Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2002, pages 53-54

Islam and the Middle East in the Far East

Wounded Foreign Workers in Israel Feared To Seek Treatment After Bombing

By John Gee

On the night of July 17, two Islamic Jihad members exploded the bombs they were carrying near an all-night kiosk in Tel Aviv, killing five people and injuring 40 to 50 more.

“Palestinian terrorists seem to have an insatiable appetite for spilling Israeli blood and will do so at every opportunity,” said David Baker, one of Ariel Sharon’s spokesmen.

On this occasion, however, most of the blood spilt by the bombers was, in fact, not Israeli, but that of foreign workers employed in Israel. Two of the dead were Chinese, one Romanian, and the other two were recent immigrants from Russia. An unusual aspect of this attack was that up to half of those who are believed to have been hurt did not seek medical attention. These walking wounded were workers who were present illegally in Israel. They feared that if they allowed themselves to be taken to the hospital, they would fall into the hands of the police and be deported.

According to the Israeli NGO Kav La’Oved, there are 300,000 foreign workers in Israel, of whom up to 195,000 are present illegally. Some came from Europe, particularly Rumania, but the other largest groups are Thais, Filipinos and Chinese. In Tel Aviv, there also is a large contingent of Nigerians. The bus station where the bombing took place is an area where such workers congregate, as many live in the down-at-heels neighborhood around it and it provides one of the few spaces where they can gather after a day’s work.

The official policy of the present Israeli government is to deport illegal workers, and over 2,000 were rounded up and expelled in the first six and a half months of this year. The authorities’ zeal for expulsion (it is something of a Zionist tradition, after all) has been tempered by the desire of many Israeli industrial and agricultural employers to retain a pool of cheap labor, in the absence of the besieged Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip who used to fulfill that role. Nevertheless, such are the fears of illegal workers that some clearly found it preferable to flee bleeding from the Tel Aviv bus station attack site. Even when an Israeli NGO subsequently offered confidential medical assistance to any who needed it, none came forward for help.

Pressure upon illegal workers was stepped up a week before the bomb attack, when Israel’s National Insurance Institute (NII) announced that it intended to stop providing coverage for illegals. Many employers did pay 2 percent of their foreign workers’ pay to the NII, which did not inquire whether or not those employees were present legally. If they were injured, fell ill or needed to be hospitalized when expecting a baby, they were covered, whatever their status. This is no longer the case. Months before the NII announcement was made, in fact, hospitals already had begun to deny treatment to illegals, or charge them full cost, in line with the anticipated official policy change.

The foreign workforce as a whole is a net contributor to the NII. In a July 15 Ha’aretz article entitled “Cash Cows for the NII,”Joseph Algazy, who frequently writes on human rights issues (especially of minorities in Israel), noted that in 2001 the NII received NIS 48 million from foreign workers in insurance payments, covering about one in three of them. Having considered the known and probable outpayments to them in the same year, Algazy concluded that “it can be estimated with a high degree of certainty that the NII is pocketing around half of the payments from foreign workers.”

Some politicians have claimed that foreign workers take jobs that could be done by unemployed Israelis, whose numbers are estimated to have grown by 50,000 to 100,000 as a direct result of the impact on Israel’s economy of the al-Aqsa intifada, but it is widely recognized that the work they perform is poorly paid, often arduous and involves long hours. Israeli citizens refuse to do it.

The more fundamental worry of most political leaders is that the character of Israel as a Jewish state will be diluted: having expelled most of the Palestinian population in 1948, they do not want other non-Jews to take up residence there. This was why, in September 2000, the Interior Ministry informed manpower agencies that they could not bring in foreign workers to provide home nursing care if their spouses already were present in the country. This ruling was directed against workers from the Philippines: men from that country have found jobs in the construction and agricultural sectors, but most workers who provide nursing care are Filipinos.

Last Dec. 2, four Filipinos were injured and one killed in a suicide bomb attack in Haifa. Despite the risks they run in Israel, many feel that it is still safer than the areas where they lived in their home country. Moreover, their priority in life is to provide for their families: they can earn from four to seven times as much in Israel as at home performing similar jobs. In these respects, the Filipinos are probably typical of most of Israel’s migrant workers.

Debilitating Corruption

Residents of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, were angry when they heard that their government planned to devote five times as much money to feeding four gorillas newly brought to Ragunan Zoo as it allocated to provide for the city’s numerous poor last year. But the pampered primates responsible for this misallocation of public funds were not in captivity, as Marianne Kearney, Indonesian correspondent of Singapore’s Straits Times, revealed in a July 11 report entitled “$630,000 for 4 gorillas, $123,000 for city’s poor.” (Those are Singapore dollars, roughly 1.6 to the U.S. dollar.)

