is that these people are stateless, Le. hold no nationality, as a matter of law. At the same time, there are others about whom this cannot be concluded, yet who are similarly situated. A widety held view was that persons with no effective nationality are, for aH practical purposes, stateless, and should be labelled and treated as such. These individuals have therefore frequentty been labelled as de facto stateless. 

There has been little research, to date, into the treatment of stateless people around the globe. For instance, a comprehensive assessment of the implementation of the 1954 convention by state parties remains outstanding, although biennial updates on statelessness are produced by UNHCR. Where studies have been conducted, a causal link has nonetheless been traced between the inadequate provision for the SSD and some serious protection concerns. For instance, mapping projects completed by UNHCR in 2011 conclude that the absence of dedicated SSD procedures has left many stateless people trapped in a hopeless cycle of detention and destitution. ... 

UNHCR (2011) Statelessness More than 3,000 Stateless People Given Turkmen Nationality. Geneva UNHCR. <>. UNHCR (2012) Afghanistan Update on VolRep and Border Monitoring October 2012. Geneva UNHCR. <>. 

The relationship between state and ethnie was profoundly different in Indonesia. The colonial cities of Netherlands India, as of Malaya, represented a sort of melting-pot where people from diverse origins came to see a common adherence to Islam as the most important thing that separated them from Europeans, Chinese and stateless unbelievers like the Balinese, Bataks and so on. Unless quickly assimilated into the Chinese or European communities through marriage (an option only available to women), the people brought to Batavia, Makassar,... 

As explained in chapter 2, states had relatively litde direct control over the inhabitants of the tropical rain-forests of Southeast Asia when compared with the great river systems of the temperate zone. For many peoples of the Southeast Asian uplands in particular, statelessness was not simply a negative absence or slowness to develop states, but a deliberate rejection of the manner in which trade-based coastal states had been experienced as a threat to their way of life. The highland populations of northern Sumatra, collectively known for several centuries as Bataks, will be our prime example of this category. 

The highlands of Sumatra, despite being more densely settled and culturally sophisticated than the lowlands before the twentieth century, remain a striking case of Eric Wolf s (1982) People without History . Ashis Nandy points out that it is the statelessness, rather than the inaccessibility, of such peoples that has denied them a history. In his view, modern secular history as practised in the academies is inextricably linked as a mode of analysis with the modern nation-state and its rise. History traces the lineage and legitimacy of modem states, and distorts our understanding of the past by doing so (Nandy 1995). 

Nation remains problematic. It has a difficult relationship with peoples. Similarly, nations and states cannot necessarily be equated. The notion of a nation-state is confusing as it refers to one nation becoming a state. To believe that every state is a nation is likewise confusing. China is a state made up of 56 different nations. The Bretons and the Sorbs are examples of stateless nations. The term nation is used in many contexts but without a clear understanding. 

Joseph Schull, for example, states that social practices embody the self-definition of a people and are also made meaningful by them. See Russian Political Culture and the Stateless Intelligentsia (Montreal McGill, 1986), p. 18. 

However, it is essential that the conditions in Myamnar permit safe return and that repatriation is truty voluntary. This is a particularly pertinent concern in the Myanmar context, where in 1994-5, UNHCR cooperated in the forced repatriation of 230,000 Rohingya from Bangladesh to Myarunar, returning these people to statelessness, insecurily, and continued persecution (Loescher and Milner 2008 313). This process serves as a tragic reminder that caution must prevail in... 

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