Stateless in Borneo: Indon Underground Workers in Sarawak

This is an unedited version of a published article I wrote for (the late) LATITUDES magazine (August 2004 edition).




It was late December 2002 when I arrived in Long Mekaba, a small Kenyah Dayak village in the Upper Baram river, deep in Sarawak, one of the two states that constitute the Malaysian territories of Borneo. My objective was to find illegal Indonesian workers to be interviewed for my ten-month research in Malaysia. They were not that hard to find.

One might wonder why it was so easy to find illegal Indonesians in Sarawak. Not only do Indonesians (referred to as Indons, often viewed as a rather pejorative term coined by Indonesia's ever-suspicious neighbors) physically differ from the Dayak and Chinese populations that dominate the state, but to my surprise, I saw many Indonesians, especially from Dayak, Timorese, Torajan or Florenese descent, mingling freely with locals in coffee shops scattered around Sarawak's upriver logging towns such Kapit, Belaga or Long San. This does not match the much publicized portrayal by the mainstream Malaysian press of Indonesian workers as urban troublemakers. The Seremban riots two years ago in Negeri Sembilan (when Indonesians overturned and burned a Malaysian police truck while singing Indonesia Raya and raising an Indonesian flag over it-incredibly, within the police compound) remains a terrifying image in the Malaysian national subconcious. Images of abused Indonesian workers like Nirmala Bonat a few months ago did nothing either to rehabilitate Malaysia as a friendly neighbor.



Laborers from the Indonesian archipelago were coming to Malaya and British Borneo long before those territories became part of Malaysia in 1963. Many of today's Sarawak Malays are descended from exiles who fled the Sambas wars in the 1850s. Some Teochew and Hakka Chinese in Sarawak are descendants of kongsi mining coolies invited by the 'White Rajah' Charles Brooke to help Sarawak's economy in the 1870s. Timorese labor trickled into British North Borneo's plantation economy via Nunukan beginning in the 1950s. Indonesian Kenyah Dayak workers were the backbone of the logging workforce that also constructed many of Sarawak's rural airstrips in 1958, while a group of them were even invited in 1959 by the British to decorate the walls of the Sarawak Museum in Kuching. Any middle-aged Sarawakian in the Miri area might even recall Indonesian workers coming to the aid of locals during Sarawak's worst floods in 1963. The legality of workers wasn't that much of a concern before the Konfrontasi broke out in 1963. The post-Konfrontasi era was a period of acute 'memory loss', plagued by police raids, unnecessary border control and of course all the brouhaha of nation-state identity politics. Gone was the kind appreciation of British colonial authorities who used to welcome and cherish the illegal workers,and finally 'Indon' was 'in'. (The term first appeared in the Sarawak Gazette's 31 January 1965 edition which reported an 'Indon' border attack on Sarawak's Fourth Division).

Today, Indonesians work mainly in Sarawak's timber and oil palm industries. The illegal segment (predominantly male) may be as high as 60% of the total number of Indonesians in the state. Legal work permits are issued only for the plantation, sawmill, plywood manufacturing and domestic help sectors, but most illegal workers enjoy better pay (though uninsured) in high-risk timber felling jobs and in the construction industry. Fluid and amicable interactions between Indonesians and local Malaysian Sarawakians go largely unnoticed nowadays despite widespread coverage by the Indonesian press when Malaysia attempted to expel over 600,000 illegal workers from its Borneo states. In fact, Sarawak witnessed the lowest numbers of forced expulsions during the Operasi Nyah raiding campaign in August 2002. Does this imply that Sarawak is a safe haven for illegal workers ?

