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Distrust puts overseas Indonesian trafficking victims in peril
Indonesian authorities have repatriated dozens of trafficking victims from Cambodia in recent weeks, but hundreds more are still stranded, mostly due to a reluctance to act.
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A former Indonesian victim of human trafficking (third left, in blue) speaks up about his experience in front of Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi (right, seated, in white) and her entourage at the Indonesian Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on Aug. 2, 2022. The government managed to set free scores of Indonesian trafficking victims with the help of Khmer authorities after one supposed victim went viral with his plea for help to Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo on social media in July. (Courtesy of Foreign Ministry/-)
Bima, a 32-year-old worker from Jakarta who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of reprisal, had been desperately hanging onto the last of his cash before sending out a message to an online-taxi driver that he hired.
“My life is in your hands. Say exactly what I have told you to say and wait however long it takes,” he recounted his message to the stranger in Phnom Penh.
The month before, Bima said he was promised an IT job in Cambodia, and, having a degree in the field, thought the US$1,000 per month salary offered was a sound deal.
But the money never came. Instead, his passport was confiscated, he was locked inside an office building and coerced into working more than 15 hours a day to scam Indonesians back home out of millions of rupiah via popular online marketplaces. He claims he was only paid less than $300 monthly and was subjected to physical violence and mental torture.
He had secretly filed reports to Indonesian officials based in the Cambodian capital, but that seemingly fell on deaf ears. So it was up to his taxi driver to save him from the grips of modern slavery.
Bima requested that the driver pose as an embassy official ordered by the Indonesian authorities to rescue him, and that, in failing to convince the trafficker, he would seek to alert Interpol regarding the matter. The driver obliged and pulled off the role, in what Bima described as “a miracle”.
After some heated arguments and physical altercations with his trafficker, according to secretly recorded footage seen by The Jakarta Post, he was eventually let go.
