100 sex workers sent back home from Tawao
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The government is sending 100 women employed as sex workers in Tawao, East Malaysia, back to their home villages in Central Java and East Java, a minister has said.
"We need an integrated system and strong coordination among the relevant agencies to tackle human trafficking cases, otherwise the government will not be able to resolve this serious issue," State Minister of Women's Empowerment Sri Redjeki Soemaryoto said in Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara on Wednesday.
The minister insisted that the government's political will was of the utmost importance, otherwise some of the women would return to Tawao.
She was referring to the importance of strong coordination between the central government and the East Kalimantan provincial administration to monitor the situation and of the police with the Central Java and East Java provincial administrations to provide jobs for women and other law enforcers to crack down on local and international syndicates involved in trafficking women and children to neighboring countries.
The presidential decree on human trafficking, which was issued by President Megawati Soekarnoputri on Dec. 22, 2001, should be simultaneously enforced by the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice and Human Rights and the National Police, she told the official Antara news agency.
The government should also coordinate with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to handle the problem of human trafficking, she added.
Sri said the government was drafting a bill to halt the illegal trade of women and children.
"While the bill is being prepared, we can use the presidential decree to tackle the problem of human trafficking," she said, citing that there was no data on the number of women sold into prostitution at home or overseas because it had been conducted in a covert way.
Sri said that the government had so far not been serious enough in dealing with the cases, but a law would give it the legal backing it needed to put a stop to the operation of local and international syndicates.
Asked about where most of the women and children come from, the minister replied almost all the northern regions in West Java, Central Java and East Java.
"The countries where Indonesian women are mostly trafficked to include Malaysia, Singapore and Middle Eastern countries," she said.
The women are usually smuggled through the border areas of Kalimantan to East Malaysia, and Batam and the Riau Islands to Singapore and Malaysia. Some Javanese have also been sent to Riau, Papua and Kalimantan, and forced to become sex workers at hotels, discotheques and red-light districts on the islands.
The minister called on the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration to temporarily stop the flow of female laborers overseas because most women forced into prostitution had been trafficked using the labor export procedures.
"Rampant cases of human trafficking have a lot to do with poverty and most women's low level of education," he said. Most women in Indonesia have either dropped out of high school or only completed elementary school.