Modes of extortion
After reading A. Djuana's letter (The Jakarta Post July 1, 1995) under the title "New mode of deceit," I began to realize the many tactics for extracting money which are practiced in Jakarta. The "trickery" employed by the hoodlums who feign injury after purposely knocking themselves against the sides of slow- moving cars and later demand money in compensation for their "injuries," as related in the letter published in The Jakarta Post, is certainly not an isolated case.
Recently, I stopped my car at the Sisingamangaraja-Trunojoyo junction, South Jakarta, waiting for the traffic lights to turn green. It was rather late at night then and there were very few cars around.
Suddenly, a rather big, hefty and fierce-looking young man appeared and approached my car, holding a big stone in his right hand. Knocking the stone against the windscreen and driver's window of my Mercedes, he demanded money, shouting "Duit, duit!," ("money, money!").
However, he took his heels when my wife, sitting next to me, sounded the horn repeatedly to attract public attention. I thus managed to escape from his extortion attempt.
But, if that incident involved a hoodlum, I have experienced another episode of attempted broad day extortion and trickery involving a white-collared, smartly dressed person of some authority.
The incident occurred at the Soekarno-Hatta Airport also not too long ago. I was then sending off an Indonesian domestic helper who was leaving Indonesia to join her foreign employer in another country. She had earlier been able to obtain an exemption from payment of the exit tax (fiscal) normally imposed on residents leaving Indonesia. The exemption was granted on the grounds that her stay in Indonesia had been temporary in nature, considering that she had earlier arrived from a foreign country and was leaving for another country, after a brief transit in Indonesia. The exemption was not, of course, obtained free of charge.
When we reached the Immigration counter at the airport, however, I was told that the girl needed yet another piece of paper, as part of the fiscal exemption procedure, before she could be allowed to pass through the Immigration point.
Bewildered, I rushed with the girl's passport and other documents to the relevant office, as indicated by the Immigration officer.
At that office, whilst the case was being processed, I was asked, in a conversational style, some personal questions -- by a man who was, apparently, the chief of the staff there. Three of those questions concerned my country of origin, my place of work and my address in Jakarta. To my replies to those three questions, the officer responded by, respectively, indicating how fortunate I was to have come from a richer country, to be able to be working in my "enviable" work place and to be privileged enough to be living at my "elite" residential address in Jakarta.
To each of those statements the officer also added a suggestion that I should be generous enough to "share my good fortune" with him and his officers. The suggestion was, in turn, followed up by a direct request.
However, when finally the whole procedure had been completed and he sought the expected "share of my good fortune" he had asked for, I replied -- after having received the domestic helper's passport and all her documents and making sure that they were all safely in my hands -- that, perhaps, the next time I would pay!
I then left his office, and, thereby, escaped the officer's extortion bid!
NGAN CUK WAK DEME
Jakarta