29/10/07
Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Mantan Wakil Perdana Menteri Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, menyarankan agar Pemerintah Indonesia bersikap tegas terhadap negara lain yang melakukan pelanggaran hukum terhadap warga negara Indonesia (WNI), termasuk terhadap Malaysia sekalipun.
"Terserah kepada kebijakan Pemerintah Indonesia, tapi kalau saya boleh mengusulkan agar Pemerintah Indonesia memiliki pendirian jelas dan tegas terhadap hal-hal yang menyangkut rakyatnya terutama dari sudut keadilan," kata Anwar ketika dijumpai di Habibie Center, Jakarta, Senin sore.
Dalam ceramahnya mengenai "Peningkatan Hubungan Indonesia-Malaysia Menuju Tatanan Kehidupan Global yang Berkeadilan dan Bermartabat", masalah kekerasan yang menimpa WNI di Malaysia, baik yang berstatus tenaga kerja Indonesia (TKI) maupun sekedar pengunjung, disebut Anwar sebagai satu hal yang merisaukan.
"Ada penelitian menunjukkan bahwa ada kecenderungan meremehkan masalah-masalah yang melibatkan pekerja asing, baik dari Indonesia, Bangladesh maupun dari negara lain. Saya pribadi juga berpendapat sikap pemerintah kadang-kadang meremehkan masalah ini, masalah yang menyangkut masyarakat rendahan," papar Anwar.
Tokoh yang pernah menjadi tahanan politik pada masa Perdana Menteri Mahathir Mohamad berkuasa itu juga menuntut agar Malaysia bersikap adil terhadap seluruh warga termasuk warga asing dan untuk tidak mengijinkan penganiayaan terhadap siapa pun.
"`Justice` (keadilan) harus ditegakkan," katanya tegas.(*)
COPYRIGHT © 2007
Headlines
29 October 2007
Anwar Ibrahim: RI Harus Berpendirian Tegas soal Nasib TKI
Bank Muamalat in Indon team-up for remittance service
The Star, Monday October 29, 2007
KUALA LUMPUR: Bank Muamalat Malaysia Bhd (BMMB) has teamed up with Bank Muamalat Indonesia (BMI) to provide remittance service between the two countries known as Muamalat Kas Kilati (mk2).
BMMB chief executive officer Datuk Abdul Manap Abd Wahab said the service was targeted at students, workers and entrepreneurs.
“The potential market is huge as there are about two million Indonesian workers here,” he told reporters after the launch of the service on Saturday.
Abdul Manap said BMMB and BMI would collaborate with the Indonesian embassy and Sekolah Indonesia Kuala Lumpur to promote the service.
“BMI will also attach its staff in BMMB branches to market the service. The service will be available at BMMB’s Jalan Melaka branch from Nov 1 and other branches in the central region, including Seremban, on Nov 15,” he said.
Abdul Manap said under the service, the money remitted would be credited into beneficiary accounts at BMI, and the receivers and senders would get short messaging service notification.
“The money can be withdrawn at all automated teller machines and post offices in Indonesia. Each transaction will cost RM10,” he said.
He said this service would be replicated in other countries as well in the future such as Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal.
He said the service would increase Bank Muamalat’s foreign exchange revenue.
“The foreign exchange business has been increasing and the bank plans to set up its own foreign exchange booth soon,” he said. – Bernama
15 October 2007
Jakarta’s informal sector gets brush-off
Financial Times, Oct 15, 2007, By John Aglionby in Jakarta
Worshippers leaving Jakarta’s Sunda Kelapa mosque after Friday prayers recently had little choice but to snake out in single file, squeezed between beggars and street sellers competing for their attention.
The beggars, mostly women, clutched suitably forlorn-looking children in one hand and a plastic cup in the other, while the street sellers hawked everything from prayer mats and sarongs to machetes and elephant tusks.
“My husband’s been crippled in an accident so he can’t work, and this is the only thing I can do while looking after the children,” says Dina Putiastuti, begging with her three-year-old son and 20-month-old daughter. “I want to become a trader but I don’t have any money and the government won’t help.”
None of the worshippers complained. Such scenes have been part of the culture in the world’s most populous Muslim nation for decades, particularly during Ramadan (which ended on Saturday), when beggars seek to exploit Muslims’ duty to be more generous and traders hope to capitalise on people’s need to buy presents for Eid, the holiday that celebrates the end of the fasting month.
