Institute for Development Studies (IDS) pernah membuat kajian terhadap Majlis Perbandaran Tawau pada tahun 1998 dan membuat laporan serta saranan seperti berikut:
Majlis Perbandaran Tawau (MPT) terletak dalam kawasan strategik kerana kedudukannya yang berdekatan dengan sempadan Indonesia dan Filipina. Ia mempunyai beberapa kriteria penting terutama dari segi keluasan, jumlah dan pertambahan populasi, masalah-masalah dan cabaran-cabaran perbandaran yang ia hadapi.
MPT mempunyai keluasan pentadbiran yang meliputi 2,390 batu persegi dan merupakan majlis perbandaran yang terluas di Malaysia. Selain daripada itu, mengikut kadar pertumbuhan penduduk di masa lalu, kawasan MPT mengalami pertambahan penduduk yang amat pesat. Ini berpunca dari pertambahan penduduk semulajadi dan penghijrahan penduduk dari negara-negara yang berhampiran ke kawasan ini.
Kepesatan pertambahan penduduk ini merupakan cabaran utama MPT kerana ia memberi kesan dari segi pencapaian objektif eksternal dan internal majlis terutama dalam aspek-aspek kawalan dan perancangan pembangunan, pemeliharaan alam sekitar, penyediaan infrastruktur dan penciptaan peluang-peluang ekonomi, keupayaan pengurusan, perjalanan pentadbiran majlis, pentadbiran bandar, perubahan peranan MPT dan tahap jangkaan orang ramai terhadap perkhidmatan majlis.
MPT juga menghadapi pelbagai cabaran lain antaranya :-
1. bagaimana untuk meningkatkan kerjasama dengan jabatan-jabatan dan agensi-agensi kerajaan lain dalam usahanya mencapai objektif-objektifnya;
2. bagaimana untuk mengeratkan hubungan dengan orang ramai;
3. bagaimana membuat dan melaksanakan dengan berkesan undang-undang kecil majlis yang bersesuaian dengan keperluan dan kehendak awam; dan
4. cabaran yang penting sekali adalah bagaimana untuk membina keupayaan organisasi majlis di semua lapisan pengurusan, pegawai dan kakitangan MPT terutama dari segi menguatkan kefahaman, pengetahuan, prestasi kerja dan perkhidmatan majlis.
Beberapa cadangan telah dikemukakan untuk mengemaskinikan struktur organisasi MPT dengan tujuan membantu MPT mencari kepelbagaian alternatif penyelesaian dan pilihan.
Cadangan-cadangan ini juga bertujuan memberi input kepada MPT dalam usahanya menangani kepelbagaian masalah yang timbul akibat perubahan tuntutan orang ramai, keadaan dan persekitaran. Perkara-perkara penting tersebut adalah seperti
berikut :-
I. Pada dasarnya tiada perubahan struktur yang dicadangkan bagi tiga jawatan tertinggi majlis;
II. Unit Perhubungan Awam dicadangkan ditukar nama kepada Bahagian Pembangunan Luar Bandar dan Perhubungan Awam, di mana Timbalan Presiden Majlis Perbandaran adalah lebih memokus kepada pembangunan di kawasan luar bandar dalam kawasan majlis di samping melaksanakan kerja-kerja penerangan;
III. Unit Hiasan Bandar dialihkan dari Bahagian Operasi dan Perkhidmatan ke Bahagian Pembangunan kerana tugas dan tanggungjawabnya berkaitan dengan pembangunan.
IV. nama “Pengurus Dewan” dicadangkan untuk ditukar kepada istilah lain seperti “Penyelenggara Dewan” kerana ia bercanggah dengan kuasa dan tanggungjawab yang terdapat pada “Pengurus Harta Benda”.
V. Pegawai undang-undang hendaklah diletakkan di bawah bahagiannya tersendiri. Bahagian Undang-undang yang dicadangkan memerlukan sekurang-kurangnya seorang lagi pegawai undang-undang.
VI. Sistem Komputer diletakkan di bawah Bahagian Pentadbiran dan Kewangan yang dikawal oleh seorang computer programmer dibantu oleh kakitangan komputer lain.
