Brigadier Rudy Soik, shown here wearing a white shirt, was arrested in October 2014 and jailed for four months. He said traffickers conspired with his police supervisor to press trumped-up charges against him in retaliation for his crime-fighting efforts. (Photo supplied)
Death threats and jail terms are occupational hazards and a fact of life for Brigadier Rudy Soik, a member of the anti-human-trafficking division of the East Nusa Tenggara police force in West Timor.
Despite all the challenges involved he has pledged to carry on by helping victims of a smuggling syndicate that has targeted the poor and marginalized in this region for years.
East Nusa Tenggara province has a population of 5.2 million. Some 88 percent are Christians, and just over half of this group are Catholics.
In recent years the province has ranked above the rest of the country in terms of the severity of its human trafficking problem.
The International Organization for Migration estimated in 2014 that 7,193 people in the region were victims of trafficking.
Many have since been rescued and returned to their villages but thousands more remain trapped in inhumane conditions, often subject to torture and constantly facing the threat of being killed.
The victims are mostly women and young girls from remote villages.
"I come from a small village so I know exactly how the people there live and all the difficult conditions they face," Soik told ucanews.com.
"I feel their pain when I hear about our brothers and sisters being treated badly," he said.
"I can't stand to see them stripped of their basic rights as human beings," added the senior police officer who lives in Kefamenanu, the capital of North Central Timor district.
"That's why I've vowed to do whatever I can to help my people."
He said many villagers in his district, and in other economically disadvantaged districts, were trafficked against their will — a practice he is determined to put an end to.
He vowed not to quit the fight even if it takes decades or requires he keep putting his life on the line.
Soik has built a fearsome reputation among his peers as a first-class investigator who has relentlessly taken down even the toughest of criminal gang members.
But his hopes of career advancement were blighted, he said, by one of his superiors who was involved in graft and did not relish the prospect of being further exposed by the brigadier.
"I was jailed for four months in 2014 when some people I arrested fought back, accusing me of violence," he said.
A judge later threw the case out of court due to lack of evidence.
The story against him was fabricated, a conspiracy between traffickers and his police superior at the time, he said.
Prior to his arrest in October of that year he had confronted his boss about why the perpetrators he had arrested were not being taken to court.
"It just wasn't happening," he said. "Instead, I found myself being accused of complicity with a trafficking network. I was accused of receiving money from the smugglers, which I never did."
Some may have lost faith in fighting crime and hung up their gloves upon being released from prison for a crime they allegedly did not commit, but for Soik the experience merely served to harden his resolve.
"I will continue to fight for the underprivileged and victims of trafficking for as long as I can," he said. "We must free the province from this scourge by smashing the smuggling syndicate."
Government statistics show that 1.7 million of the roughly 6 million Indonesians who work overseas are recruited illegally, which opens a huge window for traffickers to exploit.
Many of those who work abroad without proper permits and documents hail from East Nusa Tenggara, where unemployment is high and poverty rampant.
According to Soik, of the 62 Indonesians who died in Malaysia last year, 61 were victims of trafficking.
This year more cases have surfaced including that of Adelina Sau, who died after she was tortured by her Malaysian employer.
"And these are just the cases we have on record," Soik said. "I believe there are many more, it's just that we have no way of knowing about them."
Even more disturbing is that he has grounds to suspect many of the dead are victims of organ harvesting.
After suspicious patterns of stitches were found on a number of corpses he requested official autopsies be carried out but for reasons that were not made clear to him, his appeal was denied and his allegation remains unproven.
Defending the poor
Human traffickers often use intimidation tactics to recruit victims, most of whom survive overseas using forged immigration documents that put them at the mercy of the syndicates.
In West Timor, the brokers start by approaching poor families and offering them 2 million to 3 million rupiah (US$150-250) to marry their daughter.
Many families in those regions are so impoverished they can't refuse such a sum because it means they will be able to feed the rest of their family.
"Parents who receive the money feel under a lot of pressure," Soik said. "So they pack their kids off with realizing it's probably the last time they will ever see them."
Most of the victims are uneducated teenage girls and women who are abandoned by their husbands. They are mired in poverty and unable to find work but still have to support their families.
The Indonesian Statistics Agency reported last year that with 22 percent of the population living below the poverty line, East Nusa Tenggara ranks as the third poorest among Indonesia's 34 provinces after Papua and West Papua.
And in a desperate bid to escape the poverty trap many parents are tricked into making tragic mistakes that will come back to haunt them.
"But we cannot blame them," Soik said. "The traffickers exploit their economic conditions and lack of education."
While investigating cases in North Central Timor district he discovered that nearly all of the families in 276 villages there have relatives who work outside the province.
In the majority of cases, their exact whereabouts are unknown even to close relatives.
"When they told me they were no longer in communication with the ones who left, I instantly knew they'd been smuggled," he said.
Weak law enforcement
He said the trend continues as a result of weak law enforcement.
There have been some successes, he said, citing a May 2017 case that saw seven people sentenced in a local provincial court.
The guilty parties included an immigration officer, the leader of a smuggling network, a broker in Pekanbaru, a recruiter in the provincial capital Kupang, a driver, and an agent who provides forged documents.
However, Soik said he doubts human trafficking will cease until graft is eradicated and harsher sentences levied.
He said many cases result in what appear like slaps on the wrist as local district courts classify them as administrative violations, allowing the smugglers to get back to business as soon as their jail terms end.
"They should apply the [2007] Human Trafficking Law instead, which enables them to mete out jail sentences of up to 15 years," he said.
"If we are serious about smashing these smuggling syndicates, they have to receive the highest sentences possible."
