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resident Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo has reaped praise for his surprising pick of an all-woman committee to select the next leadership roster of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), the law enforcers the public trusts the most to fight graft.

If social media is a yardstick to measure popular response to a public policy, this decision is improving, or at least halting the slide of, Jokowi'€™s popularity.

As various surveys show, Jokowi has seen his popularity nosedive over his first six months in office because of his administration'€™s poor performance in the economic sector and his questionable commitment to fighting corruption. His poor handling of the snowballing rivalry between the KPK and the National Police was a big disappointment.

PoliticaWave, an organization that monitors public discourse in social media, noted that 93 percent of the more than 24,000 conversations it followed 24 hours after Jokowi announced the names of the KPK leadership candidates selection team on Thursday voiced support for the President.

According to PoliticaWave director Yose Rizal, the remaining 6 percent were skeptics who thought that by picking all women to select the future KPK top leaders, Jokowi was playing the gender card to polish his bruised image.

As some critics say, the nine Srikandi '€” a figure symbolizing female heroism in Javanese puppetry (wayang) '€” lack much-needed experience in corruption eradication and in handling pressure from powerful political interest groups wanting to control the KPK. Having women with no political affiliations on the KPK leadership selection team is a candid maneuver that Jokowi made to evade pressure from the political parties that support him, especially the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).

Jokowi'€™s inability to withstand pressure from parties has been singled out in the many blunders that he has made, such as his inaction to defend the besieged KPK and his pick of M. Prasetyo, a NasDem Party politician, as the new Attorney General. Headed by Bank Mandiri chief economist Destry Damayanti, the KPK candidate screening team will commence work soon and they will have to deal with pressure from various quarters that have an interest in placing their '€œrepresentatives'€ in the antigraft body.

The team'€™s proper selection could restore public trust in the KPK, which has been nearly crippled as the result of the recent conflict with the National Police after it named Comr. Gen. Budi Gunawan, a confidant of PDI-P chief Megawati Soekarnoputri, a graft suspect. Since then KPK leaders have been subject to criminal investigation and prosecution. As we know, the then KPK chairman Abraham Samad and his deputy Bambang Widjojanto have been named criminal suspects by the police.

Jokowi should not be dazzled by the early favorable public reactions. At the end of the day, the KPK screening team will be judged by its professionalism and independence.

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Indonesia, along with Malaysia, has offered to provide temporary shelter for a year to 7,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants rescued from the sea, a noble humanitarian gesture that the international community has highly commended. The two countries made the commitment during an emergency meeting, which was also attended by the Thai foreign minister, in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said the agreement applied only to the boat migrants currently found drifting in the sea. Meanwhile, Thailand is only willing to take care of the sick to be treated ashore and it refuses to provide temporary shelters. The emergency meeting was called to find ways for Southeast Asian countries to help resolve the growing humanitarian crises caused by the persecution and economic hardship endured by the Rohingya minority in Myanmar and the Bangladeshis.

Hundreds of people from Myanmar and Bangladesh, many of whom are women and children, have been found at sea off Aceh. Many were reportedly starving, dehydrated and sick after aimlessly drifting for weeks on the high seas.

Over the past few weeks, Aceh has provided temporary shelter for 677 people from Myanmar and Bangladesh, while they await international help to be repatriated or resettled in other countries. Indonesia should help the miserable migrants out of humanitarian considerations. However, as Indonesia is yet to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, we have no legal obligation to provide permanent shelter for the migrants and what the country has to offer them is adequate.

To accept migrants will pose a complicated domestic problem for Indonesia, which itself has millions of impoverished people to take care of.

Even to provide the migrants with temporary shelters can create social problems with the local residents in the longer term and therefore the government should find an uninhabited island to accommodate them, just as Indonesia earmarked Galang Island in Riau for Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s.

The Rohingyas'€™ large presence has sparked fears of a backlash among some Indonesian Buddhists. On Thursday, Indonesian Buddhayana Assembly representatives visited the Wahid Institute, an organization promoting pluralism, and called on the government to better protect them. Assembly spokesman Sugianto Sulaiman said Buddhist temples in some cities in Indonesia received bomb threats at the height of the Buddhist-Rohingya Muslim conflict in Myanmar in 2013.

The Rohingya presence in Indonesia poses a more complicated problem than many have thought.

'€” Pandaya