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Plight of shoeshine boys
It is not uncommon to see trials in which severe punishments are handed down for minor offences
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t is not uncommon to see trials in which severe punishments are handed down for minor offences. This was the case befalling 10 shoeshine boys who were charged with gambling at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.
What constituted their “crime” was betting on a game of heads-or-tails, and their punishment was one month’s imprisonment. During this their parents must have gone through hell.
Some of the children also had to flush one year of elementary school education down the drain after missing their final school exams that took place while they were in custody in the first week of June.
After committing their crime, the children were taken to the nearby police post and instructed to lie in the full sun at noon before being put behind bars. And they were detained alongside those held on more serious charges such as drug offences and theft, a horrible experience for minors.
Just before the hearing on Monday, one of the children vomited and passed out, presumably because of anxiety and exhaustion, sending his mother into a panic.
While the Tangerang court released the 10 boys, aged between eight and 15 years, they must remain under the control of the social welfare agency until they are adults.
The arrest and detention of the boys was conducted under the pretext of the Clean Airport Action campaign to upgrade the airport, which serves 32 million passengers a year. This one-year-old campaign is aimed at improving the airport’s toilets, parking system and has included raids on hawkers, and hence the shoeshine boys were also targeted.
We support the campaign, wholeheartedly, because Jakarta airport is among the worst airports in the region. It pales in comparison to Singapore’s Changi (consistently chosen as the world’s best), or Malaysia’s Subang Airport in Kuala Lumpur, which is newer and no less impressive.
Jakarta’s airport has huge room for improvement. For one, it has continually been plagued with traffic jams, particularly the domestic airport that has won the nickname of “a chaotic bus terminal”. It is probably the only airport furnished with ojek (motorcycle taxis) plying freely while carrying passengers from one terminal to another.
Managing an airport is a complex enterprise since it is like a city in itself. You need to provide a multitude of services for people on the move, from well-paved roads to clean water; from accommodation to fire fighters; from taxis to air-traffic controllers. Beyond this you must also deal with smugglers, extortion by corrupt officials against migrant workers, human traffickers and terrorists.
The menace posed by the shoeshine boys must have ranked somewhere at the bottom of the priority list.
Hence, the punishment rendered by the police and the Tangerang court smacks of power being exercised arbitrarily against small offenders who only work to complement their families’ meager incomes.
We can surely make the airport a better place as we have in the past, modest building construction notwithstanding. In those days, airport services were edging toward excellent.
We sympathize with the police for the dilemma they face in ridding the airport from shoeshine boys, since they are dealing with the tip of an iceberg — wide-scale poverty affecting more than 100 million people according to data from the World Bank.
Poverty eradication is certainly beyond the police’s call of duty, but they should at least be able to show a little more lenience toward defenseless defendants like shoeshine boys.
