Travel, Teach, Live in Asia
Many of our readers wondered why on previous occasion we posted an article about fighting corruption!
The answer to that would be, we define corruption as a paranormal practice that needs to be resisted by all means.
The local good and law abiding common Indonesian people already know how corruption is chasing foreign investors out of Indonesia, yet nothing serious is done about it by the government, though, the president did form a new committee to fight corruption but this committee is paused helpless since it has no teeth or tools to executive any counter measures policy to slow down and eradicate corruption from its roots.
In fact, the Immigration related corruption cases are huge and it starts from the moment foreigners enter into Indonesia at the Sukarno Hatta international airport in Jakarta.
Then, there is the ordinary fabrication of problems to expats, then blackmail them for solutions, the problems do not usually exist, never the less, they still find any imaginary problem and then start bargaining for huge sums of money from foreigners to settle their odyssey.
We were subjected to a corruption case in Jakarta; it was conducted by a team of the infamous immigration office gangsters and a local accomplice nick named the black widow.
And we have managed to video clip the handing over of blood money to an immigration officer who was sent by his senior officer to collect the ransom money from us to resolve a none existing problem that they have created with my team with the assistance of one of our previous local employees who I dare say was even more corrupt than they were.
There is a kind of general knowledge in Indonesia, that is if he is a foreigner then its alright to milk him out of few extra bucks.
Lawyers follow suit in Indonesia, for if one is lucky to find an English speaking lawyer, one will find out that his lawyer tends to become very sympathetic to the cause which falls under the general knowledge concept mentioned above.
Beautiful Indonesia is indeed, though, beware of the boomerang... be extra careful not to fall in any sort of problem and make sure you know a decent English speaking legal counselor before you think of conducting any business.
As for our case, we are still pursuing legal follow up to make sure this doesn't happen to us again...
Adam El Masri
Author & Researcher
