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.