“Help me. My employer is torturing me”wrote Meriance Kabu. “Every day I am covered in blood, help me!”. He quickly folded her note and tossed it through the locked iron door of the apartment in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur where she was living and working as a domestic worker.
A passing woman took it. When she read it he immediately took the note to a retired police officer who lived in that same building. “If she had stayed there, he would surely have died,” she said later.
That same day, December 20, 2014, the Malaysian Police knocked on the door of the apartment where Meriance lived, and from which he had not left in eight months. “I felt like I was breaking down,” he says, recalling the moment he saw the policemen. “They told me ‘don’t be afraid, we’re here.’ At that moment I felt strong again. I felt like I was breathing again. The police officers approached and I told them the truth.”
ATTENTION: This story contains details that some readers may find disturbing.
Nine years later, Meriance continues looking for justice to be done. His case, which is far from unique, reveals how vulnerable undocumented migrants are, and how often justice eludes even those who survive to tell their story.
In 2015, police accused Meriance’s employer, the NGO Su Ping Serene, of causing serious injury, attempted murder, human trafficking, and violations of immigration laws. She pleaded not guilty.
Meriance testified in court before finally returning to her family. Two years later, she received the news from the Indonesian embassy that the prosecutors had dropped the case with the excuse that the evidence was insufficient.
“The employer was released, where is the justiceasks the country’s ambassador to Malaysia, Hermono (many Indonesians use just one name) who met Meriance in October.
The embassy retained legal counsel for her and has been pressing for the reopening of the case against Meriance’s employer. “What was the reason for the delay? Isn’t five years enough? If we don’t keep asking, (the case) will be forgotten, especially since Meriance has already returned home.”
It’s not clear why so few abuse cases end up being prosecuted in Malaysia, but activists point to a culture that views domestic workers, most of whom are Indonesian, as second class citizens they do not deserve the same level of protection as the Malaysians.
The Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the BBC that “they would make sure that justice is done according to the law.”
In 2018, a court in Indonesia jailed two men for trafficking Meriance. The judge determined that she had been sent to work in Malaysia “as a domestic worker for the NGO Su Ping Serene, who tortured her, causing serious injuries” that took her to the hospital.
Meriance’s ordeal was described in all its disturbing detail in the verdict that her employer had severely beaten her, broken nose once, and used to torture her with a hot iron, tongs, hammers, sticks and tongs.
Eight years later, his body still bears the marks of these tortures. He still has a deep gash on his upper lip, four teeth are missing, and one of his ears is misshapen. Her husband, Karvius, says she was unrecognizable when she was rescued: “I was so shocked when they showed me photos of Meri in the hospital”.
In 2022, Malaysia and Indonesia signed an agreement to improve conditions for Indonesian domestic workers in the country. Indonesia is now pushing to reopen the case.
Undocumented workers like her are especially vulnerable because they they hold your passport and they live with their employer in a foreign country, leaving them few options for seeking help.
“Everyone has to take more responsibility,” says Malaysian parliamentarian Hannah Yeoh, who wants to see an end to what she describes as a culture of silence about the abuse of domestic workers in the country.
Malaysia’s Ministry of Manpower says there are more than 63,000 Indonesian domestic workers in the country, but that does not include undocumented workers. There are no clear estimates on their number. The Indonesian embassy says it has received reports of nearly 500 cases of abuse in the past five years.
The figure is just “the tip of the iceberg”, says Ambassador Hermono, because there are many cases, especially those involving undocumented workers, that are not reported. “I don’t know when this will end. What we know is that there are more and more victims, from cases of torture to non-payment of wages and other crimes.”.
“I will fight for justice until I die”says Meriance. “I just want to be able to ask my former employer, ‘why did you torture me?’”
She was 32 years old when she decided to look for work abroad so that “the children would stop crying because they had no food.” Life was difficult in her village in West Timor, where no electricity or running water. And her husband’s salary as a day laborer was not enough to support her family of six.
Meriance accepted the offer to work in Malaysia and dreamed of building a home for her family. When he arrived in Kuala Lumpur in April 2014, the agent took his passport and handed it over to his employer. Recruiters in Indonesia had already taken the phone from him.
But Meriance dreamed of a better life. Her job was to “take care of Grandma,” the mother of her employer Serene, who was 93 years old at the time. Three weeks after she started working, she says, the beatings started.
One night, Serena wanted to cook fish, but she couldn’t find it in the fridge because Meriance had mistakenly put it in the freezer. Suddenly, he felt the blow of a frozen fish. Her head began to bleed. After that episode, she says, they beat her every day.
Meriance remembers that they never let her out of the apartment. The apartment door was always closed and she did not have the keys. Four of her neighbors who lived in the same building did not know of her existence until the police arrived.
“I only saw her the night she was rescued”said one of them. Meriance says that she tortures her and the beatings only stopped when her employer had had enough. He then ordered Meriance to clean up his blood that had stained the floors and walls. Sometimes, she says, she thought about taking her own life. But thinking of her four children kept her alive.
“I also thought about fighting back,” he says. “But if he had fought, he would have died.” Then one day At the end of 2014, he looked in the mirror and felt that something had changed. “I couldn’t take it anymore. She was furious, not at my employer. She was furious with me. She had to try to get out of there ”.
So it was that he wrote the message that would restore his freedom. The BBC She tried numerous times to contact her employer, NGO Su Ping Serena, to hear her account, but she refused to speak.
Meriance says she fights for justice for others like her as well, and for those who didn’t survive. Hermono is now dealing with a case of a domestic worker who she says was tortured in a completely inhumane way. When she was rescued she weighed just 30 kilos. Her employer is being prosecuted.
But some, like 20-year-old Adelina Sau, were not rescued in time. Her employer starved and tortured her to death. She was charged with murder, but in 2019 the prosecution dropped the charges. An appeal to reopen the case was rejected last year.
Adelina was from the same district as Meriance in West Timor. Meriance says that he met Adelina’s mother in her town and told her, “Even though your daughter is dead, her voice is within me.”.
* Por Endang Nurdin & Raja Lumbanrau