Beberapa isu dan masalah dalaman majlis yang harus diambil perhatian antaranya adalah :-
i. kebanyakan penyandang bagi tiga jawatan teratas majlis adalah terlalu dekat kepada usia persaraan. Ini membentuk tanggapan umum bahawa jawatan-jawatan tersebut adalah tempat untuk memberikan kenaikan pangkat atau penempatan seketika sementara menanti tempoh persaraan;
II. lantikan dan tempoh perkhidmatan yang terlalu singkat kerana penyandang boleh ditukarkan pada bila-bila masa. Kecenderungan sedemikian menggagalkan (defeat) usaha untuk memperlihatkan pencapaian yang hanya boleh dinilai selepas suatu jangka waktu yang mencukupi;
III. pertukaran presiden yang kerap meletakkan kepepimpinan dan situasi dalaman majlis dalam keadaan yang sukar, contohnya telah tiga kali kejadian di mana dalam MPT terdapat dua presiden pada suatu ketika;
IV. dari segi penilaian kakitangan, usaha dan kesungguhan pengurusan hendaklah ditingkatkan bagi meyakinkan kakitangan bahawa ganjaran dan kenaikan pangkat adalah berdasarkan kepada meritocracy dan bukan disebabkan oleh pengaruh elemen lain, contohnya kaitan atau pengaruh politik;
V. penekanan haruslah diberi kepada tingkat produktiviti. Dengan kata lain, penekanan penilaian dalam pencapaian haruslah berdasarkan kecemerlangan dalam profesion, prestasi output dan disiplin kerja;
VI. lebih banyak pergerakan ke atas harus dibuat dengan lebih pemberat dan keutamaan diberi kepada penyandang dari dalam MPT sendiri terutama untuk mengisi tiga jawatan tertinggi dalam majlis;
VII. perulangan agenda-agenda mesyuarat jawatankuasa-jawatankuasa kecil memerlukan penelitian dan pengkajian yang rapi dari pihak MPT kerana ia menunjuk kepada beberapa hal antaranya sama ada :-
? kes yang sama diperbincangkan dalam beberapa mesyuarat jawatankuasa kecil berasingan tidak diambil tindakan; atau
? jawatankuasa-jawatankuasa kecil itu mengalami pertindanan tugas dan dengan itu mungkin boleh digabungkan.
viii. terdapat juga indikasi kurangnya tahap kordinasi di antara bahagian-bahagian berasingan dalam MPT, division of labour yang tidak jelas yang menyebabkan banyak bypass dengan itu cenderung menyebabkan perselisihan faham di antara bahagian-bahagian yang berlainan;
ix. tidak ada langkah dan usaha yang konsisten dalam aspek pengemaskinian data-data yang berterusan;
x. sistem penguatkuasaan yang kurang berkesan antaranya berpunca dari kekurangan kakitangan penguatkuasa, status jumud jawatan penguatkuasa dan terlalu kerap terdapatnya campurtangan politik semasa yang boleh menggagalkan kejayaan penguatkuasaan undang-undang dan peraturan dalam kawasan majlis; dan
xi. proses pengkomputeran telah dilakukan, namun untuk dapat mencapai penggunaan dan faedah pada tahap optimum, ia memerlukan tenaga kakitangan yang terlatih dan cekap mengendalikan sistem komputer ini.
Analisa keseluruhan hasil pendapatan dan perbelanjaan majlis menjelaskan beberapa perkara utama. Pertama, pendapatan majlis adalah tidak stabil dan seringkali mengalami penurunan. Kedua, perolehan banyak bergantung kepada bantuan kerajaan dan pinjaman. Ketiga, perbelanjaan majlis yang semakin meningkat. Keempat, sistem pemungutan hasil yang tidak sistematik. Kelima, kekurangan maklumat mengenai pembayaran menyebabkan hasil tertunggak yang terkumpul adalah tinggi.
Keenam, banyak prospek dan punca-punca pendapatan lain dalam kawasan majlis yang tidak dapat dipungut atau dikenakan ke atas awam disebabkan antaranya oleh cakupan kuasa undang-undang kecil yang sempit dan ketiadaan unit penguatkuasa
yang terlatih dan berkesan, kekurangan legal power serta sokongan politik tempatan. Ketujuh, oleh kerana majlis selalu berada dalam keadaan defisit, perbelanjaan pembangunan bolehlah dikatakan tiada.
Bagi menangani masalah hasil yang tidak dapat dipungut adalah mustahak bagi MPT untuk mengkaji semula undang-undang kecilnya dengan tujuan :-
i. mencadangkan undang-undang kecil yang baru;
II. meluaskan skop undang-undang kecil yang sedia wujud supaya ia dapat mencakup dan mengenakan suatu bentuk kawalan kepada kegiatan-kegiatan dalam bidang kuasa majlis; dan
III. menguatkan, menambah new clauses and provisions dengan tujuan menambah legal power serta mengenakan suatu bentuk deterence kepada would-be offenders.
Penguatkuasaan undang-undang kecil dan peraturan-peraturan lain hendaklah dibuat dengan lebih ketat. Usaha haruslah diambil untuk meningkatkan kesedaran di kalangan orang ramai tentang perlunya pihak awam memberikan kerjasama kepada
majlis dalam semua bentuk penguatkuasaan demi kebaikan bersama.