These ad hoc street emporiums will, however, soon be consigned to history in Jakarta. Or that is what the city’s administration plans, as part of a radical strategy to tackle the burgeoning informal economy in the sprawling, congested, polluted metropolis that is home to some 12m people.
The target is to make Jakarta a developed city in five years. Begging and busking, giving to beggars and buskers, and trading on bridges, pavements and public thoroughfares will be punished with hefty fines. So will living under flyovers. Locations where motorcycle taxis and street food sellers can operate will be severely limited. Spitting, littering and smoking on public transport are also among the litany of new offences.
Achmad Suaidy, head of the Jakarta legislature commission, which wrote the public order by-law, says the aim of the clean-up is to boost investment. “Once Jakarta is better ordered, more foreign capital will come here,” he said, citing similar campaigns in the Netherlands. “That will stimulate employment, which in turn will absorb all the people who are currently unemployed.”
A similar by-law was passed in several other places, including Medan, Indonesia’s third-largest city, earlier this year. As in Jakarta, reaction was mixed; people want improved public order but not to be too strictly regulated.
Vocational training centre networks will be expanded to help those threatened by the regulation to find work. “This is not anti-poor,” Mr Achmad says. “It will probably take three months for the interior ministry to approve this and then we will publicise it for six months before enforcement.”
Opposition to the government’s strategy is mounting, however.
Sri Palupi, director of the Institute for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, says there has been no consultation on the public order campaign, let alone putting in place the necessary measures to provide alternative employment for the hundreds of thousands of poor.
In effect it “bans all work by poor people and also doesn’t give any room for poor people to live in marginal areas”, she says. “So by default they’ve got nowhere to live. The authorities have planned this so badly and so many people are going to face punishment, I think formal resistance is inevitable.”
Worshippers at the mosque admitted they were likely to violate the by-law and continue to give money to beggars and buskers. “It’s a dilemma,” says a civil servant. “The city needs cleaning up but you can’t regulate people’s souls. If we want to give to beggars why shouldn’t we be allowed to?”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
01 October 2007
FIELD NOTE: IN YOUR FACE-INDONESIAN DOMESTIC WORKERS' ACTIVISM AT THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION MINISTERIAL IN HONG KONG
News from LexisNexis
Lai, Ming-Yan.
MING-YAN LAI teaches cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work focuses on gender, oppositional discourses, and alternative representations for the marginalized. Her book on the gender politics of nativist contestation of modernity in China and Taiwan is forthcoming from the State University of New York Press. She is currently conducting research on foreign domestic workers' public articulations and representations in Hong Kong.
-- Women's Studies Quarterly, Fall 2007
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Excluded, like many other marginalized and dispossessed groups, from 5 the negotiating site where decisions ultimately affecting their lives and livelihoods were being hammered out, Indonesian domestic workers (IDWs) nonetheless commanded attention with their impassioned, vibrant presence in the grassroots protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) during its sixth ministerial conference in Hong Kong. The IDWs constituted the largest and most prominent contingent of "local" demonstrators. Under the coalitional umbrella of KOTKIHO (Hong Kong Coalition of Indonesian Migrant Workers Organizations), hundreds of vivacious women marched and danced to music drummed up from traditional handheld gongs; sang folk and pop songs with rewritten, progressive lyrics; waved bold banners; staged a funeral procession for the WTO; killed a gigantic puppet WTOsaurus; and performed dramatic scenes of abuse, exploitation, and resistance in the approved protest zones. Remarkable in its visual impact, their activism is especially striking against the pervasive public effacement that plagues migrant workers in general and foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in particular. Countering the invisibility and isolation of their work and everyday existence in individual households, which are discursively reinforced by the prevalent representation of migrant women as helpless victims of trafficking, the IDWs' prominent participation in the WTO protests highlights the tenacity of activist resistance in our contemporary world, which is simultaneously connected and fragmented by global capitalism.
Although the several hundred IDWs participating in the WTO protest amount to less than 1 percent of the one-hundred-thousand-plus Indonesian women engaged in migrant domestic work in Hong Kong, their activist involvement is highly significant, not least in shedding a different light on IDWs than that of their objectification and disciplining into submissive, toiling bodies by dominant discourses and actual employment practices. Joining the tenacious struggle begun by Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong more than two decades ago, IDW activism compels our recognition of FDWs' agency in proclaiming a subjectivity and identity against their reduction to domestic bodies at the beck and call of their employers and in service to their nations. The rich array of IDW organizations in Hong Kong underscores the diversity of identification underlying the solidarity of this activism. With the right to association they enjoy under the Hong Kong Employment Ordinance, IDWs in Hong Kong have established numerous organizations catering to different interests and serving different purposes, including labor unions, religious groups, vocational training organizations, charity associations, and cultural groups. The coalitional umbrella of KOTKIHO, formed in 2000, garners seven such diverse organizations together for solidarity struggles to better the conditions of IDWs.
