The Great China Market - Indonesians Illegally Selling Their Kidneys

Why Are Indonesians Illegally Selling Their Kidneys?

What Happened: A bombshell case in Indonesia saw police and immigration officers accused of working with human traffickers to send as many as 122 Indonesian nationals to Cambodia, where their kidneys were harvested for sale. The case shone a spotlight on a particularly gruesome ring of human traffickers: those that deal in human organs. According to Indonesian police, the transnational trafficking group had been in operation since 2019 and had netted some $1.6 billion over the years.
 

Human trafficking has become an increasingly large problem in Southeast Asia, from the organ-harvesting scheme in this case to frequent reports of people being held in slave-like conditions and forced to scam others over the internet. “Young Indonesians are lured to work abroad with very tempting salary offers. But if the victims don’t reach their targets, their vital organs are sold instead,” explained Gabriel Goa, who runs an NGO called Advocacy Services for Justice and Peace in Indonesia. “We have seen so many of these kinds of online scams that send Indonesians to the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar. This is an extraordinary type of crime across Southeast Asia.”

What Comes Next: The kidney-selling ring brought headlines to an often-overlooked problem: Indonesia is a major source country for trafficking in persons, with most victims winding up enslaved or under debt bondage. “Due to a shortage of work opportunities and poverty, people just believe online information or have low literacy,” making them vulnerable to scams, Indonesian activist Damai Pakpahan told The Diplomat. The issue is particularly difficult to tackle given the emergence of transborder networks of human traffickers, with victims lured from one country into another. Southeast Asian countries have been slow to coordinate to try to tackle the problem and its jurisdictional headaches.

 “Another modus operandi is that young Indonesians are lured to work abroad with very tempting salary offers. But the fact is that the promised ticket money, passport money and others turn out to be debts that need to be paid off. If the victims don’t reach their targets, their vital organs are sold instead,” he added.

“We have seen so many of these kinds of online scams that send Indonesians to the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar. This is an extraordinary type of crime across Southeast Asia.”