Majlis juga harus meneliti bagaimana mengatasi kewujudan sebahagian besar pendatang asing (bukan pembayar cukai tetapi tetap menggunakan berbagai bentuk perkhidmatan dalam kawasan majlis perbandaran) supaya mereka dapat dicukai dan
dengan demikian tidak menjadi punca pendapatan yang tersia-sia.
Di samping itu, internal politics hendaklah dikurangkan dalam majlis dan usaha hendaklah dibuat untuk menjadikan line authority dalam majlis menjadi jelas. Majlis perlu mengadakan perubahan kepada pendekatannya dalam perkhidmatan, integrasi kegiatan-kegiatan majlis, pengoptimuman penggunaan sumber-sumber dan sistem jawatankuasanya. Terdapat juga keperluan untuk mengaplikasikan strategic management dalam majlis yakni memberikan tumpuan yang lebih kepada closer supervision of staff, lebih staff empowerment, more attainable mission, clearer vision, successful management of conflicts, co-ordination, decision making, planning and problem solving.
Penemuan penting lain antaranya adalah jangkaan awam yang tinggi terhadap majlis dan usaha-usaha penswastaan yang problematic. Adalah didapati bahawa aktiviti pengswastaan yang berlaku dalam majlis terjadi melalui forced and irrational
privatisation exercises yang menjadikannya one-sided and unprofitable joint venture activities with outsiders.
Kehilangan tanah majlis yang berterusan juga berlaku melalui manipulated agreement and contracts dengan pihak luar. Kegiatan penswastaan juga didapati bukan berdasarkan kepada kepentingan majlis di masa depan, tetapi bertujuan menguntungkan beberapa pihak tertentu. Oleh itu, adalah dicadangkan agar majlis diberikan kuasa untuk menentukan jenis perniagaan dan pelaburan serta pencarian alternatif baru pendapatan mengikut kebijaksanaan majlis dan bebas dari tekanan politik dan golongan berkepentingan lain.
Syarat kelayakan ahli-ahli majlis juga perlu ditinjau bagi membolehkan MPT mendapat ahli-ahli yang berpengalaman, berpendidikan dan profesional.
Thursday, November 25, 1999
Friday, September 17, 1999
Women feed Malaysian boom
Tens of thousands of Indonesian women work in Malaysia's booming economy as domestics and prostitutes. Often illegal, they have few rights. SIDNEY JONES visits them.
By 1995, Malaysia had become the largest importer of labour in Asia, with a foreign workforce, legal and illegal, estimated to be well over one million men and women. The vast majority were Indonesian, most were unskilled and most were illegal - that is, they had come without proper documentation or overstayed their visas in violation of Malaysia's immigration laws.
The presence of so many immigrants had become a major domestic political issue within Malaysia, a sensitive foreign policy question in Indonesian-Malaysian relations, and a growing human rights concern.
For and against
On the domestic side, the Malaysian government was under pressure from some sectors, notably the Malaysian Agricultural Producers Association and the construction industry as well as from some state governments such as Johor, to bring in more workers.
At the same time there was growing pressure from the Malaysian Trade Unions Congress to stop the flow, on the grounds that migrants were depressing the wage structure and removing incentives to attract Malaysian workers.
The Malaysian Chinese Association and the largely Chinese Democratic Action Party (DAP) were concerned that the influx of Indonesians could alter the sensitive racial and ethnic balance.
Meanwhile officials of both the ruling party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), and the opposition Islamic Party (Parti Islam or PAS), often saw the Indonesians as a potential boost to the Malay side. Passing out permanent residency cards to illegal Indonesian workers during election campaigns became a particularly notorious practice in the eastern Malaysian state of Sabah, on the northeastern coast of the island of Borneo.
By the mid-1980s, the Malaysian public, like its counterpart in other labour-receiving countries, was beginning to hold immigrants responsible for a rise in crime, prostitution and other social ills. This made it imperative for national politicians to be seen to be protecting the country's borders by detaining and deporting workers who lacked proper documents.
Abuses
Migrant workers suffer from a range of abuses. Between 1990 and 1995, some 500 illegal workers are estimated to have drowned in the Straits of Malacca while trying to reach or return from Malaysia. Others suffer from frequent illegal detention, forced labour and torture.
The remainder of this article focusses only on Indonesian women. Poniyah binti Winarto, aged twenty, was a single woman from Central Java. In early 1994, she had come to Malaysia legally through an Indonesian agency. She had paid RM1,000 (AU$550) to get to Penang from Jakarta and, through a Penang-based Malaysian agency called Pelita Baru Sdn Bhd, was placed with a Chinese family in Petaling Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur.
