Letter: KPC Melati rift affects members

Tue, 07/22/2008 10:14 AM | Reader's Forum

KPC Melati is an organization of Indonesian women married to non-Indonesian men. Until recently this put these women and their children into a gray area in regards to citizenship of those children, and rights of property ownership.

To their great credit, KPC Melati succeeded last year in achieving a dual citizenship arrangement for the children of mixed marriage couples. It is also now possible for an Indonesian woman to sponsor her non-Indonesian husband for a KITAS, and property rights is now on the agenda.

Unfortunately, these determined and strong-minded women have also had internal divisions within their organization, so that now there are at least two different organizations/factions claiming to be the true representative of Indonesian women in mixed marriages.

In our experience, this has meant that wheels have fallen off some of the early undertakings KPC made to its members, in strongly promoting itself as an agent in order to help mixed marriage couples process the documentation to obtain dual citizenship for their children.

Last year KPC Melati was offering to undertake this service for a fee of Rp 4 million (US$435) (later reduced to Rp 3 million), a bit of a stiff fee, but one that we duly transferred to the KPC Melati bank account in August 2007.

The application on behalf of our daughter was lodged at the Justice and Human Rights Ministry on August 30, 2007, for which we have a receipt for Rp 500,000. A heavy commission to KPC Melati we thought, but OK, let's get the process completed.

KPC Melati was unable to deliver on the service they had undertaken to provide, and as they still had Rp 3 million of our money, we asked them to give the money back, less any real costs they had incurred such as the Rp 500,000 for initial lodging of the application at the ministry.

We have asked and asked, by phone, SMS, letter, email, but KPC Melati sets new records in terms of non-responsiveness. Each faction claims it is the other's responsibility.

KPC Melati needs to preserve the trust and confidence of the members it seeks to serve, rather than holding members interests hostage to their own internal politics.

PHILIP RICH
Jakarta

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