archiv.ffm-online

IOM has provided evacuation assistance from Syria to 1,410 migrant workers
from the Philippines, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, Moldova, Ukraine, South Sudan,
Belarus, and Indonesia. A flight chartered by IOM returned 263 Filipino
workers to the Philippines on 11 September, but thousands of Indonesian
domestic workers in crisis-hit Syria still need help to get back home.

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Jakarta Globe, 23-09-2012
Indonesian Domestic Workers in Syria in Need of Repatriation

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/indonesian-domestic-workers-in-syria-in-need-of-repatriation/545997

Thousands of Indonesian domestic workers in crisis-hit Syria need help to
get back home, activists say.

“We wrote to the government in June to bring the suffering of migrant
workers in Syria to their attention,” Anis Hidaya, executive director of
Migrant Care, a Jakarta-based NGO campaigning for migrant workers’ rights,
told IRIN. “Today we demand the government protect its citizens and
repatriate all those in danger.”

In Indonesia, families of women and girls working in Syria continue to
receive reports about the dire circumstances of their loved ones,
including abandonment by employers. These women are particularly
vulnerable to abuse in Syria, says Hidaya.

According to the International Organization for Migration, there are more
than 100,000 migrant workers in Syria, including some 15,000 who may be in
need of evacuation assistance. Precise data is not available.

Prior to the crisis, the Manpower and Transmigration Ministry estimated
the number of Indonesians working in Syria at some 12,000. However, this
figure is difficult to confirm as many migrant workers, mostly women, are
undocumented, said the Indonesian embassy in Damascus.

Syria witnessed a steady rise in the number of foreign domestic workers
between 2001 and 2006, following the legalization of foreign nationals as
domestic workers, said a 2012 report by the Consortium for Applied
Research on International Migration (CARIM).

In 2010, the Syrian authorities estimated the number of female domestic
workers at 75,000-100,000, mainly from Indonesia, the Philippines, and
Ethiopia.

In their offices and emergency call centers across Indonesia, Migrant Care
employees help families call their daughters, sisters, and mothers to
comfort them, learn about their situation, and talk about how to get them
home.

At a Migrant Care office in Jakarta last week, Hidaya received an urgent
text message: “My daughter is in Aleppo in a house alone. Please - we
cannot contact her for two weeks. We don’t know where she is.”

The NGO is getting more and more such messages, says Hidaya.

“These women and girls are extremely vulnerable when they migrate for work
in the first place,” she explained. “Now, living amid this violence and
being ignored by their employers, they are defenseless and exposed to the
horrors of the fighting.”

“Since the violence in Syria began, the government has directly helped 770
Indonesians leave,” said Tatang Razak, director of Indonesian citizen
protection affairs at the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

“The biggest issue we face in our evacuation operations is the
unwillingness of the Syrian government to issue exit permits to workers
without employer permission,” he explained, saying that the Indonesian
government currently has custody of 348 Indonesians — mostly domestic
workers — in safe houses in Damascus awaiting processing.

To date, IOM has provided evacuation assistance from Syria to 1,410
migrant workers from the Philippines, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, Moldova,
Ukraine, South Sudan, Belarus, and Indonesia. A flight chartered by IOM
returned 263 Filipino workers to the Philippines on 11 September.

Of those assisted by IOM, only nine were from Indonesia, though the pace
of returns may be improving: Linda Al-Kalash, director of Tamkeen, a legal
aid and human rights organization in Jordan, said that just this week she
saw 117 newly-arrived Indonesian migrant domestic workers at the embassy
in Amman. "They were in Jordan for barely a day before they were
repatriated by government charter flight to Jakarta."

To date, IOM has received requests for repatriation assistance from
embassies of close to 5,000 third country nationals.

Some 700,000 documented Indonesian migrant workers go abroad to work every
year, sending part of their earnings back to their families. According to
the World Bank, registered remittances to Indonesia amounted to more than
US$6 billion annually, the second-highest source of income after oil and
gas.

The government estimates the total number of documented migrants abroad at
2.7 million, while the number of undocumented workers could be 2-4 times
that amount.