For the next ten months, she worked eighteen-hour days without pay, although her salary was supposed to have been RM300 (AU$165) a month. Her employers, Mr and Mrs Liu, kept her passport, and she was not allowed to leave the house. She could have an hour off each day but never had a day off. She was not allowed to send any letters out of the house, and could not contact the agency or members of her family.
Run away
In November 1994, she decided to run away and met an Indian man who promised to help her in exchange for RM300. She took the money from Mrs Liu's purse and gave it to the man, but he just took it and never came back. When Mrs Liu discovered that her money was missing, she accused Poniyah of stealing RM1,000. She began steadily inflating the amount until by the next morning, the amount allegedly stolen was up to RM5,000.
At the same time, her employers took pliers and pinched her midriff and her nipples with the pliers, and began pulling out her hair. They also hit her on the ankles with a ceramic mug. The use of pliers and the systematic depilation continued until February 9, 1995, when with the help of another maid working at the house, she managed to escape and report to the local police station.
The police took down her report, then got her to University Hospital in Kuala Lumpur and called a women's organisation to help her. By that time she was almost bald, and there were scars of the pliers all over her body. Her nipples had been pinched until they bled. Poniyah was able to get her passport back, but no charges were ever brought against the Lius.
Exploitation
Women domestic workers around the world are less protected and may face greater exploitation than any other group of migrants for several reasons. The fact that they live in their employees' homes means that they are separated from other workers and do not have witnesses, or the protection of others, in cases of inhumane working conditions or sexual abuse. The boundary between work and leisure is often blurred, if it exists at all, and many women routinely work fifteen-hour days and longer.
Illegal confinement to the house is facilitated by the practice of employers holding on to the women's passports for safekeeping and occasionally as a check against escape. Many countries require employers to deposit a large security bond against possible illicit activities of the foreign workers, giving the employers the incentive to restrict domestic workers to the house as much as possible. Domestic workers are also often specifically excluded from labour legislation and government policies designed to safeguard workers against abuse.
Negative
All of these factors are operative in the case of Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia, with the added problems that many of the women are poorly educated with no more than an elementary school education, and many are in Malaysia illegally. Their difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that migrant women tend to be viewed in a negative light by both Indonesian and Malaysian officials, despite the fact that they are major sources of income for both through recruitment fees and the foreign workers levy respectively.
Indonesian officials we spoke with portrayed single women who worked in Malaysia as social misfits who could not get a husband or who had personal problems at home that prompted them to leave. (Male migrants, on the other hand, were seen as adventurous and entrepreneurial). From their statements in the press, many Malaysian officials appear to view maids, particularly Filipinas but other nationalities as well, as potential prostitutes, and round-ups of foreign women are conducted not just in the name of stopping illegal immigration but stopping vice as well.
Trafficking
There is in fact a link between domestic service and prostitution among Indonesian women, but it is not the one Malaysian officials are making. As the demand for maids increases and more and more Indonesian women go to Malaysia, it becomes easier for traffickers in women to make their victims believe the promises of good jobs with nice families at high wages.
Particularly in East Java, where much of the trafficking is focussed, a young woman who is regaled with stories of the good life in Malaysia can often see direct evidence of the wealth to be made from others in her village who have worked as maids. She has no way of distinguishing between the tekong recruiting illegally for maids, and the trafficker seeking women for brothels. Indeed, it may be a Malaysian agent who determines who goes to brothels and who goes into domestic service from among the women he receives from the tekong.
Demand
The demand for maids in Malaysia has skyrocketed in recent years, as more and more middle class Malaysian women enter the labour force and need someone to look after their children. The number of Indonesians legally registered as domestic workers rose from 39,112 in 1993 to 57,563 in August 1995, out of 124,400 legal foreign domestic workers in the country. The number of Indonesian domestics was more than double the number of legal Filipina maids, according to official Malaysian statistics.
The demand for Indonesian women was already high by 1992, as evidenced by companies set up exclusively to send or recruit Indonesian domestic workers in both Indonesia and Malaysia. A company in Pekanbaru was sending 500 Indonesians a month to Malaysia, 400 of them women and almost all of those domestic workers.
The overwhelming majority of the women recruited for work as domestics are Javanese, but Sumatrans and Madurese are also well- represented. Recruitment of women in Kalimantan also has been stepped up as the demand for domestic workers has increased in Sabah and Sarawak. Not infrequently, women are recruited, taken illegally to Malaysia, and held by the Malaysian agent who waits for the highest bidder, who might be a sawmill owner, a family needing a domestic worker, or a brothel owner.
