"Last year, some 3,200 people were smuggled into Indonesia ," Dennis Hill, IOM`s chief representative in Indonesia, said after an launching an anti-human trafficking familiarization program in Batam on Monday.
He said the majority of people smuggled in came from Afghanistan and conflict-torn countries in the Middle East.
They came to Indonesia enroute to Australia where they planned to seek asylum. "Indonesia was only used as a transit point," he said.
He said certain parties had made the smuggling of people into Indonesia a business for their own profit.
Meanwhile, the IOM had also recorded that as many as 6,000 people from around the world had entered Australia illegally in 2010.
Meanwhile, the head of the National Police Headquarters` Safety Maintenance Affairs, Commissioner General Faith Sujarwo, said the smuggled people had entered Indonesia through several gates.
"The entry gates they used were located in severalproovinces such as West Kalimantan, East Kalimantan, Riau Islands and North Sulawesi," he said.
Batam was also one of the places through which the illegal immigrants entered Indonesia, he added.
Police, he said, were dong ther best to minimize the smuggling of people via the country`s border regions, he said.
(SYS/A014/H-AJM)
Editor: Suryanto
Copyright © ANTARA 2011
