Another regional headache

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.