Assistance
Many women are treated well and paid regularly, but the nature of domestic service does render women particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
One of the few organisations in Malaysia that provides assistance to Indonesian workers, the Indonesian Workers Welfare Association or Persatuan Kebajikan Anak Indonesia (PKAI) in Kuala Lumpur, received 212 complaints between February 1994 and September 1995. Of those, 30.6% were registered as 'failure to pay wages', and a third of those were lodged by domestic workers. But 'failure to pay wages' was usually short-hand for a much more complex set of problems as some of the entries in PKAI's log book illustrate.
Eti
One case reported in September 1995 involved an Indonesian domestic worker named Eti. At the beginning of August 1994, Eti, aged thirty-two, left her home in Malang, East Java and registered with a recruitment agency, PT Duta Ananda in Jakarta, to work in Sarawak as a maid. Two weeks later, after paying Rp500,000 (AU$250), she was sent by ship to Pontianak in West Kalimantan, together with dozens of other migrants.
After a week in Pontianak, she was taken to Sarawak via the border crossing of Entikong, and put to work as a maid in the home of a Malaysian recruiting agent in Kuching. She was promised a salary of RM230 (AU$130) a month and a two-year contract. But she found herself working from 4.30 am until 9.00 pm without a break, and forbidden to go outside the house. When her employers went out, they locked the doors from the outside. They also placed a lock on the telephone, so Eti could not call anyone for help.
In October 1995, after a year of working under such conditions without receiving any wages at all, Eti finally managed to call the Indonesian consulate in Kuching after her employers went out and forgot to lock the telephone. The consulate managed to get the employers to pay ten months of wages but at 50% of the promised rate. The other two months, they said, were deducted to pay the costs incurred by PT Duta Ananda in bringing Eti to Malaysia.
Many Indonesian agents simply collect women and turn them over to their Malaysian counterparts. The women themselves have no idea who they will be working for, or where in Malaysia they will end up. They place total faith in their recruiter, who is often an acquaintance or friend of the family, to take care of them.
Prostitution
The rise in the Malaysian demand for Indonesian maids has been accompanied by an apparent increase in cases of trafficking of Indonesian girls and women into Malaysia for prostitution - apparent because no statistics are available on such a sensitive issue, and the number of articles appearing in the press of both countries is only a guide. (The rise in the number of Indonesian male migrants may also be a factor in the apparent increase).
The pattern of trafficking is all too familiar. It is virtually identical to that of Burmese women trafficked into Thailand or Nepali women into India. A friend or a relative, acting as an agent or a pimp, approaches a young woman, almost always from East Java, although there has been some trafficking of women from Kalimantan into Sabah.
The agent speaks in glowing terms of the money to be made in Malaysia from working in a hotel or a restaurant. The young woman, usually aware of other women in her village who have returned from Malaysia with consumer goods, agrees to go. The usual route is bus to Surabaya, plane or boat to Ujung Pandang, Ujung Pandang to Pare-Pare, across to Nunukan in East Kalimantan, and then into Tawau, Sabah. There the women end up locked in one of the seedy-looking brothels near the bus terminal.
Tawau
In June 1992, nine young women, aged sixteen to twenty-two, were found locked in Hotel Tawau where they had been forced to work as prostitutes. They had been there for two months when two of the women managed to escape and report to the Indonesian consulate. For the two months, they had not been given food if they refused to take clients, and were kept under constant guard.
The nine women had been recruited by an agent based in Tuban, who promised them all good jobs as waitresses. When they had arrived at the Plaza Tawau hotel, they were sold to pimps. A woman named Yayuk, from Probolinggo, East Java, was sold for RM1,500 (AU$825). The women told police that some forty Indonesian women were kept under lock and key at the hotel by eight pimps.
At the same time that the story of the nine women surfaced, police in Tarakan, East Kalimantan, reported foiling four other cases of trafficking. A waiter from the Plaza Tawau hotel was caught in Tarakan trying to smuggle two women from Sidoarjo and Bojonegoro, East Java. Both had been promised work in a resort hotel in Lahad Datu, Sabah. The other women from Kediri and Sidoarjo were rescued from a pimp who was bringing them to a brothel called the Chester Inn in Tawau. Ten cases of trafficking of women into Tawau had been reported in 1991, and the journalist who reported the new cases wrote that the number was rising.
Sidney Jones is regional director of Human Rights Watch for Asia. This article is extracted from a report to the Canberra INFID conference.
By 1995, Malaysia had become the largest importer of labour in Asia, with a foreign workforce, legal and illegal, estimated to be well over one million men and women. The vast majority were Indonesian, most were unskilled and most were illegal - that is, they had come without proper documentation or overstayed their visas in violation of Malaysia's immigration laws.
The presence of so many immigrants had become a major domestic political issue within Malaysia, a sensitive foreign policy question in Indonesian-Malaysian relations, and a growing human rights concern.
