Human Trafficking, the Role of the State, and the Crisis of Rule of Law: A Recent Study on Human Trafficking from Eastern Part of Indonesia

Indonesian government, like those in the other post-authoritarian states, after two decades of experiencing transactional democracy is still struggling to anticipate the impact of heavy market penetration on labour migration in the post New Order regime. While, the centralistic state has been replaced by giving autonomy to the districts, the problem of human trafficking is one of the most extraordinary crimes that are yet to be anticipated by the state institutions in terms of design, coordination, and attitude toward human trafficking. Today there is no institution at the higher level that could match the power of the crime network in order to prevent human trafficking in Indonesia. This paper is a combination of my work as a researcher and an activist of anti-trafficking in the last four years in the Eastern part of Indonesia. Additional research on newspaper mapping is also done to build data base of human trafficking in NTT Province. A significant point from historical investigation is that human trafficking today resembles the colonial slavery during the Dutch occupation period. This paper aims to describe how state institutions are unable to prevent its citizens from the risk of human trafficking today.