RI looking for hostages' families

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.