For and against
On the domestic side, the Malaysian government was under pressure from some sectors, notably the Malaysian Agricultural Producers Association and the construction industry as well as from some state governments such as Johor, to bring in more workers.
At the same time there was growing pressure from the Malaysian Trade Unions Congress to stop the flow, on the grounds that migrants were depressing the wage structure and removing incentives to attract Malaysian workers.
The Malaysian Chinese Association and the largely Chinese Democratic Action Party (DAP) were concerned that the influx of Indonesians could alter the sensitive racial and ethnic balance.
Meanwhile officials of both the ruling party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), and the opposition Islamic Party (Parti Islam or PAS), often saw the Indonesians as a potential boost to the Malay side. Passing out permanent residency cards to illegal Indonesian workers during election campaigns became a particularly notorious practice in the eastern Malaysian state of Sabah, on the northeastern coast of the island of Borneo.
By the mid-1980s, the Malaysian public, like its counterpart in other labour-receiving countries, was beginning to hold immigrants responsible for a rise in crime, prostitution and other social ills. This made it imperative for national politicians to be seen to be protecting the country's borders by detaining and deporting workers who lacked proper documents.
Abuses
Migrant workers suffer from a range of abuses. Between 1990 and 1995, some 500 illegal workers are estimated to have drowned in the Straits of Malacca while trying to reach or return from Malaysia. Others suffer from frequent illegal detention, forced labour and torture.
The remainder of this article focusses only on Indonesian women. Poniyah binti Winarto, aged twenty, was a single woman from Central Java. In early 1994, she had come to Malaysia legally through an Indonesian agency. She had paid RM1,000 (AU$550) to get to Penang from Jakarta and, through a Penang-based Malaysian agency called Pelita Baru Sdn Bhd, was placed with a Chinese family in Petaling Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur.
For the next ten months, she worked eighteen-hour days without pay, although her salary was supposed to have been RM300 (AU$165) a month. Her employers, Mr and Mrs Liu, kept her passport, and she was not allowed to leave the house. She could have an hour off each day but never had a day off. She was not allowed to send any letters out of the house, and could not contact the agency or members of her family.
Run away
In November 1994, she decided to run away and met an Indian man who promised to help her in exchange for RM300. She took the money from Mrs Liu's purse and gave it to the man, but he just took it and never came back. When Mrs Liu discovered that her money was missing, she accused Poniyah of stealing RM1,000. She began steadily inflating the amount until by the next morning, the amount allegedly stolen was up to RM5,000.
At the same time, her employers took pliers and pinched her midriff and her nipples with the pliers, and began pulling out her hair. They also hit her on the ankles with a ceramic mug. The use of pliers and the systematic depilation continued until February 9, 1995, when with the help of another maid working at the house, she managed to escape and report to the local police station.
The police took down her report, then got her to University Hospital in Kuala Lumpur and called a women's organisation to help her. By that time she was almost bald, and there were scars of the pliers all over her body. Her nipples had been pinched until they bled. Poniyah was able to get her passport back, but no charges were ever brought against the Lius.
Exploitation
Women domestic workers around the world are less protected and may face greater exploitation than any other group of migrants for several reasons. The fact that they live in their employees' homes means that they are separated from other workers and do not have witnesses, or the protection of others, in cases of inhumane working conditions or sexual abuse. The boundary between work and leisure is often blurred, if it exists at all, and many women routinely work fifteen-hour days and longer.
Illegal confinement to the house is facilitated by the practice of employers holding on to the women's passports for safekeeping and occasionally as a check against escape. Many countries require employers to deposit a large security bond against possible illicit activities of the foreign workers, giving the employers the incentive to restrict domestic workers to the house as much as possible. Domestic workers are also often specifically excluded from labour legislation and government policies designed to safeguard workers against abuse.
Negative
All of these factors are operative in the case of Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia, with the added problems that many of the women are poorly educated with no more than an elementary school education, and many are in Malaysia illegally. Their difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that migrant women tend to be viewed in a negative light by both Indonesian and Malaysian officials, despite the fact that they are major sources of income for both through recruitment fees and the foreign workers levy respectively.
Indonesian officials we spoke with portrayed single women who worked in Malaysia as social misfits who could not get a husband or who had personal problems at home that prompted them to leave. (Male migrants, on the other hand, were seen as adventurous and entrepreneurial). From their statements in the press, many Malaysian officials appear to view maids, particularly Filipinas but other nationalities as well, as potential prostitutes, and round-ups of foreign women are conducted not just in the name of stopping illegal immigration but stopping vice as well.