As a participant-observer of KOTKIHO's repeated collective actions for wage increases and changes in discriminatory government policies even before the WTO protest, I have witnessed impressive turnouts and passionate commitment to articulating the common concerns and redressing the exploitation and abuse of IDWs in particular and FDWs in general. Because of its global scale, the WTO protest offered an opportunity for KOTKIHO to accentuate and consolidate this collective activist agency, drawing in new participants and energizing veteran activists. Before the weeklong multinational activities coordinated by the Hong Kong People's Alliance in the week of the WTO ministerial, KOTKIHO staged two massive preparatory rallies on successive Sundays at Victoria Park, a transient "home" that IDWs claim for themselves on their rest days. The rallies featured cultural performances by members of its constitutive organizations and sing-along sessions at which audiences could learn songs with lyrics, set to familiar melodies, about the plight, but also indomitable courage, of Indonesian migrant workers, as well as speeches by Indonesian activists and migrant nongovernmental-organization leaders about the impact of the WTO on the Indonesian economy and the consequent rise in labor migration. These preparatory rallies doubled as educational and mobilizing vehicles, and rehearsals for the WTO protest, which included festive onstage performances celebrating solidarity among migrants, workers, and peasants of different nationalities, and carnivalesque marches from Victoria Park through busy streets to the designated protest zone near the ministerial conference venue. From the KOTKIHO preparatory rallies to the WTO protest marches and rallies, IDW participants enacted a collective activist subjectivity and experienced a solidarity struggle that highlighted national identity even as it dramatized the urgency and power of coalition building across boundaries.
Coalition building figured prominently in the activities that KOTKIHO took part in throughout the WTO protest. In the stage backdrops, banners, and giant posters for the rallies and marches, the particular demands of the IDWs as migrant workers in Hong Kong were put side by side and given equal attention with general calls for "sinking the WTO." IDW demands inscribed in these protest props included such long-standing demands as the following: stop underpayment; stop abuses and discrimination of migrants; scrap the new condition of stay (which requires FDWs to leave Hong Kong within two weeks after contract termination, thus making it extremely difficult for them to find new employment without going through the whole costly process of returning to their home country and applying for another agency placement); enact wage increases now; and use the employers' levy to compensate and protect FDWs. Next to these particular demands, directly tied to the FDWs' conditions of work and stay, were general calls for getting the WTO out of the industries to be covered by the agreement under negotiation, including agriculture and food, fisheries, and services. Linking these two sets of demands is the concept of commodification, as indicated in the slogan "No to Commodification of Workers, Women, and Migrants" and explained in KOTKIHO rallies by activists from Indonesian NGOs and migrant organizations in Hong Kong.
Although this discursive link proved rather elusive to IDW participants in the protest, as my conversations with many of them during the rallies revealed, the actual practice of marching side by side with Korean peasants, Filipino fishers, and workers and labor activists from different countries impressed IDW participants of a tangible connection between their particular woes and poor people's struggles all over the world. The empowerment experienced in a grassroots protest on a global scale and the collectivity articulated in activist struggle was palpable and keenly expressed. Even if their participation was immediately motivated by the opportunity to capitalize on the media coverage at a global event, to call attention to their particular conditions of exploitation and demands for redress, the experience of a contingent global coalitional struggle was in itself motivating and generative of further activism. Marching with them, I, too, was heartened and energized by the collective action, though my participation was differently motivated by my ongoing research on FDW representational practices in Hong Kong. As we were caught together in a tear gas attack by the Hong Kong police to disperse a march that had gone off the designated course, a supportive bond was forged in the actual practice of resistance. Notwithstanding the fluidity and contingency of this activist bond, which became apparent once we emerged from the confrontation to face the police's strategic maneuver to differentiate the "foreign" protestors from "local sympathizers" for targeted repression and control, the moment of solidarity helped to nurture a growing collectivity of IDW activists and to prime the ground for further coalitional struggles with local and transnational activist groups down the line.