Another regional headache

Now that our economic crisis has started to spill over into neighboring countries, the government is facing another problem with not only a regional but also a global impact.

Fourteen immigrants from Aceh, in northern Sumatra, forced their way into the compound of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Kuala Lumpur yesterday asking for protection. The 14, of the same origin as the immigrants who reportedly incited a riot in the Semenyih camp near the Malaysian capital last week, also oppose the Malaysian government's policy of repatriating them. They claim they are political refugees and have expressed their fear of being executed once they arrive back in Aceh, where they say an armed struggle by separatist rebels is ongoing and they are likely to be accused of being part of it.

However, as far as the Malaysian authorities are concerned, the immigrants' fate back home is not their business, especially after Jakarta assured them that the situation in Aceh is under control. A more serious problem for Kuala Lumpur -- as it does not see the illegal immigrants as political refugees -- is that the UNHCR has requested Malaysia to give it access to the Acehnese in detention. The UNHCR believes there are 2,000 Acehnese asylum seekers in Malaysia but its attempts to enter the camps have thus far been in vain.

The authorities in Kuala Lumpur are acutely embarrassed by the influx of waves of illegal immigrants from Indonesia. Since the beginning of the economic crisis last July, 17,000 have fled to Malaysia. The Kuala Lumpur authorities have been giving the issue a very low profile, until the incidents at the Semenyih camp and the UNHCR office. They have simply repeated their determination to repatriate the immigrants as soon as possible and ordered the Malaysian navy to intensify it patrols to block any efforts by Indonesians to sneak into the country.

Before the currency crisis hit the region, thousands of Indonesian immigrants were employed in Malaysia, where economic growth reached 8 percent until last year. But now that Kuala Lumpur is also facing a serious economic crisis itself, it cannot tolerate any more migrants. People has come from as far as Bangladesh and Myanmar.

For Indonesia this problem should be understood as part of the whole unemployment issue, which cannot be solved only by the ministers of social services and manpower. It is a national crisis, which needs the involvement of the whole government. Since the economic crisis is likely to drag on for years and unemployment will rise and rise, the cure the country needs is not symptomatic in nature but one that gets to the root of the problems.

In the coming months more and more Indonesians will be laid off, and it will soon not only be people from Sumatra who will be crossing the Strait of Malacca, undergoing any hardship and attempting to evade all legal hurdles because they believe Malaysia is the best place to survive in current circumstances.

This will of course develop into a serious regional problem. And the involvement of the UNHCR, which regards them as asylum seekers, and the reaction from human rights bodies over the refugees from Aceh, has also made the difficulty an international issue.

Since this new crisis does not only involve Indonesia and Malaysia but also Singapore, into which many Indonesian illegal immigrants have also tried to enter, and Myanmar, Jakarta should suggest setting up a regional body to discuss the core of the problem and try to solve it together with our neighbors. Any failure to tackle the issue properly will further tarnish our country's image in international eyes.

Meanwhile, what the government should do now is guarantee the safety of the illegal immigrants sent back by Malaysia in line with the peaceful conditions it says exist in Aceh at present. This would be a good first step to make the world believe it is indeed sincere.