Trafficking
There is in fact a link between domestic service and prostitution among Indonesian women, but it is not the one Malaysian officials are making. As the demand for maids increases and more and more Indonesian women go to Malaysia, it becomes easier for traffickers in women to make their victims believe the promises of good jobs with nice families at high wages.
Particularly in East Java, where much of the trafficking is focussed, a young woman who is regaled with stories of the good life in Malaysia can often see direct evidence of the wealth to be made from others in her village who have worked as maids. She has no way of distinguishing between the tekong recruiting illegally for maids, and the trafficker seeking women for brothels. Indeed, it may be a Malaysian agent who determines who goes to brothels and who goes into domestic service from among the women he receives from the tekong.
Demand
The demand for maids in Malaysia has skyrocketed in recent years, as more and more middle class Malaysian women enter the labour force and need someone to look after their children. The number of Indonesians legally registered as domestic workers rose from 39,112 in 1993 to 57,563 in August 1995, out of 124,400 legal foreign domestic workers in the country. The number of Indonesian domestics was more than double the number of legal Filipina maids, according to official Malaysian statistics.
The demand for Indonesian women was already high by 1992, as evidenced by companies set up exclusively to send or recruit Indonesian domestic workers in both Indonesia and Malaysia. A company in Pekanbaru was sending 500 Indonesians a month to Malaysia, 400 of them women and almost all of those domestic workers.
The overwhelming majority of the women recruited for work as domestics are Javanese, but Sumatrans and Madurese are also well- represented. Recruitment of women in Kalimantan also has been stepped up as the demand for domestic workers has increased in Sabah and Sarawak. Not infrequently, women are recruited, taken illegally to Malaysia, and held by the Malaysian agent who waits for the highest bidder, who might be a sawmill owner, a family needing a domestic worker, or a brothel owner.
Assistance
Many women are treated well and paid regularly, but the nature of domestic service does render women particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
One of the few organisations in Malaysia that provides assistance to Indonesian workers, the Indonesian Workers Welfare Association or Persatuan Kebajikan Anak Indonesia (PKAI) in Kuala Lumpur, received 212 complaints between February 1994 and September 1995. Of those, 30.6% were registered as 'failure to pay wages', and a third of those were lodged by domestic workers. But 'failure to pay wages' was usually short-hand for a much more complex set of problems as some of the entries in PKAI's log book illustrate.
Eti
One case reported in September 1995 involved an Indonesian domestic worker named Eti. At the beginning of August 1994, Eti, aged thirty-two, left her home in Malang, East Java and registered with a recruitment agency, PT Duta Ananda in Jakarta, to work in Sarawak as a maid. Two weeks later, after paying Rp500,000 (AU$250), she was sent by ship to Pontianak in West Kalimantan, together with dozens of other migrants.
After a week in Pontianak, she was taken to Sarawak via the border crossing of Entikong, and put to work as a maid in the home of a Malaysian recruiting agent in Kuching. She was promised a salary of RM230 (AU$130) a month and a two-year contract. But she found herself working from 4.30 am until 9.00 pm without a break, and forbidden to go outside the house. When her employers went out, they locked the doors from the outside. They also placed a lock on the telephone, so Eti could not call anyone for help.
In October 1995, after a year of working under such conditions without receiving any wages at all, Eti finally managed to call the Indonesian consulate in Kuching after her employers went out and forgot to lock the telephone. The consulate managed to get the employers to pay ten months of wages but at 50% of the promised rate. The other two months, they said, were deducted to pay the costs incurred by PT Duta Ananda in bringing Eti to Malaysia.
Many Indonesian agents simply collect women and turn them over to their Malaysian counterparts. The women themselves have no idea who they will be working for, or where in Malaysia they will end up. They place total faith in their recruiter, who is often an acquaintance or friend of the family, to take care of them.
Prostitution
The rise in the Malaysian demand for Indonesian maids has been accompanied by an apparent increase in cases of trafficking of Indonesian girls and women into Malaysia for prostitution - apparent because no statistics are available on such a sensitive issue, and the number of articles appearing in the press of both countries is only a guide. (The rise in the number of Indonesian male migrants may also be a factor in the apparent increase).
The pattern of trafficking is all too familiar. It is virtually identical to that of Burmese women trafficked into Thailand or Nepali women into India. A friend or a relative, acting as an agent or a pimp, approaches a young woman, almost always from East Java, although there has been some trafficking of women from Kalimantan into Sabah.
The agent speaks in glowing terms of the money to be made in Malaysia from working in a hotel or a restaurant. The young woman, usually aware of other women in her village who have returned from Malaysia with consumer goods, agrees to go. The usual route is bus to Surabaya, plane or boat to Ujung Pandang, Ujung Pandang to Pare-Pare, across to Nunukan in East Kalimantan, and then into Tawau, Sabah. There the women end up locked in one of the seedy-looking brothels near the bus terminal.
