Yunus M. Yamani, chairman of the Indonesian Labor Exporters Association (Himsataki), said Manpower and Transmigration Minister Muhaimin Iskadar should coordinate with the Foreign Ministry and the National Agency for the Placement and Protection of Overseas Labor (BNP2TKI) to take measures to bring them home.

"The repatriation of troubled workers must be the priority of the new minister in the coming months," he told The Jakarta Post here Thursday.

The labor exporters association has monitored 600 migrant workers at the Indonesian Embassy in Kuwait, 300 in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, 150 in the United Arab Emirates and thousands of others in Indonesian embassies in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

"The workers have been stranded for weeks after personal problems or disputes with their employers and cannot get home because of financial constraints. Our diplomats and the BNP2TKI should not paper over the issue, as it has been reported to the President," he said.

Many workers employed as housemaids have frequently left their workplaces after being exploited, abused or mistreated by their employers and relatives, the exploitation and abuse rampant because the workers were undocumented and unskilled. Many labor exporters and activists have blamed the rampant abuse and human trafficking on the workers' unclear status and the refusal of destination countries to ratify the 1990 UN Convention on the protection of migrant workers and their families.

Yunus said many labor exporters were skeptical of the new minister, who is a politician who knows nothing about crucial manpower and transmigration issues.

He said the minister should first revise the appointment of the insurance consortium that had declined to repatriate the migrants.

The new minister should review labor export procedures which failed to bring together all stakeholders nor take into account any problems befalling workers between their departure to their arrival back home, he added.

Wahyu Susilo, a legal consultant for Migrant Care that provides legal advocacy for migrants, said the new minister should overhaul labor export procedures to provide legal protection for workers, including a review of the 2004 labor export and protection law.

"If Muhaimin is committed to labor protection, he has to review all rulings on labor export and recruitment processes, and to forge bilateral ties, especially when dealing with domestic helper issues," he said.

The government should ratify the UN Convention and lobby destination countries to do so too, he added.

Migrant Care urged the government to deal with the torture case of Mantik Hani, a migrant worker from Jember, East Java.

Mantik, 36, was unconscious, seriously injured, and bound hand and foot when she was found by the police at her employer's house in Klang Selangor on Tuesday.

Gerald Lazarus, a Malaysian lawyer and Mantik's advocate in the case, said he found out about the torture case from a woman who reported it at an adjacent police office.

"We are very disappointed with the government as neither the Manpower Ministry nor the BNP2TKI are paying any attention to the case, probably because there are so many torture cases in our neighboring country," Migrant Care executive director Anis Hidayah said.

She lambasted the government which, she said, had moved too slowly in dealing with the case, as it did with a similar case that befell Siti Hajar from Garut early this year.

She called on the new minister to follow up the proposed labor agreement between Indonesia and Malaysia to protect the more than 2 million workers working there.

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