When the tsunami hit Indonesia's Aceh, the Malaysians were the first to be there to lend a helping hand. And after the Dec 26 tragedy, many Malaysians donated generously to the cause of helping the Indonesians.
Even now, the Malaysian government is offering help to the Indonesians to rebuild Banda Aceh a la Putrajaya. We see our government assisting the Indonesians in so many ways like in helping them to train teachers, in helping them to rebuild houses and in generally helping them in the Asean spirit of cooperation and neighbourliness.
Our prime minister has even bent over backwards to accede to the request of the Indonesian president to defer the planned crackdown on illegal workers in Malaysia.
But now, we have the Indonesian Manpower Minister, Fahmi Idris, coming out to tell Malaysia that the Malaysian immigration laws are not being enforced fairly and that he is coming over to engage Malaysian lawyers to pursue civil and and criminal action against Malaysian employers who have failed to pay their illegal Indonesian workers.
To top it al, this minister further says that the reason Indonesian illegal workers did not take up the recent amnesty offer granted for them was because they were not paid by their employers.
The irresistible conclusion in the minds of many Malaysian would be that the amnesty offer granted to illegal workers confers upon them the status of a legal foreign worker. What is even more troubling is the conclusion that it is the employers who are now completely at fault with no regards to the conduct of the illegal workers themselves.
Somehow or other, the whole idea that immigrants who enter the country illegally are criminals seems to have been forgotten. The fact that they entered the country illegally and committed a further offence by being employed is also being ignored.
The Indonesian manpower minister also took issue with the punishment (a fine) meted out to local employers by Malaysian courts when he compared it to that dished out to illegal workers (caning and imprisonment). He conveniently avoided the issue that illegal immigrants are criminals in the first place.
I find the behaviour by the Indonesian manpower minister in criticising our laws extremely insulting to the Malaysian government. Whatever our prime minister has done out of goodwill for Indonesia is not appreciated by the Indonesian government.
But then again, the fact of the matter is that the problem of illegal immigrants has never been addressed decisively by the Malaysian government. Amnesty periods are always expected every year, as are the threats of a nationwide crackdown that never takes place.
As such, the Indonesian government and their illegal workers simply got bolder by the day. The kindness and compassion of the Malaysian government are taken as weaknesses.