S'WAK POLLS Amid the hustle of the Sarawak election campaign, the hard life continues for a woman and her young children who are practically stateless, despite being born in Malaysia.
While election candidates went for a walkabout at Pasar Padawan Kuching, Ita Peri and her three children were seen going through the trash behind the wet market, looking look for fresh produce that may have been discarded.
Ita Peri brings her children to the wet market every day to look for food to cook at home, which is not far from the market.
“I walk here from the 10th Mile, every day. I will take the damaged vegetables and wash them out. I have no choice. I have no money,” the 35-year-old woman told Malaysiakini.
Her eldest, who is 14, and her husband work as construction workers, earning RM35 a day.
The Iban woman said none of her four children have birth certificates because she does not have an identity card. Her only documentation is a clinic appointment card she uses to get medical treatment from the public health clinic.
Ita hails from Hulu Bakong, near Baram, which is located 24km from Miri, Sarawak.
Three of her children were born in the thick of a oil palm plantation while her youngest was born in a government hospital.
“I don’t know how to apply for a birth certificate for my children,” she said, with her daughter swaddled on her back.
Ita and her family now live on the construction site where her husband and son work. None of her children go to school.
“I don’t know how to register them for school, they have no birth certificates,” she said.
State-wide registration exercise
In March, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Joseph Entulu said a statewide exercise to register Sarawakians who have no identity cards would continue until the end of 2017.
However, the focus appears to be to reach those in the hinterlands.
“The pockets of population, which are scattered deep in the interiors, pose a big challenge for the task force in the dissemination of information on the programme.
“Nevertheless, we are doing our level best to reach out to them and continue with the programme after the cut-off point (Dec 31, 2017), if need be,” Entulu (photo), who heads the task force, reportedly said.
The programme is to assist Sarawakians without documentation to obtain identity cards through certification by community leaders, such a longhouse or village chiefs.
The state branch of the National Registration Department (NRD) received 136 late applications for birth certificates and 35 applications for identity cards in the pilot programme in Sibu, Entulu said.
Last month, NRD officers were shocked to find 600 applications for identity cards and birth certificates awaiting them in the interiors of Sungai Asap, about 150km inland from Bintulu.
Sungai Asap is where those displaced by the much criticised Bakun dam were resettled.
Three hundred more applications awaited the NRD in the equally rural Belaga constituency, about 70km away from Sungai Asap, the Borneo Post reported.
Back in urban Kuching, Ita said she tried registering for an identity card once, but failed. She does not know why.
Ita hopes that with the 11th Sarawak election, the government would issue identification papers for herself and her children.
This is her only request from the government.
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