Indonesia halts Taiwan internship scheme, after students were ‘forced to work in factories and eat pork’
- Reports say hundreds of Indonesian students were only allowed two days of classes per week – but spent four days packing contact lenses instead
Indonesia decided late on Wednesday to suspend sending students to Taiwan for an internship programme following news reports that hundreds of Indonesian students who took part were forced to be manual labourers in factories on the island.
Taiwanese media quoted legislator Ko Chih-en as revealing over the weekend that in one case, the Indonesian students were only allowed to go to class two days a week and had one day of rest, while working the remaining four days at a factory, where they packaged 30,000 contact lenses for 10 hours per shift.
The students, according to Ko, who is a legislator from Kuomintang, or the opposition Nationalist Party of China, worked from 7.30am to 7.30pm with only a two-hour break, while they stood for 10 hours a day packaging the contact lenses.
And although most of the Indonesian students are Muslims, their meals contained pork chops.