Registration for Jakarta's of stateless Chinese begins
JAKARTA (JP): Hundreds of Chinese who lack proper citizenship documents registered at the Tambora and Tamansari district offices in West Jakarta yesterday as the city administration began collecting data expected to settle their immigration status.
As of yesterday afternoon, almost 300 Chinese were present at the Tamansari district office, over 100 of whom registered themselves.
According to the chief of the office, Satibi Darwis, those who have not registered yet lacked some of the documents required for adopting Indonesian citizenship.
Satibi said that there are over 5,000 Chinese in the area, or three percent of the district's total population, who are categorized as stateless.
"The 5,000 are only those previously registered, while the unregistered stateless Chinese living in this district are estimated to total over 1,500 people," Satibi told The Jakarta Post.
The current registration is offered free of charge to stimulate the people of Chinese descent, who are still stateless, to register.
The people of Chinese descent who are considered stateless are those who do not have either Chinese or Indonesian citizenship. The suspension of diplomatic ties between the People's Republic of China and Indonesia in the wake of the 1965 aborted communist coup made it impossible for the people of Chinese descent resident in Indonesia to apply for Chinese citizenship. Ties were restored in 1990.
Informed Sources at the Tambora district office said the total number of registered stateless Chinese in the area reached 5,500 people, or two percent of the total population. It is estimated that another 2,000 stateless Chinese remain unregistered in the district.
A number of the Chinese classified as stateless in the Tambora and Tamansari districts interviewed by the Post said they had long wanted to naturalize and become Indonesian citizens but did not have enough money to afford it.
"Several years ago, it cost me millions of rupiah to get Indonesian citizenship," said Alex, an Indonesian citizen of Chinese descent, who was seeking information for his still stateless relatives at the Tamansari district office.
T.M. Pardede, head of the assimilation agency at the Directorate General of Social and Politic Affairs of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the registration will last up to October.
"We'll open this opportunity until October. But if until then, they still do not register, we will introduce another measure," Pardede told the Post while inspecting the registration in Tamansari and Tambora, the two largest areas in the capital where many Chinese reside.
Rp 160 million
After being registered, each person who qualifies can apply for Indonesian citizenship, while the rest will be given documents to confirm their foreign citizenship.
For naturalization, each person has to have more than a dozen documents, including a birth certificate, a document certifying loyalty to the nation and good conduct papers, which may cost each individual a total of Rp 647,000 (US$302).
Reliable sources at City Hall said the municipal administration has allocated some Rp 160 million to finance the registration. The funds are taken from this fiscal year budget for the capital.
Records at the city population affairs office show that around 27,500 stateless Chinese live in the capital, while data at the Directorate General of Immigration of the Ministry of Justice lists the number stateless of Chinese in the city at only 4,200.
Hario Subayu of the immigration office said he could understand the big difference between the records at his office and those of the city administration.
"The city administration has its own officials collecting data down to the neighborhood unit level, while we depend heavily on voluntary reregistration," Hario said. (jsk/11)