By Margot Cohen in Tanjungbalai, north Sumatra, and Sigli, Aceh
In his long career as the famed troubadour of Aceh, 66-year-old Adnan P.M. Toh had never played to a more captive audience. More than 500 Acehnese workers – some of them handcuffed – listened to Adnan recite melodious verse on March 27 aboard a military ship bound for Aceh, Indonesia's northernmost province on the tip of Sumatra. They had been deported from Malaysia, and Adnan's performance, courtesy of the Indonesian government, aimed to ease their fears of a hostile homecoming.
The pudgy entertainer's verses drew laughter and rueful tears. "Before you left, you were all so handsome," he trilled in his native Acehnese. "Look at you now, you're all wounded."
Adnan's lyrics rang literally true: Many in his audience were bruised and bleeding – casualties of "Operation Go Away," Malaysia's large-scale crackdown on illegal workers. In an effort to free up jobs for its own people and stem the influx of job-seekers escaping Indonesia's economic crisis, Malaysia is forcibly repatriating thousands of workers from Sumatra, Java, Lombok, Kalimantan and East Timor. Most seemed stunned or angry at their overnight transformation from unsung heroes of Malaysian development to unwanted parasites. Many have shocking tales of physical and mental abuse at the hands of the Malaysian authorities. "It's inhumane," grumbles Adnan, echoing a view expressed by Indonesian officials supervising the deportees, hospital staff who have treated them and activists at non-governmental organizations.
But this shock therapy appears to be working. Traumatized deportees told the REVIEW they wouldn't dream of going back to Malaysia, and would discourage friends and relatives from doing so. Many others reportedly poised to sneak across the Strait of Malacca have hastily cancelled their plans. Even some fishermen who supplemented their income by transporting illegal migrants have gone into abrupt retirement. With Malaysian naval patrols boarding suspicious vessels, "it's too much of a risk," says a boatman in Lalang village on the east Sumatran coast.
Such vigilance may be deterring migrants for the moment, but the factors fuelling illegal migration remain undiminished: Job scarcity at home, higher wages abroad, and the demand for cheap labour in Malaysia. These factors provide fertile ground for illegal labour recruiters who are everywhere in Indonesia – "in the government, in the streets, in the bus terminals," complains Parlindungan Purba, executive director of Mutiara Karya Mitra, a recruitment firm operating legally in the north Sumatra capital of Medan.
Despite the threat of stiff fines, Malaysian employers are also likely to continue hiring illegal workers if they feel the risks are offset by the benefits: They don't have to pay for work permits, medical check-ups, minimum wages or foreign-worker levies. Deported workers say their Malaysian bosses and recruitment agents routinely extracted money from them as fees for their "work permits," but they later discovered the stamps in their passports to be false.
Even now, seamen in the north Sumatran port of Tanjungbalai say would-be illegal migrants are cooling their heels on small Indonesian islands such as Pandan in the Strait of Malacca, waiting to be smuggled into Malaysia. But some 3,000 others from Java and other islands seeking to be smuggled across the strait were sent home by the authorities in Riau province in March. According to NGO officials, the Riau islands have provided many popular jumping-off points into Malaysia, with recruiters, officials and police colluding in the lucrative business.
Until recently, turning a blind eye was the official attitude in Malaysia too – according to experiences related by deported Indonesian workers. Take the allegations of 24-year-old Zainuddin, a gaunt rice farmer from Lombok. In April 1996, tempted by tales of high pay, he gave an Indonesian recruiter 550,000 rupiah ($235 at then exchange rates) to slip him into Malaysia on a fishing boat departing from Riau. An additional 500 ringgit ($200), paid to a Malaysian agent, bought him a construction job in Kuantan, a city in the central state of Pahang. During his two years there, he was caught by police four times, but got off each time by paying a bribe of 50-100 ringgit, he says.
Money couldn't save him last month, though, when the crackdown came. Armed police burst into his boarding house on March 17 and threw him into a lock-up barefoot and barechested. For nine days, he says, he slept on a cement floor in his shorts and endured beatings that came without warning and for no apparent reason. At one point, he recalls, a policeman beating him with a rattan stick snarled: "Your president is a very rich man. Why do all of you have to come to our country like hungry dogs?"
More beatings came, he says, after his transfer to another camp, one of Malaysia's 10 overcrowded detention centres for illegal immigrants. He began spitting up blood. Deportation came as a relief. On April 6, he was still being treated for his injuries at the hospital in Tanjungbalai, the north Sumatran port where many deportees land. Apart from beatings, other deportees speak of a menagerie of punishments. One was called "dizzy elephant" in which a migrant is told to place a finger on the ground and twirl around until he falls down. Orders to "walk like a duck" require scuttling across hot pebbles. Beatings on the head with heavy wooden planks were also reported. The trauma of detention alone appears to be leaving psychological scars. "Don't kill me, don't kill me," sobbed an Indonesian woman in her early 30s when a reporter tried to interview her as she sat slumped in a temporary shelter in Tanjungbalai. She had been deported from Malaysia for working illegally as a maid.
Other workers are less frightened than bitter. "Without Indonesians, all those Malaysian buildings wouldn't be standing," declares Didik Supriadi, a 33-year-old from East Java. Didik earned a good salary installing electrical cables in the state of Selangor. But he brought nothing home in April, he says, because the authorities seized 2,500 ringgit from him when he was arrested. Such complaints are common, although a few workers told the REVIEW that the police had returned their meagre funds prior to deportation. One worker was so desperate to hold on to 200 ringgit that he rolled it up in plastic and swallowed it, along with a banana. He excreted the bills on the boat trip home.
