Lindsay Murdoch – The smugglers' plan went like clockwork. Paid up asylum seekers were flown in small groups from Pakistan to Jakarta, transiting in Bangkok, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur.

There was little fear of their fake Indonesian visas and Afghan passports being rejected in Jakarta, which has one of the most corrupt airports. The smugglers even paid for special passes so they could wait inside the customs area and arrange for their clients to be processed in a side room and not have to wait in queues like other new arrivals.

Faizullah, a shopkeeper, was happy with the service he got for the $US12,000 he had paid to smugglers in the Afghan capital Kabul, the Pakistan city of Lahore and Jakarta to bring his pregnant wife Fatima and their two children to Australia.

One of the smugglers even travelled with them, making sure nothing went wrong during the trip to Indonesia, but keeping his distance. "He told us to ignore him," Faizullah says. "In Jakarta another man, a Pakistani, was waiting for us at the airport. He took us to a rented house and told us not to talk to any neighbours, stay inside and wait until he came to take us on the final leg of the trip."

Over several months the smugglers, from one of six major people-smuggling syndicates operating in Indonesia, had parked clients, who had paid them more than $US700,000, in safe houses across Jakarta and its outlying suburbs.

Abdul Rashid Matin, a 35-year-old nurse from Kabul, was surprised the arrangements went so smoothly for himself, his wife and four children. In Pakistan he was even shown a photograph of the smuggler who would be waiting for him among the teeming faces of taxi drivers and con artists who tout for business at Jakarta airport. "The smugglers fulfilled every promise until the time we stepped on to the boat," Matin says. "That's when we realised we had been left to a terrible fate."

It was almost dark by the time the smugglers had collected 138 people from the safe houses and brought them to a port on the southern coast of Java (the smugglers warned their clients not to reveal the location). There was no time to properly check out the KM Harapan Jaya II because the tide was moving fast, the smugglers said, and the police might come. But they were to find out later the boat's hull was rotting, there were no working pumps or life jackets as the smugglers had promised, and it would have been overcrowded if only a dozen had boarded, let alone 138.

As the boat chugged out to sea a couple of teenagers who had picked up basic Bahasa Indonesia while staying at their safe house learnt from the four Indonesian crew that the trip to Christmas Island was expected to take seven days and seven nights. The smugglers had told them 30 hours.

But there was barely time to digest that news. The boat hit the rocks off Nusa Kembangan, Indonesia's "Devil's Island", in the early hours of the morning. When water started to fill the hull, the asylum seekers tried to bail it out with their hands. Said Sakhi, 20, fell into the sea as waves washed over them. "For God's sake help me," he screamed before slipping away and drowning.

Fatima, 20, clutched her baby, Murtaza Roni, who had been born in Indonesia 2 months earlier. But as the boat split into pieces she lost her grip and the baby fell into the water. "We could see him. But nobody could reach him," says Abdul Rashid Matin. "The rest of us managed to get ashore and then we found the body. It was a huge shock to all of us."

Three weeks later, Fatima sits on the concrete floor of a dormitory in the jail on Nusa Kembangan, her sad eyes only looking downward, the look of shame and despair. She has not spoken for days. "We had to come even though we lost our baby," says husband Faizullah, 24. "In Afghanistan the Taliban was going to kill me because I refused to fight for them. But I feel now that if I could stay anywhere in the world it would not make up for the loss of our baby."

Many of the hundreds of asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries who are stranded in Indonesia have similar horror stories.

Boats carrying hundreds of people have sunk, drowning all aboard. Like the Vietnamese boat people before them, the new asylum seekers trying to reach Australia have been the targets of modern-day pirates and rapists and the victims of cruel smugglers.

And Indonesian authorities have at times helped push boats out to sea, knowing they are not seaworthy and the passengers' chances of survival only slim, some survivors say.

The survivors of the KM Harapan Jaya II and hundreds of other asylum seekers who have failed to reach Australia are unwelcome in Indonesia, where authorities are becoming increasingly impatient with them. When they are caught, Indonesia's policy is to place them in "quarantine" – usually a jail compound with criminals or at a guarded hostel or cheap hotel pending assessment of their status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. But they often escape, or are allowed to walk away by officials fed up with them. Their only option then is to try to arrange passage with other smugglers.

