‘Girls’ come home in coffins or vanish
Migrants trafficked
FATUKOKO, Indonesia Dec 13, (Agencies): 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 Middle East 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.
Migrants
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 great-aunt 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 - fighting both a teenager’s excitement and a crushing headache - doubted he could stop Lina from going.
Still, the couple wanted to hold a Catholic prayer service for Lina before she left. Sarah promised she would only take Lina to the provincial capital of Kupang for one night to organize her paperwork, then bring her back the next day. It was a lie.
Less than one hour after Sarah walked into their home, she walked back out with Lina. And just like that, their girl was gone.
Looking back on it now, Tasoin crumbles under the weight of whatifs. “I regret it,” she says through tears.
“I regret letting her go.”
Tracking
Faot
When it comes to tracking the fate of migrants, Asia is the blackest of black holes.
It has more migrants than any region on earth, with millions traveling within Asia and to the Mideast for work. Yet it has the least data on those who vanish. In an exclusive tally, The Associated Press found more than 8,000 cases of dead and missing migrants in Asia and the Mideast since 2014, in addition to the 2,700 listed by the UN’s International Organization for Migration. More than 2,000 unearthed by the AP were from the Philippines alone. And countless other cases are never reported.
These workers reflect part of the hidden toll of global migration. An AP investigation documented at least 61,135 migrants dead or missing worldwide over the same period, a tally that keeps rising . That’s more than double the number found by the IOM, the only group that has tried to count them.
While it’s not clear how many left for jobs, in general workers make up about two-thirds of international migrants, according to the International Labor Organization; the rest are fleeing everything from drug violence to war and famine. Migrants may die on perilous journeys through deserts or at sea, while many others like Lina disappear into networks that traffic in people.
Unlike Lina, Orance Faot was betrayed by her own flesh and blood.
The road to her house is so rocky that by the time you arrive, it feels like you’ve gone through an hours-long earthquake. The sunny, hardworking girl was just 14 when she traveled down that same rocky path four years ago on a motorbike bound for Kupang.
That morning, Orance told the grandmother she lived with, Margarita Oematan, that she was going with her older cousin Yeni to a priest’s house to study the Bible. When she failed to return, her uncle went looking for her. He walked as far as the river where she sometimes swam, but found no trace of his niece or Yeni. A driver later told the family that the girls had hired a bike.