Prospective haj pilgrims blast listing

BEKASI (JP): Prospective haj pilgrims protested to a local bank branch and the regional legislative council as they found their names excluded from the list for this year's trip.

Representatives of the 350 prospective pilgrims to Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia, said they had paid the required fee long before the closing date.

The government had set the opening date for registrations as Aug. 19 and the closing date as Nov. 30 or earlier, if the quota set by the Saudi government was already met. This year's quota is 195,000 pilgrims.

"I had paid the fee for the pilgrimage to Bank BNI even before the registration began," a retired army officer, Tugiman, told a local Bank BNI officer yesterday.

"You should have known the quota for your bank and stopped accepting registration and payment as soon as it was filled," Tugiman said angrily.

Lili Sugiarto, the Bank BNI officer, replied that he did not know about his bank's quota up to yesterday.

"What we knew was that last year's quota for this bank was 2,000 people," he explained.

The candidates accused the bank officers of foul play.

Bekasi has a quota of 4,571 pilgrims this year which is shared among five state banks: Bank Ekspor Impor Indonesia, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Bank Tabungan Negara, Bank National Indonesia and Bank Bumi Daya.

Bekasi is one of 25 regencies in West Java whose total quota is 46,000 pilgrims this year.

The government has set a fee of Rp 7,551,000 (US$2949.61) for this year's haj pilgrimage.

Last year, the quota of 192,000 was filled within 18 days after registration opened. 2,000 were canceled due to illness or other reasons.

Hundreds of candidates failed to leave because they lacked the necessary documents, including visas. The Ministry of Religious Affairs, in charge of having the candidates' documents processed at the Saudi Arabian embassy, was blamed for the crisis.

Forty thousand of the 230,000 candidates who applied had to be put on the waiting list for this year's haj. (kod)