Councillors rebuke plan to expel poor migrants

Ahmad Junaidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

City councillors came out on Thursday against the city administration's plan to expel unregistered migrants, saying the policy would be a violation of the people's right to travel and work anywhere in the country.

"A draft bylaw to ban migrants would be useless and difficult to enforce," councillor Wasilah Sutrisno of the National Mandate Party said.

Wasilah, who is also chairwoman of the council's Commission E for social welfare affairs, also said that as the nation's capital Jakarta belonged to all citizens.

She said that rather than issuing an outright ban on migrants, Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso would do better to ask governors from other provinces to appeal to their residents not to migrate to the capital.

"If it's only a call, OK. But we cannot force people to leave the city," she said.

Sutiyoso, who has come under fire for failing to deal with the numerous urban problems here, has blamed migrants as a major source of the problems. The administration is now drafting a population bill to curb urbanization and to expel poor migrants who do not have Jakarta identity cards. Sutiyoso, who was inaugurated for a second five-year term earlier this month, wants the bill passed before the end of the first year of his second term.

Critics have warned Sutiyoso against pursuing this policy, saying it is unconstitutional and a violation of human rights and would only worsen the situation.

Councillor Abdul Aziz Matnur also criticized the policy, saying it was impossible to turn Jakarta into a closed city.

"Jakarta is different from Batam. I have heard that there have been many protests in Batam due to the policy to make it a closed island," said Aziz, who is also the secretary of the council's Commission A for legal and administrative affairs. He was referring to the island in Riau province.

He suggested the administration improve its population registration procedures rather than expelling migrants, which could trigger protests and conflict.

"With good registration management, we could have valid data on our residents and then decide on what policy would be best," he said.

He said Commission A would propose a bylaw on population and civil registration to improve the registration management.

Azis also said the central government should help the city deal with urbanization by spreading development projects around the country.

"With regional autonomy, if other provinces could provide jobs for their residents they would not come here," he said.

In a meeting with other governors in Lampung last week, Sutiyoso urged the governors to encourage their residents not to come to Jakarta if they do not have a job or a house in the city.

In the 1970s, then governor Ali Sadikin issued a decree declaring Jakarta a closed city in an effort to curb urbanization. Although the decree was never revoked, it also was never effectively enforced.