That's the Official Name of Its Crackdown on Illegal Immigrants : Malaysia to Indonesians: Go Away
International Herald Tribune
March 25, 1998
Thomas Fuller

The Malaysian Navy has launched a small fleet. The police have descended almost nightly on squatter villages, arresting those without working papers. And trawler captains convicted of ferrying illegal immigrants have been sentenced to three years in prison and six lashes with a rattan cane.

Malaysia in recent weeks has all but declared war on boatloads of illegal immigrants landing on its shores.

Called a new breed of "boat people" by Malaysia's prime minister, Mahathir bin Mohamad, they are refugees from Indonesia's financial crisis. About 19,000 refugees, almost all of them Indonesian, have been arrested since January in Malaysia, twice the number in all of last year. To stem the flow, authorities last week launched Operation Nyah, or, literally translated: Operation Go Away.

Naval ships, police boats and helicopters patrol the Strait of Malacca around the clock, intercepting overloaded trawlers before they can reach Malaysia.

After years of ignoring the influx of illegal workers — there are about 800,000 of them in the country — Malaysia is sealing its borders and handing down harsh sentences for those caught ferrying or harboring the workers.

Neighboring Singapore has also ordered a crackdown on illegal immigrants. On Saturday, a judge sentenced 117 men, convicted of entering the country illegally or overstaying, to prison sentences and caning, the Sunday Times reported.

"We are literally a nation besieged, and a lot of manpower and resources have to be deployed to block their entry until the waves of such immigrants subside," the newspaper quoted the unidentified prosecutor in the case as having said.

Earlier this month, Singapore's prime minister, Goh Chock Tong, expressed concern over the immigrants. "If we see them in large numbers, the situation is going to destabilize Malaysia and Singapore," he told a German newspaper in an interview.

In Malaysia, in addition to eight boat skippers sentenced to be caned on Monday, the police have used the country's Internal Security Act, which allows authorities to hold suspects without trial, for those thought to be harboring illegal aliens.

Analysts say that Malaysia's high-profile anti-illegal immigrant campaign, which is widely covered on television and is featured daily on newspaper front pages, is as much an effort to turn back boatloads of illegal immigrants as it is to prevent others from ever launching.

"If we're pussyfooting and not sure what we're going to do, that will lead to more people coming, because they will think they can get away with it," said Abdul Razak Abdullah Baginda, executive director of the Malaysian Strategic Research Center, a government-linked think tank.

For many Indonesians, the incentives to leave their country are great. Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs as the country's financial crisis has mounted. And even those with jobs would be likely to earn several times more money in such countries as Malaysia or Singapore.

Not only are wages higher in those countries, but both the Malaysian ringgit and the Singapore dollar have appreciated sharply against the Indonesian rupiah in recent months — a boon to those Indonesians repatriating their salaries.

For years, Indonesians came to Malaysia to work in the construction industry or plantation sector, or as maids. During the recent boom years, a labor shortage required Malaysia to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers. Today, there are about 2 million foreign workers in the country, making up about 20 percent of the total work force.

"We needed them," said Mr. Razak. "We knew they were illegal workers, but they were putting up our buildings. It was a dilemma we had to live with for 15 years."

Foreign workers were helping change the face of modern Malaysia, supplying almost all the low-cost labor for such large-scale projects as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Once there were 25,000 illegal immigrants working at the site, according to Kamaruddin Hamzah, police chief of Selangor, the state where the airport is situated.

"Now there are only some 3,000 left, and the problem is expected to be solved with more operations," he told the official Bernama news agency on Tuesday, referring to periodic police sweeps that have netted more than 1,000 people since January.

With the onset of the regional financial crisis last year, the Malaysian government said that as many as a million foreign workers could be sent home.

Indonesia has vowed to help with the operations. Last week, the Indonesian foreign minister, Ali Alatas, said that Jakarta would send navy ships to help repatriate 17,000 illegal workers held in Malaysia.

"We will work together with Malaysia in dealing with the repatriations," he said. But with Indonesia's economy in shambles, Jakarta's participation could be limited.

"We know the Indonesian authorities are not going to make this a top priority," Mr. Razak said. "They have problems of their own."

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune