A story of money of the folding variety

A story of money of the folding variety

JAKARTA (JP): Most expatriates with a sufficient experience of
Indonesia can immediately identify the one government department
they dislike dealing with above all others. You would not be a
million miles from the answer if you suspected that some of its
officials work at ports of entry.

Now, I am well aware that, as the rogue Iago put it in
Shakespeare's Othello: "Reputation is an idle and most false
imposition/Oft got without merit and oft lost without true
desert", but if you come across a certain story often enough you
do at least check it out.

Everybody can relate stories about corruption in Indonesia, of
which the victims are generally ordinary Indonesians. Few
Indonesians may be aware that foreigners too catch the thick end
of the corruption stick, generally from officials in the
immigration department.

I came to the conclusion long ago that there is something
intrinsic to immigration departments just about all over the
world. That something is an ingrained nastiness. In my own
country, Britain, it manifests itself in racism as immigration
officers generally delight in harassing brown and black-skinned
people trying to enter the country. (Here one plainly sees echoes
of empire.)

In Indonesia the reverse is the case: the immigration
department specializes in harassing those wishing to depart.
Little do they understand the commonality of their xenophobia,
these guardians of the ports of entry of London and Jakarta, but
I am inclined to believe that they were trained in the same place
and then simply color-coded. Somewhere in the bowels of the earth
there is a school for gimlet-eyed immigration officers.

Above all I am referring, in the matter of Indonesia, to the
men and women who staff the immigration counters at Soekarno-
Hatta International Airport. These people, to be blunt, could
smell a truffle under half a ton of compost.

Unfailingly, they can find an error in your passport where no
such error exists. Never mind that you have just brought your
passport from the immigration office on Jl. Warung Buncit. And
that look in their eye! They've seen the main chance ... and it
is the color of money, folding money and not the sort you pass to
the conductor of a Metromini bus!

Not a few people trying desperately trying to leave Indonesia
last May were obliged to deposit largish sums of this folding
money at Soekarno-Hatta immigration counters. It gives you iron
in the soul just to think about the ravening looks on one or two
khaki-clad officers' faces as they measured up the plight of
families fleeing the violence.

I take a bit of an interest in these things, but not gladly I
might add, and so when The Jakarta Post printed an item in
January about the head of the immigration quarantine unit
accepting Rp 40 million from two nationals of the People's
Republic of China, my eyebrows raised a little. These gentlemen
had allegedly been caught traveling on false passports and were
locked up. Voila! They produced large amounts of the
aforementioned folding money and disappeared into the dark,
encircling night.

What made me almost choke on my nasi goreng (fried rice) was
the response of a senior official at the immigration department.
He informed the public that foreign passport-holders quarantined
by his people were subject to very strict conditions, and, no,
corruption there was impossible. Even the blind man on the
galloping horse would soon see this one.

There are foreign nationals here who have officially been in
quarantine for several years, and yet they walk the streets of
Jakarta in the full light of day, having paid the quarantine unit
officers... folding money. (I know one or two names but will not
oblige by divulging them.)

The immigration service specializes in keeping people from
other impoverished parts of the world -- North Africa (the Moor
the merrier?), Somalia, Nigeria -- on a short leash while priming
them for contributions to the pension fund.

It is almost impossible to be genuinely nice about immigration
officials. Almost, I say, because there are exceptions such as at
Batam's ferry port.

I am probably asking too much, whistling for the moon, but
might it not be time for the reform winds to waft through the
musty minds of the immigration service. Might it not be time to
clean the Augean stables of corruption in what, after all, is the
first and last Indonesian government department that the majority
of foreigners get to deal with.

-- David Jardine