Even if they are assessed to be refugees, third countries including Australia have been slow to accept them, leaving Indonesia, a country struggling with its 1.5 million internally displaced people, with the burden of coping with the rapidly growing numbers.

Lukmiardi, a senior official at Indonesia's Justice Ministry, says that placing all the asylum seekers in quarantine is proving impossible "given that their numbers are reaching into the thousands and are likely to increase". He urges the building of proper detention facilities "to convey the message that Indonesia is not a transit point for illegal migrants".

Tensions are running high on Nusa Kembangan, the prison island off the central Java city of Cilacap that houses some of Indonesia's most notorious criminals, including Bob Hasan, the one-time golfing partner of the former dictator Soeharto. "Our job is to provide security for Indonesian criminals, not foreigners," says Djono, a guard on the island that has been a prison since the Dutch colonial era. "The presence of these people is a big problem for us."

Abdul Rashid Matin, the nurse from Kabul, speaks for the group of survivors, many of whom are unwell because of the lack of food and water, and the primitive conditions on the island. "As you are Australians please report to your country that we are suffering and appreciate very much your humanitarian program," he tells the Herald. "You have taken in many Afghans before. We know that. We hope you will please help us." Abdul Ghani, 20, presses to the front of the group. "Please can you tell us. Should we stay here or escape? Please tell us. We are desperate."

The presence of refugees who share houses in Indonesian cities, towns or villages has often caused problems in the local communities, including gang fights. Some asylum seekers turn violent. When 33 Iraqi people were caught arriving on North Sumatra recently, two men cut their chests open and a mother threw her baby to the ground to protest being taken to a local immigration shelter instead of Jakarta.

Gira Prawijaya, the head of the police foreign monitoring office on Lombok, where several hundred Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers have been staying, says the situation has become intolerable: "They [the asylum seekers] are so outrageous. They come to this country with fake passports but act like nobles, demanding first class facilities and services."

Often those in immigration shelters go on hunger strikes. A few have sewn up their mouths or cut their tongues to protest the refusal of Indonesian authorities to take them to Jakarta where smugglers are easily found, usually in the city's biggest McDonald's after 9pm every day.

An Indonesian policeman who worked undercover for months in an international squad funded by Australia to track the smugglers says each syndicate has a field co-ordinator for each country who employs hotel providers, boats and crews, the producers of passports and visas and travel agents. He says network members are usually of Arab descent. The two best-known syndicate bosses are Pakistani. They fly first or business class, use at least four aliases and always travel with four to six bodyguards. "They are very dangerous, deceitful, untouchable," says the policeman, who asked not to named.

While drug smugglers face execution in Indonesia and possessing a firearm can send a person to jail for 20 years, the laws covering people smuggling are vague and untested.

One syndicate boss, known as Captain Bram, who was recently in Cambodia with 241 Afghan and Pakistan people trying to get to Australia, has often been arrested in Indonesia but is always released because of the lack of evidence. "Money talks," the policeman says.

Smugglers often meet clients openly in the jails and immigration shelters. "The syndicates work very secretly and are hard to infiltrate," the policeman says. "Jobs are given on a need to know basis."

The policeman says the operation, from the start until the asylum seekers board a boat for the last leg of the journey, is sophisticated and highly professional. Passports are usually genuine, but the names and visas fake. He says the asylum seekers are told to destroy their travel documents when they arrive in Indonesia by either plane or boat from Malaysia, which has emerged as the people smuggling hub because the country allows visa-free entry for people from most Muslim countries. Without proof of where they are from, asylum seekers cannot be sent home.

There are two main sea routes out of Indonesia. One is through the eastern

islands to the tiny, uninhabited Ashmore Reef 200 kilometres north-west of the Australian mainland. The smugglers know that if their cargo reaches there, Australian Navy and Coastwatch patrols will carry them to immigration authorities.

The other route to Christmas Island is faster but more risky because of the notoriously rough seas that can blow up at any time.

On Nusa Kembangan, the Afghan survivors have been told by prison guards and workers about the drama involving the people on the Tampa and how they were plucked from their sinking boat off Christmas Island. "If we get another another chance to go, we will go," says Abdul Ghani. "Those people aboard are being taken to be resettled in a third country. That is all we are asking for ourselves."