Location of Long Mekaba, my research site

I went to Long Mekaba at the suggestion of a Marudi District Councilor, Jalong Tanyit. Jalong, a Sarawakian Kenyah Dayak, still lives with his family in one of the four longhouses in the village, and plays a significant political role in mobilizing support from upriver Baram Dayaks to back up Sarawak's Barisan Nasional (Malaysia's National Front ) government. Despite being a BN politician, Jalong did not hide the fact that he hosts a number of illegal Indonesian workers in his longhouse during off-time labor seasons. As Sarawak is the only Malaysian state with a non-Malay Christian majority (hence, the absence of the UMNO / United Malay National Organization in the state), Christmas is widely celebrated in rural Sarawak and in logging camps throughout the state. It is usually during these holidays that Indonesians spend a couple of weeks in neighboring villages closest to their work sites. "You will find plenty of Indons staying at my longhouse," Jalong said. "You should go there."


I departed from Miri, the major coastal town in Sarawak's oil-rich northwest, boarding a privately-owned pickup truck which regularly commutes between Miri and the Upper Baram, transporting everything from building materials, semi-nomadic Penan families to commuting Japanese botanical researchers. During the nine-hour journey, Lim, a Foochow Chinese trader and the car's owner, stopped in the middle of nowhere to purchase wild boar meat from Penan hunters in exchange for a can of Danone Jacob's Cream Crackers and, to my surprise, a box of Indonesian-made instant noodles. "Indon food tastes much better than Malaysian-made noodles, and the sauce is easier to mix compared to Maggi Mee," the Penan argued.
"Indons have very good action films, too! We bought a VCD copy of Angling Darma!" Angling Darma? This low-budget soap opera based on a Javanese myth is a favorite of Malaysian Penans ? Deep in Malaysia's interior, Indonesia felt as close as ever.

Lim's upriver taxi

As Lim unloaded his car at our destination, a thin man came to assist. "This is Bujang," said Lim. "He's an Indon like you." Bujang, forty-years-old, is an illegal worker. He came over from Sambas, West Kalimantan in 1992 as a keyboard player looking for jobs in the night-life scene in Sibu. Bujang escaped a police raid and managed to flee to Miri. Lim found him, depressed and broke, at the bazaar and offered him a job as a coolie far upriver. Bujang told me, "Halfway there, we were stopped at a police roadblock. I was terrified, but Lim ordered me to pretend I was a mentally disturbed Iban. We managed to pass through, and I've stayed on ever since. I'm afraid to return home."

The remote Kenyah village of Long Mekaba


Bujang was to accompany me for the thirty-minute river journey to Long Mekaba.

"Don't you have work to do at Lim's place?" I asked.

"No, during Christmas I often go to Long Mekaba myself. I like to sing and play keyboards at the local church." Puzzled, I asked, "But aren't you a Malay Muslim ?" "Yes, but it's the only place I can play music. I just enjoy the music. The Kenyah people over there often invite me to their church, and they usually persuade Lim to let me have time off."

Long Mekaba was packed with guests. The four longhouses were crowded with families returning from their work places in coastal towns, in Brunei, and as far as Johor Baru, where some Sarawak Kenyahs are working in a consumer electronics plant. Traditional sampe (Kenyah lute) music and communal singing competed with Indonesian Sheila On 7 tapes blaring out from unforgiving karaoke boxes. Merarau, or communal dining on longhouse verandahs, dominated the Christmas celebrations. Among the long-eared Kenyah women serving Milo milk and the never-ending supply of wild boar meat, I noticed a few men assisting them. These men were physically distinct from the predominantly fair-skinned Kenyahs. Lejau Tusau, the local tua kampong (village elder) told me, "This year three urang Timur from Indonesia are here helping us to build our new Kenyah cultural house. Of course, they always volunteer on
occasions like these." What on earth did he meant by 'urang Timur'? I noticed that they were all dark-skinned and curly-haired. Aha! He probably meant Timorese.

The three Indonesian workers were commissioned by a local Kenyah who had won a construction bid from the Sarawak government. Long Mekaba was particularly known for its sampe players who had performed in places as diverse as Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and Paris. Projected to be a highlight for Sarawak tourism, Long Mekaba needed a cultural display.

