Jungle's dirty secret

Roostien Ilyas knew that young girls were being trafficked from all over Indonesia, but the last place she expected to find them was in the middle of the Borneo jungle. Trafficking of young girls from Indonesian Borneo, or West Kalimantan, has been going on for years. But usually the destinations are major cities in Malaysia, Singapore, or on the mainland or Taiwan. Rarely are they taken to the wilds of Kalimantan. So what one of her staff members uncovered earlier this year in the middle of the forest in West Kalimantan shocked her. 'We found about 150 girls aged between 14 and 16 who were being forced to provide sexual services for illegal loggers,' she said. Ms Ilyas, the director of a local non-government agency, Peduli Anak, which assists children and teenagers traumatised by conflict or natural disasters, said the girls had been tricked by brokers offering training skills that would lead to work. The teenagers, most of whom came from some of the thousands of smaller islands scattered across the archipelago, jumped at the chance to avoid joblessness and poverty in their villages. 'This was a good trick to play on uneducated people; they asked their parents or mothers did they want their girls to get some job skills,' Ms Ilyas said. It's not unusual for agents to visit rural parts of Indonesia, where the women of struggling farming families are offered jobs as maids, shop workers or restaurant staff in Malaysia, Singapore or the Middle East. A girl or woman who finds a job overseas becomes her family's major income earner. Last year Indonesia exported about 4.3 million people, mostly women, to Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the Middle East to work as maids or sometimes as nurses, collectively bringing home US$13 billion. But a small percentage are underage girls who are offered jobs as restaurant or shop workers or maids. But horror awaits when they arrive at their destination, and they are forced to work as prostitutes. West Kalimantan, partly because it shares a long and poorly controlled border with Malaysia, has become both a transit point and a source of trafficked girls, says Jakarta-based NGO Aisyayah. 'Some are trafficked as domestic workers, some as sex workers and some restaurant workers. But the under-age girls are usually sold into the sex business,' said Yayu Nurul Afidah, a social worker with Aisyayah, which rescues girls at the border points. She said that over the past two years Aisyayah had helped 313 women and young girls who had been forced to work for a pittance, were physically or sexually abused by their bosses or trafficked to work as prostitutes. But she said this was probably just the tip of the iceberg. Tales of local girls being abused at the hands of Malaysian or foreign employees bring domestic outrage. Politicians, ministers and local officials compete for photo opportunities with the abused young woman. But when Ms Ilyas raised the alert on the logging camp near Ketapang, a coastal town on West Kalimantan's coast, it was met with just polite smiles and empty promises. It was when Ms Ilyas and her colleagues working in Pontianak began receiving death threats via telephone and SMS messages that she decided to go higher. 'I realised that we can't depend on local police and local government because they're involved,' she said. Local police chiefs and regional government members were major customers in this brothel, Ms Ilyas said. She said police in Jakarta also appeared concerned about the high-level connections in the case, advising a colleague of Ms Ilyas' who initially uncovered the case to flee Kalimantan and remain under police protection. But she said Pontianak was not the only jungle brothel where timber mafia were using the services of trafficked girls to buy the acquiescence of local politicians, forestry officials and police. She has urged the local government and police to investigate similar trafficking cases in West Kalimantan, where locals have tipped off Ms Ilyas' aid group about young girls being forced into prostitution. She said the dense jungles were a good place to hide such brothels. A Pontianak government official, tasked with assisting trafficking victims, said there were several cases where illegal logging or even legal logging was fuelling trafficking. 'There's logging mafia, and they keep moving around logging different forests, and each time they move the places for sex workers too,' said Nur Aini, head of the government child protection unit in the province's social welfare department. But she denied that the 150 girls that Ms Ilyas discovered were forced into prostitution. 'We sent our local officials there and they reported back that the girls were just under-age workers at the logging camp,' she said. Ms Aini said her department, working with local NGOs, had uncovered several trafficking cases, which led to the prosecution of some traffickers. 'The government is really serious about dealing with this problem,' she said. But Ms Ilyas said local officials were too afraid to report this particular trafficking case because the local mayor was also involved and backed the illegal logging. Another government official appeared to support her claim, saying that district officials had been lax in investigating the trafficking of the girls because they feared the logging mafia was behind it. Environmental group Telepak, which has launched investigations into the illegal logging business from Kalimantan to Papua, said girls often were trafficked into illegal logging camps. 'In one place we found a group of women who had been offered work as maids but they were tricked,' said Hari Gunawan, referring to a logging camp on Sulawesi island. 'Because the logging location is so isolated, they depend on the loggers to escape, so they can't get away.' Mr Gunawan said that in several locations close to the border between Malaysia and West Kalimantan, he had found women who had been forced to become sex workers. The logging boss had brought the women into the camp to entertain the loggers and keep them working long hours. But with much of West Kalimantan's police force recently found to be involved in a massive illegal logging case, launching an investigation using local police could be difficult. West Kalimantan's police chief, Brigadier General Zainal Abidin Ishak, two senior police inspectors and several forestry officials were arrested last month amid allegations they helped a logging gang hide and attempt to smuggle US$24 million worth of logs. Several more heads are expected to roll in one of the biggest operations against illegal logging ever conducted by Indonesian police. But the police chief has not been suspended from the police force, only relieved of his position and moved to Jakarta. Despite the obvious corruption in the local police force, Ms Ilyas is still hopeful the police will track down and prosecute the logging boss who trafficked the 150 girls. But those with more experience in this field are sceptical. Local government officials admit traffickers and illegal loggers receive backing from the military or the police. Jakarta has vowed to crackdown on illegal logging, launching several major investigations over the past two years, and arresting dozens of security and forestry officials. But time is running out. Environment group Greenpeace estimates 72 per cent of Indonesia's pristine forests have been destroyed and the rest is in danger. Telepak says that despite government rhetoric about banning illegal logging, not a single member of the security forces nor a timber baron has been brought to justice. Mr Gunawan said the police were even less likely to seriously pursue those involved in the apparently lesser crime of trafficking, particularly if many of the police were customers of the girls. 'There is no proper legal process here,' he said.