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