Pacik, the eldest at the age of fifty, in fact came from Palu in Central Sulawesi. Pacik had come to Sarawak independently in 1985 to work in oil-palm fields in Sabah and later near Miri. He returned briefly to Sulawesi to pick up his wife. His two children were born in Sarawak. Despite his illegal status, Malaysian law entitles every child born on Malaysian soil to birth certificates and Malaysian citizenship at the age of twelve, regardless of the legal status of parents. Thus while Pacik and his wife are still renegade as illegal workers, their two children are now enjoying every free Malaysian social service as citizens. "I don't worry now because the state provides lodging, food and books to every elementary schoolchild. My two children are in Long San, downriver from here."

Pacik, focused on finishing the Kenyah cultural house (Dec 2002)

"How can you live tranquilly when your status is illegal?" I asked him.
"That's no problem. I know all police officers in Long San, and they often give me small jobs doing repair work. You could say that they protect me."
Lejau interrupted, "-and of course they are protected by the Long San Kenyahs as well."

It turned out that Long San was the residence of the late Temenggong Oyong Lawai Jau, the Paramount Chief of the Sarawak Kenyahs, who played a prominent role in securing indigenous support for the Malaysian Federation back in 1963. As the Temenggong married his brother to a Kalimantan Kenyah, hospitality toward Indonesians was always secured.

As the celebrations went on, I ran out of my Indonesian kretek cigarettes. The local Sidang Injil Borneo church, a somewhat puritan institution, had prohibited the sale of booze and cigarettes in the village, and Lim's shop was annoyingly eighteen kilometers upriver. "Don't worry," Pacik assured me, "meet Leo over there. He stocks all our cigarettes!"

Leo was sitting on the end of the verandah, taking a break from serving Milo to the guests. He seemed to be reluctant to talk during our initial contact. (Pacik later told me that he thought I was a Malaysian policeman).He opened up during our next conversations at the work site where they were constructing a cultural house-but only after I showed him my Indonesian passport. Leonardo Nahak, aged twenty-four, came to Malaysia from Oecussi (East Timor) in 1997, soon after he was expelled from high school-on the second day of final exams- for hitting a teacher. His mother was an East Timorese Dawan from Oecussi, and his father came from Sainoni in Indonesian West Timor.

Leo,hammering his way up

"The basic problem for us Indon workers here is all the lies we're told by recruiting agencies back home," said Leo in a strange mixture of Malaysian Malay dialect spoken in an Eastern Indonesian accent.

Leo's story is typical of the experience of other Indonesians working in Malaysia. After being lured by agencies in Kupang with promises of a daily wage of sixteen Malaysian ringgits (around US$4.20 or Rp38,500), free food and good lodging for a job on an oil-palm plantation, he boarded a ship with about a hundred people from Surabaya to Nunukan. The agency took care of all the formalities, and the workers entered Sabah legally with the required visas and work permits. When they arrived at the work site near Keningau, their new employers took everyone's passports away. Dreams of a lucrative salary evaporated on the first day.

"Not only were we living in overcrowded barracks with sixty people, but we had to accept a daily payment of only RM10, from which we had to buy our food."
As the new employers owed recruiting agencies RM1,500 per worker, the workers themselves found their salaries deducted.

"We wanted an explanation, but we never saw the agency people again!”

"What was your first impression about Malaysia ?"

"Of course they're richer, but I don't like the food," Leo said, laughing. "And the language was a problem, because Malaysian Malay and Bahasa Indonesia are slightly different. We once had a fight with locals only because one of them called us 'budak´, which in Indonesian means 'slave'. One of them almost got killed. Only after our supervisor intervened did we learn that 'budak´ means 'anak' (boy) in Malaysian Malay. Some locals apologized, and suddenly we all began to laugh!"

Leo, with his Kenyah supervisor, having a good laugh...

"What did you do about your working conditions?"

"We protested after our third month, and the employers gave us two options: leave with a two-month salary without passports returned, or the other way around: passports returned without salary. Of course, most of us opted to have some survival cash, so it was goodbye to our passports."