Tawau
In June 1992, nine young women, aged sixteen to twenty-two, were found locked in Hotel Tawau where they had been forced to work as prostitutes. They had been there for two months when two of the women managed to escape and report to the Indonesian consulate. For the two months, they had not been given food if they refused to take clients, and were kept under constant guard.
The nine women had been recruited by an agent based in Tuban, who promised them all good jobs as waitresses. When they had arrived at the Plaza Tawau hotel, they were sold to pimps. A woman named Yayuk, from Probolinggo, East Java, was sold for RM1,500 (AU$825). The women told police that some forty Indonesian women were kept under lock and key at the hotel by eight pimps.
At the same time that the story of the nine women surfaced, police in Tarakan, East Kalimantan, reported foiling four other cases of trafficking. A waiter from the Plaza Tawau hotel was caught in Tarakan trying to smuggle two women from Sidoarjo and Bojonegoro, East Java. Both had been promised work in a resort hotel in Lahad Datu, Sabah. The other women from Kediri and Sidoarjo were rescued from a pimp who was bringing them to a brothel called the Chester Inn in Tawau. Ten cases of trafficking of women into Tawau had been reported in 1991, and the journalist who reported the new cases wrote that the number was rising.
Sidney Jones is regional director of Human Rights Watch for Asia. This article is extracted from a report to the Canberra INFID conference.
Thursday, January 07, 1999
Yong Teck Lee Keeps Singing A Different Tune
Malaysia.net
Wed, 07 Jan 1998
It was revealed in court yesterday that about 5 million acres of forest
was signed away to companies through FMUs by Yong Teck Lee leaving only
about 800,000 hectares of 2nd class forest.
No criteria was set! How are requirements to be enforced? How were the
companies chosen? Why the hurry? Why 100 years?
The 'Jungle-Cabinet' of Yong (Ghapur Salleh, Pandikar and Yong) decided
on the recepients without even considering the then Conservator of
Forest's views and input - infact he was technically sacked and sent off
on a 'timbuctoo-journey' to a non-existent post in a non-government
entity. Why? Was Ag.Tengah, the then Conservator and (court-rulling)
still the rightful one, in Yong's way?
Were the NBT shares bought by Warisan Harta actually kick-backs from
certain parties (recepients of FMU schemes) to Yong and his associates
in the 'jungle-cabinet'?
It might explain why the MAD RUSH by Warisan Harta to purchase the
shares before they crashed and made the 'kick-backs' worthless.
Yong has still to explain the privatisation of government vehicles to
Angkatan Hebat to cut costs. He was the Finance Minister then.
The government has ended-up spending 4 to 5 times the amount previously
spent by the government.What kind of ECONOMICS was that?
His 'group' obviously has 30% interest in Angkatan Hebat.
But Yong Teck Lee refuses to give explainations!
He his more concerned in attacking his critics in any and all ways he
can - threatening them and sueing them (sounds familiar?).
One wonders whether the objective of the Anti Corruption Agency (ACA) in
Malaysia is to go after the culprits or find ways to clear culprits with
political connections?!?
Wed, 07 Jan 1998
It was revealed in court yesterday that about 5 million acres of forest
was signed away to companies through FMUs by Yong Teck Lee leaving only
about 800,000 hectares of 2nd class forest.
No criteria was set! How are requirements to be enforced? How were the
companies chosen? Why the hurry? Why 100 years?
The 'Jungle-Cabinet' of Yong (Ghapur Salleh, Pandikar and Yong) decided
on the recepients without even considering the then Conservator of
Forest's views and input - infact he was technically sacked and sent off
on a 'timbuctoo-journey' to a non-existent post in a non-government
entity. Why? Was Ag.Tengah, the then Conservator and (court-rulling)
still the rightful one, in Yong's way?
Were the NBT shares bought by Warisan Harta actually kick-backs from
certain parties (recepients of FMU schemes) to Yong and his associates
in the 'jungle-cabinet'?
It might explain why the MAD RUSH by Warisan Harta to purchase the
shares before they crashed and made the 'kick-backs' worthless.
Yong has still to explain the privatisation of government vehicles to
Angkatan Hebat to cut costs. He was the Finance Minister then.
The government has ended-up spending 4 to 5 times the amount previously
spent by the government.What kind of ECONOMICS was that?
His 'group' obviously has 30% interest in Angkatan Hebat.
But Yong Teck Lee refuses to give explainations!
He his more concerned in attacking his critics in any and all ways he
can - threatening them and sueing them (sounds familiar?).
One wonders whether the objective of the Anti Corruption Agency (ACA) in
Malaysia is to go after the culprits or find ways to clear culprits with
political connections?!?
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