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First Lady vows to aid migrant workers
First Lady Kristiani Herawati promised Tuesday to tell the stories of Indonesian human trafficking victims in Malaysia to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Manpower and Transmigration Minister Muhaimin Iskandar
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irst Lady Kristiani Herawati promised Tuesday to tell the stories of Indonesian human trafficking victims in Malaysia to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Manpower and Transmigration Minister Muhaimin Iskandar.
“Be patient and have hope that your problems will be solved very soon,” Ani said to more than Indonesian 40 migrant workers at a labor shelter built by CIMB Bank Niaga.
“I will make sure that the President and the manpower and transmigration minister handle this issue properly and immediately,” she added.
Mistreatment of Indonesian workers in Malaysia is an issue in the nations’ bilateral relations.
The workers said they were all victims of human trafficking and were left without jobs after they had encountered problems with their Malaysian employers.
The migrant workers are mostly women between 12 and 20 years old. They claimed that their Indonesian sponsors manipulated their ages and other personal information to meet Malaysian employment regulations.
Fiona, 13, from Kiaracondong, Bandung, West Java, said a local court had sentenced her to a year in prison after she was convicted of setting fire to her employer’s bedroom.
“Ibu,” she said to Ani, “please help me get out this country. I want to go home to my mother.”
Fiona said she was 12 years old when an employment agent smuggled her from Bandung to Malaysia in October 2009.
She set the fire out of frustration after her employer’s children repeatedly beat her, she said.
“I could not endure the violence. I set the room on fire to attract attention and escaped.”
The Trengganu District Court allowed Fiona to serve her one-year sentence in the Indonesian Embassy, she said.
Fatimah, 28, from Sambas, West Kalimantan, said she has worked as a housemaid since she was 14 years old.
She said she has never received any salary and that her employers refused to let her communicate with relatives in Indonesia.
“I was sponsored by a West Kalimantan employment agency that claimed I was 22 so I could meet the official work requirements in Malaysia.
“I escaped from my [Chinese] employer because they forced me to eat pork when they knew I was Muslim,” she said.
Nurainun, 24, of Pangkalan Brandan, North Sumatra, told Ani a similar story.
Nurainun said she had never received any salary after 11 years of work for a Chinese-Malaysian family in the Taman Kodok housing compound in Kuala Lumpur.
Ani pledged to help the child laborers, who are mostly elementary school drop-outs or graduates,
return to Indonesia. She also offered to send the laborers to school free of charge until they finish high school.
Ani hugged Fiona and told the girl to finish the last eight months of her prison sentence so that she could return to Indonesia and continue studying at a junior high school.
Other human trafficking victims would be given low-interest loans to start small businesses in their home villages, Ani said.
