Illegal RI workers face KL fury

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.