Airport extortion of workers slammed

Bambang Nurbianto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The National Commission on the Protection of Women (Komnas Perempuan) slammed the immigration office on Friday over continued exploitation of returning Indonesian migrant workers (TKI).

Komnas Perempuan secretary-general Kamala Chandrakirana urged the immigration office to scrap checkpoints specially set up to serve returning migrant workers at international airports.

"Although by design, the checkpoints provide special services to migrant workers, in practice, they are used by immigration officers to exploit the workers. Such a practice could be categorized as an abuse of human rights," Kamala told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

She argued that the existence of special checkpoints for migrant workers at international airports institutionalized the exploitation of migrant workers in Indonesia.

"To avoid exploitation, returning workers should be treated like any other Indonesians coming back from an overseas trip," she said.

As many as 738,000 Indonesians work overseas, sending US$1.1 billion annually to their family members back home. The government hopes to raise it to $5 billion in 2005.

Despite their contribution to the country's foreign reserves, Indonesian workers are not given sufficient legal protection when they work overseas and when they return home.

Many of them experience torture, rape, and arbitrary punishment while they are abroad and are robbed by corrupt immigrant officers at the airports when they return home.

Another Komnas Perempuan member Mely G. Tan stressed that stopping the exploitation of migrant workers by immigration officers should not be so difficult as it only involved a few people at airport checkpoints.

"It is very odd that the government cannot not stop such practices. The government should be serious in giving protection to them, not only wanting foreign exchange from them," Mely stressed.

Mely said recruitment companies should be required to provide protection to migrant workers.

"The companies receive a lot of money from migrant workers, so they should also be obliged to prevent any exploitation at the airports."

Kamala proposed that an independent body be established to give protection to migrant workers as the manpower ministry has clearly failed to carry out its job.