Jakarta Globe, July 23, 2010
Migrant worker Sariah, 37, died after she was allegedly tortured and beaten in Kuwait. Indonesian authorities have been criticized for failing to act. (Photo Migrant Care)
Jakarta. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has launched an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the alleged torture and death of an Indonesian migrant worker in Kuwait.
Teguh Wardoyo, the ministry’s director general for the protection of Indonesians overseas, told Detik.com that it had received an official report from an Indonesian forensic team who performed an autopsy on Sariah, 37.
Teguh said that according to the report, the domestic worker from Indramayu, West Java, died from abuse and not of natural causes, as claimed by Kuwaiti medical practitioners.
The team from Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital announced on Wednesday that the Sariah had been beaten with a blunt object, including the likely fatal blow to the back of her head.
Teguh said the ministry was following up of the results of the autopsy but was quick to deflect any hint of blame from the Indonesian Embassy in Kuwait, saying if its offial report contained errors, responsibility should lay with the Kuwaiti doctor who wrote the initial findings of death by natural causes.
Sariah left for Kuwait in 2008 and changed employers on three occasions.
She told her family over the telephone that her employer had routinely abused her. In her last phone conversation, she said she was beaten and locked in a room without meals.
She was already in a critical condition when her employer took her to Al Adan Hospital in Kuwait on June 30. She died eight days later.
In its report, the hospital wrote that she died from heart complications and a damaged artery.
Kuwait’s Ambassador in Jakarta, Nasser Al-Enizi, was not available for comment.
Indonesian migrant workers often suffer terrible abuse in the Middle-East, where abusers act with impunity.
Anis Hidayah, director of labor watchdog Migrant Care, said Shariah’s family had contacted the organization after she was admitted to hospital in a coma.
Migrant Care reacted by contacting the Foreign Ministry and the Indonesian Embassy in Kuwait, which had failed to investigate despite solid evidence of torture and sustained beatings at the hands of her employer.
Anis said it was Migrant Care, not the Indonesian government, that had been forced to act to ensure an autopsy was completed at RSCM.
“The government should perform an autopsy on every migrant worker who dies while in the care of their employers, even if the hospital reports from foreign countries say they died of natural causes,” she said.
“The hospital in Kuwait lied to the Indonesian government about Sariah’s death and it might not be the first lie foreign hospitals have told us.”
Anis said that according to its data, not a single foreign employer from a Middle-East country had ever been found guilty of abusing a domestic worker.
She hoped Sariah’s death “could be the starting point to investigate other deaths and we hope the government will be more attentive to our workers.”
