100 sex workers sent back home from Tawao

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.