- Endang Nordin and Raja Lumbanrao
- BBC Indonesia, Kuala Lumpur
Mirance Kabo weeps as she tells her story in Kuala Lumpur
“Help me, I am being tortured by my employer, I am covered in blood, help me!” Mirance Kabu wrote on a piece of paper, which she folded and threw outside the iron gates of the apartment where she worked as a maid on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.
A woman passed by the house to pick up this piece of paper, and as soon as she read it she took it to a retired police officer who lived in the same building. “If she had stayed in this house, she would certainly have died,” said the retired policeman.
On December 20, the Malaysian police knocked on the door of the apartment where Mirianis was living and did not leave him for eight months.
Mirance described the moment when she saw the police at the door of the apartment and almost collapsed from exhaustion. She added that the police officers told her: “Don’t be afraid, we are here,” and she says that this is the first time that she has regained a sense of strength.
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Nine years later, Mirance is still fighting for justice in her case, which is hardly unique, as it reveals the vulnerability of undocumented migrant workers, and how difficult justice is for even those who survive to see their story.
In 2015, police charged Meriance’s employer, Aung Soe Ping Seren, with aggravated harm, attempted murder, human trafficking and immigrant law violations, but she denied the charges.
Mirance testified in court, before finally returning to her family’s home.
Two years later, she received news from the Indonesian Embassy that the Public Prosecution Office had closed the case due to insufficient evidence.
image copyright BBC/ Dwiki Marta
Mirance’s husband said he did not recognize her when she was rescued
“Where is the justice, after the employer is free?” asks Hermono, the Indonesian ambassador, who met Merians in October.
The Indonesian embassy had provided Mirance with legal advice and was pressing for an appeal against her employer.
The Indonesian ambassador added: “What is the reason for the delay? Isn’t five years enough? If we do not continue to search for answers, we will forget, especially since Mirance has already returned home.”
It is not clear why prosecutions of a number of abuse cases have stalled in Malaysia, but activists note that there is a culture among Malaysians of viewing domestic workers, most of whom are Indonesian, as second-class citizens who do not deserve the same level of protection as Malaysians.
Malaysia’s foreign ministry told the BBC it would ensure justice was done in accordance with the law.
In 2018, an Indonesian court jailed two men for trafficking Mirance, while the judge ruled that she was sent to work in Malaysia as a maid for Aung Soo Ping Seren, who tortured her, causing serious injuries that led to her hospitalization.
During the trial, what happened with Mirance was described in disturbing detail, during which it was stated that her employer severely beat her, on one occasion breaking her nose, and frequently tortured her with hot irons, tweezers, a hammer, a club, and pliers.
Even her husband, Carpheus, said he couldn’t recognize her after she was rescued and added, “I was shocked when I saw the pictures of Merians in the hospital.”
Eight years later, her body still bears the marks of this torture. There is a deep scar on her upper lip, four of her teeth are missing, and one ear is misshapen.
Last year, Malaysia signed an agreement to improve conditions for Indonesian domestic workers in the country. Indonesia is now pressing to resume the case against Mirance’s employer.
Undocumented workers in Malaysia are at greater risk because their passports are taken while they live with their employer in a strange country, leaving them with few options to seek help.
For her part, said Malaysian MP Hana Yeoh, who wants to see an end to what she describes as the country’s culture of silence about the abuse of domestic workers: “Everyone needs to take more responsibility.”
The Malaysian Ministry of Manpower said there are more than 63,000 Indonesian domestic workers in their country, but this does not include undocumented workers, and there are no clear estimates of their numbers.
The Indonesian embassy says it has received reports of nearly 500 cases of abuse in the past five years.
Indonesian Ambassador Hermono explained: This figure is just “the tip of the iceberg”, because many cases, especially those related to undocumented workers, have not yet been reported.
“I don’t know when this will end. What we do know is that there are more and more victims of torture, non-payment of salaries and other crimes,” the ambassador added.
The Embassy did not track the number of cases of abuse that led to prosecution. But there were some notable rulings. In 2008, a Malaysian woman was sentenced to 18 years in prison for torturing her Indonesian maid, and six years later another couple was sentenced to death for killing an Indonesian domestic worker.
“I will fight to death“
“I will fight for justice until I die, I just want to be able to confront my former employer and ask her, why did she torture me?” Merence says.
image copyright BBC/ Dwiki Marta
Mirance with her husband and three children
Merence said she was 32 when she decided to look for work abroad so that “children would never cry for food again”.
Their lives were very difficult in their village West Timor, as there was no electricity or clean water, and her husband’s wages as a day laborer were not enough to support his family of six.
Mirance accepted a job offer in Malaysia, dreaming of building a home for her family.
When she arrived in Kuala Lumpur in April 2014, the agent took her passport and handed it to her employer, and to her surprise, the staff of the recruitment agency had also taken her phone.
Her job was to look after the employer’s grandmother, who was 93 at the time.
She says the beating began three weeks after she started working.
One evening, the employer wanted to cook fish but could not find it in the freezer because Meriannes had frozen it by mistake. She said that the employer hit her on the head with the frozen fish suddenly and it started to bleed.
After that, Mirance says she was beaten on a daily basis.
She adds that she was not allowed to leave the apartment, the iron gate was always locked and she did not have a key, and four of the neighbors who lived in the same building did not know of her presence until the day the police arrived.
One said, “I only saw her the night she was rescued.”
“The torture and beatings only stopped when the employer felt tired, and after that she would order me to clean up her blood, which was splattered on the floor and walls,” Merians said.
But according to Mirance, there were times when she thought about ending her life, but the thought of her four children at home made her carry on and endure everything she went through.
image copyright BBC/ Dwiki Marta
Mirance says that thinking about her children kept her working despite the difficult circumstances
“I also thought about retaliating, but I knew that if I wanted to resist, I would die,” she said.
At the end of 2014, she looked at herself in the mirror and felt something had changed. “I couldn’t take it any longer,” she says. “I was angry not at my employer, but at myself. I had to dare and try to get out.” And this was when I wrote the letter that would free her.
The BBC tried several times to contact her employer, but she refused to respond.
Mirance says her fight for justice is also on behalf of others like her, “those who did not survive”.
Ambassador Hermono deals with another case of a domestic worker, who says that the degree of her torture “exceeded what the human mind can comprehend” and she was starved. She weighed only 30 kilograms when she was rescued, and her employer is currently on trial.
But there are people like 20-year-old Adelina Sao who weren’t rescued in time. She was subjected to death by allegations of starvation and torture at the hands of her employer.
Her employer was charged with murder, but in 2019 prosecutors withdrew the charges. An appeal to reopen the case was rejected last year.
Adelina was from the same district as Merians in West Timor, and Merians says she met Adelina’s mother in their village and told her, “Even though your daughter is dead, her voice is in me.”