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)