Malaysian police have declined to comment on these specific allegations of abuse, and have denied charges of brutal treatment in general. "It is clear that such reports which allege that the police mistreated illegal immigrants at detention centres have bad intentions," Malaysia's deputy director of Internal Security and Public Order, Mohamad Yusof Said, said on April 10. "They are aimed at creating a strain on the good relations enjoyed by Malaysia and her neighbours."
Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights is planning to send a fact-finding mission to Malaysia to examine the deportation process. But, anxious to maintain neighbourly relations – and preserve work opportunities for legal migrants – the Indonesian government seems reluctant to protest against the treatment of its citizens.
Indonesian officials are instead scrambling to prepare for more boatloads of deportees. Since March 27, 2,035 deportees have arrived in Tanjungbalai and 545 have arrived in Aceh, say Indonesian officials, with 11,000 more to follow, according to human-rights workers. Unlike the Acehnese who were taken on a naval vessel to the Aceh city of Lhokseumawe, migrants arriving in the Sumatran port of Tanjungbalai come in wooden boats normally used to transport vegetables. "If there's an accident, who will take responsibility?" frets Slamet Priyoto, the official overseeing deportees there.
New arrivals are put up in a temporary tented shelter inside the local football stadium. Appalled at the scanty apparel of the first wave of deportees – some clad in only a sarong or torn shorts – officials have collected used clothing from the local community. Those who arrive with enough money to go home are dropped off at the bus terminal, no questions asked. The destitute sign up for food allowances and free bus trips home, partly funded by the Social Affairs Ministry, now headed by Siti Hardijanti Rukmana, President Suharto's eldest daughter. "Don't go back to Malaysia!" squawks a stadium loudspeaker, as workers assemble to board buses. "Develop your villages!"
The saga might have ended there, with their forlorn return to the villages. But the repatriation of Indonesian workers has been complicated by a political issue – the claims of some Acehnese migrants to be political refugees, members of the Free Aceh movement. A small insurgency by this Islamic separatist brigade that began in the 1970s was effectively crushed by the Indonesian army in the 1990s (see box). Many Free Aceh operatives fled to Malaysia, where their status is unclear. To the Malaysian government, they have all been economic migrants. "Claims that they were political refugees only surfaced in the last few weeks," Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said on April 9.
But now that they are being ejected, members of the fading movement appear to be fighting back. Bloody riots greeted deportation attempts, the most serious occurring on March 26 at the Semenyih camp outside Kuala Lumpur, leaving eight migrants and a policeman dead.
Immediately after the riots, a Free Aceh-linked group called the Acheh/Sumatra National Liberation Front issued a press release in typically charged language: "These hapless, unarmed refugees [risk] death by summary execution if they are surrendered to the hands of the Javanese-Indonesian neocolonialist regime, led by Suharto and his cohorts of Javanese generals."
Dramatic action followed these words. On March 30, 14 Acehnese slammed a truck through the gates of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Kuala Lumpur and demanded asylum. On April 10, another 35 Acehnese stormed three embassies and a Brunei-owned palace in Kuala Lumpur, also demanding asylum.
The French and Swiss embassies promptly called in the Malaysian police to remove them, as did the Brunei authorities. But the American embassy refused to turn over the eight Acehnese who sought refuge there and asked the UNHCR to investigate their claims that they would be persecuted if returned to Indonesia. The UNHCR also extended protection to the 14 Acehnese in its own compound. On April 13, the commission said it wanted to investigate the conditions of the 545 Acehnese deported on March 26 before deciding the fate of the 22 people seeking asylum in Kuala Lumpur.
The UNHCR has no access to the Malaysian detention camps or to Rancong, an Indonesian "re-education centre" outside Lhokseumawe where 500-odd Acehnese deportees have been detained. Human-rights groups cite historical reasons for concern about Rancong. New York-based Human Rights Watch calls it "the most notorious military interrogation centre in Aceh . . . the site of extrajudicial executions and torture" from 1989 to 1992.
Rancong appears to be a different place today, according to a group of 11 Javanese and Sumatran migrants who were released after being mistakenly sent to Aceh by the Malaysian authorities and kept in Rancong for four days. They say decent food and clean clothing is available, and activities indeed focus on re-education. The Acehnese reportedly attend hours of lectures on development, as well as how-to sessions on making tofu and soyabean cakes. Islamic preachers provide spiritual guidance, and volleyball games fill spare afternoon hours. Since April 11, Rancong has been rapidly emptied of its inmates, who are being sent to skills-training centres around Aceh for one-to-two weeks. They will then be allowed to go home.
Fourteen of the detainees, however, face a more uncertain future. On April 4, the military announced that they were linked to the Free Aceh movement. Six were said to be cadres, and eight were considered "lightly" involved. Although military officials in Jakarta and Medan had said earlier that none of the deportees would be put on trial, the fate of these 14 remains to be seen.
North Aceh regent Karimuddin Hasybullah maintains that it was psychologically necessary to hold deportees in seclusion in Rancong. The beatings they allegedly received in Malaysia, combined with rumours that they would be tortured upon arrival in Aceh, caused tremendous angst among the deportees, he says. "We didn't want the families to see them in a state of shock. We wanted to give them time to build their self-confidence."
But fears of retribution still linger due to the heavy military guard assigned to hospital rooms where detainees recover from gunshot wounds and other consequences of Malaysia's crackdown. (Two patients were forced to have feet amputated because of festering wounds allegedly neglected by Malaysian authorities.)
No matter how harsh the deterrent tactics, however, fear alone will not stop for long a lunge for more lucrative shores.
The real deterrent is jobs at home – for people like 25-year-old Mohammad Atim, who is finding it harder and harder to make a living taking snapshots of tourists at the magnificent 19th-century Baiturrahman mosque in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. He is considering a jump to Malaysia, he says. "I'm not afraid to die."