Indonesia vows to do more to combat human trafficking
AP probe reveals scores of trafficked girls quietly disappeared from one of the regions
JAKARTA: An Indonesian oficial is vowing to do more to combat human traficking after an investigation by The Associated Press revealed that scores of trafficked girls have quietly disappeared from one of the nation’s poorest regions.
The vice governor of East Nusa Tenggara province, Josef Nae Soi, says oficials will work with police to try to ind the missing girls cited in the AP’S report. He says oficials are strengthening checks at airports and seaports to block attempts by traffickers to smuggle migrant workers abroad.
Soi’s comments on Friday came one day after the AP’S report revealed that possibly hundreds of teenage girls have vanished from East Nusa Tenggara after falling prey to illegal recruiters promising work in Malaysia. The stranger showed up at the girl’s door one night with a tantalizing job offer: Give up your world, and I will give you a future.
It was a chance for 16-year-old Marselina Neonbota to leave her isolated village in one of the poorest parts of Indonesia for neighboring Malaysia, where some migrant workers can earn more in a few years than in a lifetime at home. A way out for a girl so hungry for a life beyond subsistence farming that she walked 22 kilometers (14 miles) every day to the schoolhouse and back. She grabbed the opportunity — and disappeared.
The cheerful child known to her family as Lina joined the army of Indonesians who migrate every year to wealthier countries in Asia and the rest of the world for work. Thousands come home in coffins, or vanish. Among them, possibly hundreds of trafficked girls have quietly disappeared from the impoverished western half of Timor island and elsewhere in Indonesia’s East Nusa Tenggara province.
The National Agency for Placement and Protection of Indonesian Workers has counted more than 2,600 cases of dead or missing Indonesian migrants since 2014. And even those numbers mostly leave out people like Lina who are recruited illegally -- an estimated 30 percent of Indonesia’s 6.2 million migrant workers.
On that night in 2010, Lina didn’t seem to sense the danger posed by the stranger named Sarah. But Lina’s greataunt and great-uncle, who had raised her, were hesitant.
Sarah insisted they could trust her; she was related to the village chief. And Lina would only be gone two years.
Lina’s aunt, Teresia Tasoin, knew a Malaysian salary could support the whole family. Her husband — ighting both a teenager’s excitement and a crushing headache — doubted he could stop Lina from going.