Jakarta Globe,
Rizky Amelia, Edi Hardum, Novianti Setuningsih & Vita A.D. Busyra, Jul 30,
2014
Jakarta. Activists have demanded sterner action from the authorities against the long-running shakedown of migrant workers and foreigners at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, following the release of 18 people arrested last weekend for roles in an alleged extortion racket.
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| A returning migrant worker at Soekarno-Hatta airport, where an extortion racket has been running for more than a decade. (Antara Photo/Noveradika) |
Jakarta. Activists have demanded sterner action from the authorities against the long-running shakedown of migrant workers and foreigners at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, following the release of 18 people arrested last weekend for roles in an alleged extortion racket.
The
Corruption Eradication Commission, or KPK, which led the sting operation last
Saturday, has estimated that the network of criminals, officials and military
and police personnel at the airport extorts some Rp 325 billion ($28 million) a
year from returning migrant workers.
“We demand
to know why President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has neglected these cases for so
long even though the crimes are so blatant,” Emerson Yuntho, the legal
monitoring coordinator at Indonesia Corruption Watch, a nongovernmental
organization, said on Wednesday.
He accused
the president of constantly calling on migrant workers to increase the amount
of remittances they sent back from abroad while doing little himself to end the
discrimination and predatory practices they faced back in the country.
Emerson
urged Yudhoyono to haul up Manpower Minister Muhaimin Iskandar and Gatot
Abdullah Mansyur, the head of the Agency for the Placement and Protection of
Indonesian Migrant Workers, or BNP2TKI, for questioning about the officials
preying on the migrant workers, and to fire them if they were found to be
negligent in their oversight of the matter.
Emerson
also said that the military and police chiefs should be made to answer for
their men’s roles in the racket, which included forcing migrant workers to use
specific taxis, which were set up to shake down the vulnerable passengers.
Two police
officers and one soldier were among the 18 people arrested during the sting
operation at the airport. However, police released all of the suspects on
Monday, promising to follow up on the case in the mean time.
“We have to
send them home, but we’ve obliged them to report to us regularly and write a
statement [that they will not repeat the alleged offense],” Jakarta Police
spokesman Sr. Comr. Rikwanto said on Sunday.
Gen.
Sutarman, the National Police chief, said on Monday that there was a
possibility that the two police officers arrested in the sting could be
dismissed.
“We will
process their crimes and ethical violations [and look into] whether or not they
are still worthy of serving as police officers,” he said.
But the
release of the suspects, including 15 criminals known to have been running the
extortion racket for more than 10 years, is a “huge mistake,” according to Anis
Hidayah, the executive director of Migrant Care, a migrant worker rights NGO.
“What a
blunder! If the Jakarta Police released all of them, then we need to be
suspicious that many more police officers might be involved,” Anis told the
Jakarta Globe on Wednesday.
She
demanded that the investigation continue to break up what she called the
long-ingrained culture of corruption and nepotism in the government’s handling
of migrant workers.
“The
terminal where the migrant workers pass through at the airport is under the
oversight of the BNP2TKI,” Anis said.
She added
that Migrant Care was working closely with the KPK to gather evidence and
propose policies to break up extortion rings run by officials, agencies and
civil society groups.
KPK deputy
chairman KPK Bambang Widjojanto said that the extortion racket had been
squeezing some Rp 325 billion out of unwitting arrivals every year for more
than a decade.
“Around
360,000 migrant workers return home each year, and the thugs extort an average
of Rp 2.5 million per person,” he said on Saturday. “If we estimate that 50
percent of all migrant workers are being extorted, that’s 130,000 workers times
Rp 2.5 million, which is Rp 325 billion per year.”
Wahyu
Susilo, a researcher at Migrant Care, said similar shakedowns were also taking
place at other airports across the country, and slammed the BNP2TKI chief’s
proposal for a return to the previous system whereby all migrant workers were
channeled through a dedicated terminal at Soekarno-Hatta.
Wahyu
pointed out that this system was abandoned in 2012 precisely because the
officials running the terminal were given free rein to extort the migrant
workers away from the public gaze, and that if it was revived, it would only
exacerbate the problem.
The
Manpower Ministry has also refuted the idea of a return to the single-terminal
system.
“I think we
all agree that allowing the migrant workers the choice to travel freely is a
non-discriminative act, but that obliging them to travel through a specific
terminal would be discriminative,” Reyna Usman, the ministry’s director general
for guidance and placement of migrant workers, said on Tuesday.
He said the
solution was to tighten up oversight at Soekarno-Hatta and other airports to
crack down on the extortion racketeers.
“It’s
embarrassing that we have so many criminals operating at the airport and that
we have to consider special measures for migrant workers just because of this.
The best thing, of course, is to eradicate the criminals,” Reyna said.
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