Parliamentary budget commission member Anna Rudiantika told Kearney that zoo managers had submitted a request for support that outlined the special dietary needs of the four gorillas, which would necessitate importing food from overseas. When questioned about these supposed special needs, Willie Smit of the Gibbon Foundation dismissed the claims, saying of the gorillas, “They are in two acres of natural forest, there is more than they can eat. It is like a giant two-acre salad bowl.” A spokesman for Ragunan Zoo denied that it had made any request for funds to feed the gorillas.

Once again, it seems, some clique or individual has hatched a fraudulent scheme to channel public money to their own pockets. Corruption pervades the Indonesian political and legal system. The Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency, charged with recovering state money spent on trying to save collapsing banks during the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98, has lost over 80 percent of the 400 legal cases it launched against businesses that owe billions of dollars to the government. Those who ran up these debts were in a position to bribe judges and prosecutors to sabotage or throw out the suits against them: at least four of every five judges actively solicit bribes, resulting in most Indonesians having little confidence in the judicial system.

The lenient treatment accorded ex-President Suharto’s children has illustrated the obstacles that honest officials face in trying to reform the system. During the trial of Tommy Suharto, his lawyer admitted to paying money to three prosecution witnesses who subsequently changed their testimonies, but claimed that it was just so that they would be better dressed in court and have rented cars to take them there. Tommy himself testified that the police hid him while they were supposedly engaged in a nationwide manhunt for him. Though Tommy was accused of having murdered a judge who had crossed him, prosecutors did not press for a death sentence, but rather for a 15-year jail term (of which he will probably serve only a few years), citing his age (he is 40), his children’s needs and his good manners as reasons for treating him “compassionately.” As they made their plea, the Indonesian press revealed that Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, Suharto’s oldest daughter, had brokered arms deals in the 1990s in which she had bumped up the price that Indonesia had to pay for British Hawk jets and Scorpion tanks and second-hand German warships beyond that asked by the sellers and then pocketed the difference.

A 2001 World Bank-Partnership for Governance Reform-Indonesia survey found that those hit hardest by corruption were the poor, who find themselves making extra payments for services including refuse collection, electricity and education. Examples cited included parents being charged three times the legal limit for school building maintenance, and a woman who was made to pay a bribe just to have a teacher hand over her daughter’s school report book. Two of three survey respondents said that they were victims of corruption by public officials, and 70 percent viewed corruption as Indonesia’s most serious social problem. They rated mosques, churches and temples as the least corrupt institutions in the country.

Six million Indonesian children are underweight or malnourished, six in every hundred babies born do not survive past the age of five and 70 million people are at risk of hunger when prices fluctuate. Most political leaders, however, seem more interested in jockeying for power, while those who have grown rich off corruption are unmoved by the plight of their victims. Western governments and corporations winked at dishonest practices in Indonesia in the past, when it suited them. They too have had a big hand in creating a swamp of corruption that Indonesian clean government campaigners think would take an honest and determined leadership a quarter of a century or more to eradicate.

Malaysia Welcomes Arab Tourists

Flying back to Singapore from the north Malaysian island of Langkawi last year with my family, we found ourselves seated next to a young couple from Saudi Arabia. They were newlyweds and, for both of them, this was their first trip abroad. We asked them why they had chosen to come to Malaysia. The husband replied that he’d heard that there were some beautiful places to see and that it was relatively inexpensive to visit. He then added that, as Malaysia is a predominantly Muslim country, he thought there would be more that would be familiar there than in most other lands.

His feelings are probably shared by many of the Arab tourists who travel to Malaysia on holiday. This green tropical land, with a rich mix of cultures, may be very different from their countries in some ways, but in providing for its own Muslim population, it also makes itself something of a home away from home for Arab visitors, particularly those from the more socially conservative Gulf countries. There are mosques everywhere and halal restaurants aplenty. In hotels, visitors will quickly spot an arrow (often on the ceiling) which indicates the direction of Mecca (the qibla), which Muslims face when praying. What is displayed in public advertising and television shows is governed by sensitivity toward the outlook of the predominantly Malay Muslim public: local female singers without headscarves on television are OK (indeed, popular), but there are no billboards or shop window displays of underwear models.

Malaysia expects about 150,000 Middle Eastern tourists this year, compared to only a third of that number in 2000. Its attempts to lure them to its shores and cities have been assisted by the increased post-Sept. 11 Western suspicions of Muslim visitors, who feel that Europe and North America are less inviting destinations than before.

Compared to the total of 12 million tourists who visit Malaysia each year, 150,000 Middle Easterners may not seem significant, but those numbers do not tell the whole story. The average stay of most tourists is 5.5 days: some merely stop over briefly on their way between Australia and Europe. Arabs, by contrast, generally stay for over 10 days and are also bigger spenders. They shop a lot, particularly for designer label clothes, and often dine in up-market restaurants.

Malaysia is doing what it can to increase its appeal to visitors from the Arab world. Some of the big hotels in Kuala Lumpur now employ Arabic-speaking staff during summer, the peak time for Arab tourism, and a growing number of restaurants offer Arab cuisine.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: Israel and the Palestinians, available from the AET Book Club.