Haj business haggling

Haj business haggling

This archipelago has been sending haj pilgrims to Saudi Arabia
for centuries. Lately the number of people wanting to fulfill the
fifth tenet of Islam has significantly increased. However, this
positive trend is not without problems.

Although the authorities allow certain private travel agencies
to send pilgrims to the Holy Land, some unauthorized
organizations have intervened in the lucrative business by
allowing their clients to travel to Mecca on the standard green
passports instead of the brown ones especially issued to
pilgrims. In the past this unauthorized business did not appear
to cause any serious problem.

However, this year it was no less that President Soeharto who
ordered Minister of Religious Affairs Tarmizi Taher to deal
harshly with those going to Saudi Arabia for the haj pilgrimage
on illegal tours.

According to Tarmizi, who met with the President to report on
the situation, thousands of Indonesians have left on unauthorized
tours and many of them have been arrested by the Saudi security
authorities. In response to the report, President told the
minister that the "illegal" pilgrims would have to be flown back
home on the Garuda flights, which are returning from taking the
brown-passport pilgrims to the Middle East.

The minister's statement was reportedly based on recent
reports from Saudi Arabia saying that the chairman of the
Southeast Asian pilgrimage committee there had booked 14,000 beds
for "illegal" Indonesian haj pilgrims, 10,000 of whom left
through Singapore and the rest through Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta
International Airport, which have never been used for sending
pilgrims on the officially organized trips.

In light of the fact that the President expressed some
irritation upon hearing the minister's report, it is important to
note that the veracity of the existence of the "illegal" pilgrims
is still in question.

Earlier this week, the state-owned Radio Republik Indonesia
quoted the Indonesian consul general in Jeddah who questioned the
accuracy of the figures mentioned. And the Saudi Ambassador in
Jakarta, Abdullah Abdulrahman Alim, flatly denied on Tuesday that
his government had arrested any Indonesian pilgrims.

Tarmizi's statement about the detention of the pilgrims, which
became headlines in local newspapers, must have sounded
excessively harsh to the ambassador's ears because such an act
would be in blatant violation of Koranic law which forbids people
from banning Moslems from entering the sanctuaries of Allah. And
haj pilgrims are none but God's very own guests who enter the
Holy Land to visit the Kaaba and other sacred sites.

The sending of pilgrims to the Holy Land by unauthorized
organizations has been going on for a long time. Many of those
pilgrims say that they receive decent services for reasonably low
rates from the illegal agents.

The problem seems to be little more than administrative
because the Ministry of Religious Affairs failed to detect the
practice.

Therefore, the most correct solution to the problem might be
not to send the pilgrims back home before they can carry out
their religious duties, but to arrest the managers of the
unauthorized agencies who sent them there. Earlier reports said
that the Saudi authorities conduct raids on umrah (minor haj)
pilgrims who go there before the holy month of Ramadhan with the
intention of overstaying until the high haj season begins about
three or four months later. But in the run-up to the peak day of
the haj season on May 21, the Saudi government has shown
tolerance toward those who have already arrived there with legal
travel documents.

So, the problem of the "illegal" pilgrims as reported to the
head of state seems to require some clarifying. And the fact that
after the Saudi ambassador rejected the statements, Tarmizi did
not say anything, makes us feel the need to ask just what is
really happening.