Egypt slams RI minister’s statement

INDONESIA: The Egyptian government is questioning Indonesian Manpower and Transmigration Minister Muhaimin Iskandar’s statement that the country was forbidding the sending of Indonesian migrant workers to Egypt due to ongoing instability.

“It would not occur to us that the Indonesian government would have made such a decision had the situation in Egypt qualified in the minister’s assessment of ‘political upheavals in Libya and Egypt which could endanger the lives of our workers’,” the Egyptian Embassy in Jakarta said in a press statement issued Thursday.

Muhaimin was earlier quoted by Antara news agency as saying that Indonesia had stopped sending workers to Libya and Egypt due to the political crisis in both countries and would resume sending them only when conditions had returned to normal.

These statements, the embassy said, were “gravely inconsistent and contradictory” because the Indonesian government’s latest assessment of the situation in Egypt was that is was stable and secure. — JP