Leo dropped in and out of various plantation jobs for two years before arriving in Sarawak. Most workers remain undetected by authorities because most employers bribe policemen before raids occur. "The working conditions on a plantation near Miri were far worse. We didn't receive our salary for three months, so I decided to run away with only RM20 in my pocket. I walked for thirty kilometers towards Miri until I spotted a police roadblock at a junction near Lambir. I noticed that one bus line regularly turned at a side road before the roadblock, so without knowing my destination I boarded that bus. The RM13 bus trip took me to Lapok, a major logging pond on the Tinjar river near the Baram. There were no job openings. Desperate, I spent my last RM 7 on cigarettes and a cup of coffee."

Fortunately for Leo, a chat with a local Iban landed him an easy-going job as a gardener. "I had to plant cabbages, peppers and other vegetables. I earned money from the profit-sharing of sales." A regular customer was a Chinese man who offered Leo a part time job as a plantation sprayer.

"That was the turn of the tide," Leo continued. "I earned good money, and the Iban provided me a decent room at his house and even free meals."

Made by Indons: Long Mekaba's finished Kenyah cultural house (Oct 2003)

One day the Chinese man arrived with his brother, who turned out to be a construction contractor. Leo was commissioned to build the teachers' quarters at a local school. "I had no experience at all in construction jobs, but I went ahead. The Chinese offered me RM 4,000 to complete the job in a month. That's when I met Pacik. We decided to split the money ourselves and not to hire other workers."

Numerous construction jobs followed, and Leo negotiated the contracts himself. Both Pacik and Leo have their signatures stamped on many longhouses, schools and churches throughout the Baram region.

"So how do you spend all the money you earn?”

Leo laughed again and said, "I'm still young and I spent a lot on drinking and hanging out in karaoke bars. I flirted with an Iban girl and she bought me a cell phone. I couldn't get rid of her until I decided to block her calls. I ran to Long Ikeng once, but she found me. When I finally got the Long Mekaba job, I ran away again. I hope this time she won't catch me." Lejau interrupted again, "Yeah, Leo asked me to keep a watch on the river. Every time we hear a boat approaching, Leo would hide inside our longhouse. I teased him. 'If you don't marry a Kenyah girl here I will hand you over to the Ibans!'”

Another problem for Leo was culture shock.

"I often saw the greatly elongated earlobes of Dayaks on television back in Indon," he said. "I thought it was a hoax. But when I arrived in the Baram, I couldn't believe my eyes. The long ears did exist! An elder once got angry when I couldn't stop staring at her ears. I asked her 'Mama, were you born like that ?' But now I'm sitting here working side by side with a 'long ear'. Amazing!"

One thing that keeps Leo happy is that upriver communities like the Ibans, Kayans and Kenyahs in Sarawak treat illegal Indonesians very well. "In towns we usually have to buy our own food. But here, villagers are always giving us free shelter and food. They never ask to be repaid. I used to think Dayaks were mean and merciless. That's not true. They even refuse any payment. That's why I always insist on helping them in celebrations, or doing small jobs for them, like repairing a longhouse roof."

"How do you feel about East Timor's independence?"

"I don't know. I haven't returned since I first came here, and that was before independence. The only difference is that the telephone line to my mother in Pante Macassar sounds much better now," he said laughing. "But my father's family is in Sainoni, near Kefa on the Indonesian side. So I'm not sure yet where or when I will return home. Either way, it would be difficult to find a job there for somebody as bodok (stupid) as me. That's what my mother says."

Leo, Fahmi (from Lombok) with their Kenyah host, amai Bit

With over RM 10,000 in savings, people like Leo have no immediate plans to return home or to fight for a legal identity in their host country. For most Sarawakians, citizenship doesn't matter when it comes to appreciating foreign workers. As Lejau put it, "These Indons are doing nothing wrong, whatever our government may say. Is it wrong for somebody to earn a living? Sarawak couldn't survive without them. They help us more than the Malaysian government does."

Perhaps 'Indon' is not such a bad word after all.

Dave Lumenta is an anthropologist.