One domestic servant, identified only as Enung, had a mat on the floor instead of a bed, prosecutors say.
Abeyasekere in Jakarta: A History (1987) notes the population count of Batavia in 1673 as:
Netherlanders 2,024
Eurasians 726
Chinese 2,747
Mardijkers 5,262
Moors and Javanese 1,339
Malayans 611
Balinese 981
Slaves 13,278
Total Population 27,068
It IS hard to believe that Jakarta only had a population of 27,068 people at one time but so it was. The Dutch, it seems, knew how to build a city. Nearly half the population of the city at this time were slaves. Abeyasekere notes that, “Slaves stood out as the single largest population group in Batavia until the last half of the eighteenth century”. It is also interesting to note that local Javanese were banned from the slave trade likely out of the fear they would poison the food or slit the throats of their masters as they slept.
Over the years there have been a number of notorious cases of abused Indonesian women working as domestic servants in Singapore, Hongkong, Saudi Arabia and now the United States. Such is the progress of globalism.
The New York Times on December 3, 2007 reports:
From Stand in Long Island Slavery Case, a Snapshot of a Hidden U.S. Problem
Paul Vitello
CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y., Nov. 30 — The two tiny Indonesian women know just a handful of English words. They know Windex. Fantastik (the cleanser, not the adjective). They know the words Master and Missus, which they were taught to use in addressing the Long Island couple they served as live-in help for five years in the sylvan North Shore hamlet of Muttontown.
Their employers, Varsha Sabhnani, 35, and her husband, Mahender, 51, naturalized citizens from India, have been on trial in U.S. District Court here for the past month. They are charged with what the federal criminal statutes refer to as involuntary servitude and peonage, or, in the common national parlance since 1865, the crime of keeping slaves.
The two women, the government charged in its indictment, were victims of “modern-day slavery.” …> read full article here
The AP, December 17, 2007, writes:
Long Island millionaires guilty in ‘modern-day slavery’ case
Frank Eltman, AP
CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. – The woman had been tortured for more than five years when she wandered into a Dunkin’ Donuts on Mother’s Day morning, wearing rags on her back and with wounds oozing from her ears. Scars of various sizes covered her body.
She had run away from the nearby home of Varsha Sabhnani and her husband Mahender Sabhnani _ millionaire perfume moguls whose extravagant life in their Long Island mansion was worlds apart from the humble existence the woman led back in Indonesia.
The mansion was also the place where the Indonesian woman, named Samirah, said she and a fellow maid were subjected to horrific abuse at the hands of the Sabhnanis. When authorities arrived at the home, they found the second maid cowering in a small closet under the basement stairs; the women were taken to the hospital to treat all the abuse they endured. …> read full article here
NY Couple Convicted in Slavery Case
CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) — A jury on Monday convicted a millionaire couple of enslaving two Indonesian women they brought to their mansion to work as housekeepers.
Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, 51, and his wife, Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, 45, were each convicted of all charges in a 12-count federal indictment that included forced labor, conspiracy, involuntary servitude, and harboring aliens.
Prosecutors said the women were subjected to repeated psychological and physical abuse and were forced to work 18 hours or more a day. …> read full article here
