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Cisarua. Indonesia is steadily developing into a way-station for refugees from the Middle East waiting to migrate to a third country.

Afghan refugee Bashir Bahtiari, 45, has been stranded here just like his countrymen Habibullah, 29, and Ismail, 17, as well as Duraid, 44, and Dina, 32, from Iraq.

But all of them want to leave as soon as possible. “We would go anywhere,” they all said.

They came to Indonesia directly or via Malaysia because these Muslim countries are among the very few that issue entry visas to Afghan and Iraqi nationals.

The prospect of traveling on to nearby Australia is an additional lure, and its Navy has already intercepted some 15 refugee boats this year alone, compared to only seven in the whole of last year.

Nobody knows exactly how many of the often overloaded and rotten boats make it through and how many sink on the high seas.

But Ismail is convinced that “there is a 90 percent chance to make it to Australia,” adding that he got this information from the Internet. Human traffickers demand $6,000 per person, according to Ismail.

As a child, he fled Afghanistan’s capital Kabul with his entire family and found shelter in a refugee camp in Pakistan, where he learned fluent English. “I now want to complete my higher education, then study social science and politics,” he says.

Duraid once worked at the Ministry of Planning in Baghdad, but was threatened, he says, and eventually saw himself confronted with the choice of fleeing the country or dying.

He and his wife fled Iraq in February 2008 together with their 2-year-old daughter Dana, via Syria to Malaysia. There Duraid bought South African passports on the black market. They reached Indonesia by boat, but the immigration officers at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport detected their false travel documents.

They registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, received refugee papers, and now live in Cisarua, a small town some 70 kilometers south of Jakarta.

The couple are not allowed to work. Instead they live on an allowance of some $225 per month given to them by United Church Services, a nongovernmental organization.

Now the family of three is waiting for a host country to invite them for resettlement.

More than 1,200 Afghans and about 280 Iraqis are currently registered with the UNHCR in Jakarta, but aid organizations say that the real number of refugees is probably much higher as there are many illegal immigrants.

“Indonesia is very generous to refugees. They don’t accept them for resettlement, but they don’t turn anyone away either,” says Anita Restu of the UNHCR.

It is this hospitality that irritates Australia, which has a budget of just $34 million for bilateral action by Australian and Indonesian police against traffickers.

Meanwhile, Indonesian authorities have stepped up their security patrols along the 1,000-kilometer south coast of Java and beyond. Bashir Bahtiari says his life was in danger after he mocked Taliban leader Mullah Omar in cartoons he drew.

“The Taliban said that anyone who kills me will get $100,000. Even my relatives wanted to get that money,” he says.

Eventually Bashir obtained a visa, fled to Indonesia and now holds legal refugee status.

Deutsche Press-Agentur