Stateless ethnic Chinese to get RI citizenship

Stateless ethnic Chinese to get RI citizenship

JAKARTA (JP): After decades of waiting, some 140,000 stateless
ethnic Chinese will finally get Indonesian citizenship before the
end of the year courtesy of a 1995 presidential ruling, Antara
reported on Wednesday.

The Ministry of Law and Legislation said on Wednesday that
145,070 out of the 208,820 registered stateless ethnic Chinese in
Indonesia in 1993 had sent in applications for citizenship,
according to the news agency.

Among the applications, 139,788 have been approved and 3,974
returned because they were incomplete.

Only 108 applications were turned down, mostly women who are
married to Chinese nationals or those who stated their profession
in the application form as a former teacher in China.

The ministry said that the government hoped to speed up the
naturalization process for all the stateless ethnic Chinese so
that their citizenship could be granted by December.

It added that the government had already simplified the
bureaucratic procedures to obtain Indonesian citizenship for
these people in line with the 1995 presidential decree.

Many of them have lived in Indonesia for over 40 years and
have built their homes and families in this country.

The problem of the stateless ethnic Chinese in Indonesia dates
back to the early 1960s when the government barred Indonesians
from having two nationalities, a policy which effectively forced
many ethnic Chinese living here to either relinquish their
nationality, or adopt Indonesian citizenship.

While thousands of them left the country, most of them who had
already lived in the country for generations took up the
citizenship offer. But some of those who stayed became stateless
persons because of difficulties in getting through the
bureaucracy when processing their papers. (emb)