Don't shoot the messengers

Don't shoot the messengers

President Megawati Soekarnoputri, who was widely criticized
last week for her administration's poor handling of Indonesian
workers deported from Malaysia, is now trying to shift the blame:
on the press. Speaking to the Indonesian community in
Johannesburg on the last day of her visit to South Africa,
Megawati was reported on Friday to have said that the press has
blown the problem of the returning workers out of proportion.

Insisting that her administration has done everything in its
power to assist the workers, she targeted her attack on the
number of deaths in makeshift shelters in Nunukan in East
Kalimantan. She said that officially, the death toll was 33, not
the 60-plus figure that has been widely reported in the press.

President Megawati has every right to defend her record and to
counter criticisms. But shooting the messenger, a new and
unfortunate pastime she has acquired of late, is not only
unhelpful for her image, it is certainly not helping the plight
of the workers either.

If anything, the media's greatest shortcoming in reporting the
plight of these deported workers is that we have not exposed it
proportionally within the scope of the disaster, and early enough
to prompt a timely and proper government action that could have
saved precious lives.

This is a problem that should have been anticipated as far
back as February when the Malaysian government first gave notice
to all foreigners who were working illegally there of an
impending tough immigration law and a crackdown after July 31.
Instead, the government seems to have done very little -- if
anything at all -- to prepare for the safe return or at the very
least ease the passage home of these Indonesian illegal workers,
whose numbers are believed to number in the hundreds of
thousands.

The media only started providing serious coverage at the end
of July as the deadline neared. But the problem began in May,
when some of these workers began to stream back through Nunukan,
and when casualties were already in evidence, but never reported.

This explains the discrepancy between the official and
unofficial death toll figures for Nunukan that President Megawati
quibbles about. The 60-plus figure includes those who died in
May; the official 30-plus figure only included the deaths
beginning in late July. By disputing the death toll, when real
people, mostly children, are still dying because help was not
forthcoming, the government has highlighted its lack of
sensitivity to the problem.

The media and Megawati's critics may have made too much of a
direct comparison in contrasting Megawati with Philippine
President Gloria Arroyo in handling the problem. Arroyo
personally went to greet the Philippine workers deported from
Malaysia last week; Megawati decided to go ahead with her lengthy
overseas trip. Admittedly, this contrasting approach was simply
too resistible to ignore.

The press's greatest failure is not in blowing the problem out
of proportion, but in failing to raise the alarm bells early
enough that would have prevented this problem from turning into
the national tragedy that it is today. But once this problem was
given extensive press coverage, the government's response should
have been to mend its ways and to show that it truly cares for
these workers. Instead, all it's been doing is to try to find
scapegoats. And Megawati is aiming her gun at the press.

The President may still not get the message about the tragedy
of the Indonesian workers that is still evolving in Nunukan, but
it would be dead wrong for her to blame the press. After all, we
are only the messengers, whose job it is sometimes to deliver the
bad news.