RI looking for hostages' families

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

While two Indonesian citizens are in the clutches of kidnappers in Iraq, the government continued to seek their family members. Officials said earlier they were trying to involve family members of the women, Rosidah binti Anom and Rafikan binti Aming, in appealing for their release.

Spokesman of the Foreign Affairs Minister Marty Natalegawa said on Sunday said that a special team handling the hostage crisis was continuing its search for the women's family members. They also wanted to find out about travel history in the Middle East.

"We have distributed their photographs to the Middle East regions surrounding Iraq. We want to find out whether these women had come to these regions before they went to Iraq," Marty said.

As of late Sunday there was no sign of who and where the families of the women were, despite the fact that their pictures taken from Al Jazeera footage have been published and aired in several print and electronic media.

Clearing up the confusion over their identities, Marty said the two women had mentioned their own names, in an interview aired on the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television channel, which was broadcast on Friday. Marty had said the interviewer of the hostages spoke to them in Indonesian "with a heavy Arab accent".

The special team comprising officials of the ministries of foreign affairs and manpower had also managed on Sunday to contact by phone a woman with a similar name to one of the hostages. The woman, Rafikah binti Nasim, turned out to be safe in Kuwait where she was working as a housemaid.

The difficulty so far has been establishing how the women came to be in Iraq, as each of the government's appointed labor supply agencies stated that they had not sent the two women there. Requests to send Indonesian workers to Iraq have been turned down as the country is now at war, claimed Husein Alaidrus, chairman of the Indonesian Labor Export Association (Apjati).

He said on Saturday that they had found none of their members who had sent the above women to Iraq. He suggested that the two workers could have entered Iraq on their own initiative or could have been directly recruited by Iraqi employers from other Middle East countries because Indonesia suspended labor exports to Iraq even before the U.S.-led alliance launched their offensive there.

The hostage takers, naming themselves the Islamic Army in Iraq, have demanded that Indonesia release alleged Jamaah Islamiyah leader Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, who in turn has angrily dismissed the demands, saying that holding innocent women hostages "is a sin."

President Megawati Soekarnoputri on Saturday appealed for the hostages' release, reminding them that the Muslim fasting month was approaching.