T

housands of Indonesians working on foreign vessels are suspected to be victims of human trafficking and slavery, an official says.

The Foreign Ministry'€™s director for the protection of Indonesian nationals and entities abroad, Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, said that there were at least 12,000 Indonesian crew members on Taiwanese ships prone to being exploited.

'€œThere is probably the same number of people on Korean vessels,'€ he told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

According to Iqbal, the number is just the tip of the iceberg.

'€œThere are so many [of them] and the trend is increasing every year,'€ he said. '€œMaybe there are cases that go undetected by us because sometimes we don'€™t have consuls or ambassadors in the places where they sail to.'€

According to Sea Shepherd Global, an international conservationist group, there are around 60,000 Indonesian crew members being exploited on board Korean and Taiwanese ships. The group came to the conclusion during a recent operation, where it hunted down alleged poaching vessels.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), meanwhile, had assisted 268 enslaved Indonesian crew members since 2005, with most of them rescued in African waters.

According to the Foreign Ministry, there are currently 262,000 Indonesians working as crew members overseas, with 77 percent working on fishing vessels, 8.84 percent on tugboats, 6.8 percent on cruise ships, 6.75 percent on cargo ships and 0.68 percent on tankers.

IOM Indonesia project manager Nurul Qoiriah said that in most cases, these crew members did not have any other option besides working like slaves.

'€œThey can'€™t run anywhere. Their Seafarer'€™s Identification and Record Books [SIRB] are detained [by the ships'€™ captains],'€ she said on Thursday.

The SIRB is a seafarer'€™s identity document issued for the purpose of providing the holder with identity papers for travel to or from an assigned vessel.

And sometimes the books are forged with fake identities and nationalities, Nurul said.

Recruitment company PT Karlwei Multi Global (Karltigo), for example, was found to be guilty of neglecting 163 Indonesian crew members on board a Taiwanese vessel in Trinidad and Tobago as well as operating without proper permits and forging documents for those 163.

The crew members were stranded in the middle of the ocean for six months after the company went bankrupt. However, the company neglected them without paying their salaries for two years.

When the crew members accepted the jobs, they did not know that they would work on ships.

They were offered a salary of US$240 per month during the first three months of the probation period. After that, they were promised a salary increase to $400. From their first day on board in 2011 until the day they were abandoned in 2013, they did not receive a single cent.

The case was brought to trial in 2014. The judges fulfilled a restitution payment request filed by trafficking victims, ordering the company to pay them Rp 1.2 billion ($90,100).

Data from the Foreign Ministry show that there were 606 Indonesian crew members named suspects for illegal fishing in 2014, while there are 187 cases in 2015 so far.

Sometimes, the Indonesian government succeeded in lobbying foreign governments to grant remission to its citizens, such as the recent case of 55 Indonesians who were repatriated on Monday after being imprisoned in Myanmar since 2014 for illegally entering and fishing in the waters of Myanmar.

Nurul, who was involved in the lobbying attempt, said that the Indonesian government was able to convince Myanmar to free the 55 Indonesians after being reminded of how Indonesia facilitated the repatriation of hundreds of enslaved Myanmar workers on the remote island of Benjina.