Malaysia has given Indonesia a one-month deadline to solve delays and help its workers return to work in the country legally, a report said today.

Home Affairs Minister Azmi Khalid has told Indonesian Manpower and Transmigration Minister Fahmi Idris that Malaysia would seek foreign workers elsewhere unless Indonesia resolves the problem, the Star newspaper said.

"We have informed him that if these delays are not resolved within a month, the Malaysian government may be forced to open up its labour market to other countries," Azmi was quoted as saying.

"This is because our employers cannot wait that long for Indonesian workers to come back," he said.

"If the Indonesian government doesn't move to resolve the delay, they may find that when their workers finally make it back to Malaysia, there won't be too many jobs left over fot them," he said.

Azmi said he was disappointed that only 500 Indonesians had returned to Malaysia with legal permits since an amnesty pardoning illegals ended on Feb 28.

He was commenting on reports that thousands of Indonesians wanting to return to Malaysia as legal workers were stranded at the 11 one-stop centres at Indonesian border points which were set up to facillitate their applications.

Malaysia has estimated there were nearly a million illegal workers in the country, mostly from Indonesia but also from the Philippines, Burma, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.

About 382,000 took advantage of the amnesty, which started at the end of October, to depart without penalty but an estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants remain.