Illegal RI workers face KL fury

By David Chew

SINGAPORE (JP): It was a bright Monday morning. The young man emerged from his house, playfully pinched the cheek of the child his wife was carrying, and roared off on his motorcycle to work after bidding her goodbye. A short distance away, a group of laughing children threw stones at a stray dog, which yelped and beat a hasty retreat with its tail between its legs. Oblivious to their cruel game were some old men, puffing kretek cigarettes while waiting to be served pisang goreng (fried banana) and steaming tea by an obliging vendor at their favorite roadside warung.

The young man, boy and old men spoke Bahasa Indonesia. So did other people around them. Yet this street scene, typified by wooden shanties huddled together along narrow dusty streets, was not a village near Jakarta or anywhere else in Indonesia.

Kampung Pandan Dalam is in the state of Selangor, not far from the bustling Malaysian capital city of Kuala Lumpur. It is an illegal settlement where several Indonesian families, numbering about 1000 people, lived crammed in 80 squatter houses, undetected for several years by the Malaysian authorities.

Their presence was recently exposed in a front page story a local daily, The Star, about Malaysian Home Minister Datuk Megat Junid Megat Ayob lambasting local authorities for ignoring the number of illegal Indonesian settlements in Malaysia.

The publicity, accompanied by color pictures and graphics of other illegal settlements in Selangor, spurred the authorities into action, particularly after the Selangor Chief Minister Tan Sri Muhammad Taib ordered all district offices to demolish the illegal settlements after serving the residents eviction notices.

On March 23, bulldozers moved into Kampung Pandan Dalam and began leveling the wooden houses. Within six hours, the illegal settlement which took six years to build was reduced to heaps of rubble and broken wood.

Many of its residents are being temporarily housed in makeshift structures at an open garage near where their homes used to stand, pending their deportation to Indonesia once they are confirmed as illegal immigrants.

The Kampung Pandan Dalam incident has highlighted the contentious issue of illegal Indonesian settlements proliferating in Malaysia. No one knows the exact numbers, but every one knows that they will suffer the same fate as Kampung Pandan Dalam.

Particularly after Dr. Mahathir Mohamad chided the local authorities for allowing the problem to reach such serious proportions. No one wants to incur the prime minister's further wrath. Rather than wait for another Kampung Pandan Dalam incident to blow up in their faces, several other chief ministers issued directives to flush out the illegal immigrants.

The lure of higher wages in Malaysia has made many Indonesians risk boat trips across the Strait of Malacca, often under cover of darkness from their homes in Sumatra, Java and Riau. Once they landed on various points in Malaysia's long coastline, they are hurriedly taken by organized syndicates to work on the oil palm plantations and construction sites which face a labor shortage.

They preferred this surreptitious mode of entry into Malaysia to the orderly but slow arrangements for Indonesian contract workers formulated by the Malaysian and Indonesian government. The gains of circumventing the cumbersome bureaucracies in both countries is offset by the exploitation of unscrupulous employers who pay meager wages and subject laborers to harsh working conditions.

Many illegal immigrants do not return home after their contract finishes, but work in Malaysia as hawkers and traders. Some men marry locals, and others tie the knot with other illegal immigrants. Inevitably the illegal immigrants build homes to settle permanently in Malaysia.

Illegally clearing jungle land they bought from locals before helping each other build houses, settlements like Kampung Pandan Dalam, Kampung Malindo II, Kampung Sungei Lui, Kampung Sungei Makau and Kampung Sungei Tekali sprouted and remained undetected until the Star reported their presence.

One reason they were able to keep a low profile was their ability to blend with the local Malay population since they spoke the same Malay language (but with a different accent) and professed Islam. Some of them even claimed the same indigenous status as the Malays.

The illegal immigrants were left alone so long as they did not threaten the local people. Lately, however, some of them were involved in a spate of armed robberies and served as hired assassins for local killers. There were also others who spread deviant Islamic teachings which displeased the religious authorities. These threats possibly pressured the authorities to act against the illegal immigrants.

Pecuniary advantage led some Malays to help set up the illegal settlements. The various state governments are probing the activities of these recalcitrant locals and aim to try them when the necessary evidence is gathered.

Many states sell farmland to Malays, and some locals resold this land to the illegal immigrants for handsome profits. Such transactions were often through "middlemen" who also got a cut of the profits. In many cases the illegal immigrants were misled into thinking their purchase of such land was genuine and they could do what they liked with it.

It was only when they were caught by the authorities and told they did not possess state land that the illegal immigrants realize they had been swindled.

Dr Mahathir has said his government's demolition of illegal Indonesian settlements in Malaysia would not harm the present cordial ties between the two countries. He made it clear that his government was cracking down on illegal settlements on state land irrespective of whether they were foreign or local.

No country anywhere could tolerate the existence of illegal settlement within its confines. If it did not do anything about the problem, the government would lose the confidence of the people. This was the essence of Dr Mahathir's message.

The premier was responding to a question by the Indonesian host of a talk show "Citra Nusantara" on March 23, jointly hosted by Indonesia's RCTI and Malaysia's TV3 commercial television channel. The Indonesian host questioned the necessity of the action since the immigrants had all ready set up a colony and what would happen to them after their houses were pulled down.

The writer is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore.