OF Animals, Animalistic Humans And Moonlighting Maids

A Kadir Jasin

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MIGRANT RIGTHS, a website dedicated to raising awareness on the plight of migrant and expatriate workers in the Middle East went to town to report that a Malaysian Chinese woman and a former flight attendant, Yim Pek Ha, 40, who repeatedly scalded her Indonesian maid Nirmala Bonat with hot iron, had been jailed by a Kuala Lumpur court for 18 years.

Thanks to the animalistic behaviour of a handful of ugly Malaysians, their law-abiding countrymen and women have to suffer, and the country's image smeared.

Indonesia has stopped allowing its citizens to go to Malaysia as maids. Those who suffer most are the Malay/Muslim households who traditionally depend on maids from Indonesia for religious and cultural reasons.

But we are not alone in hosting humans with animal instinct, bearing in mind that some animals are capable of humanlike compassion. Over in China, the authorities a few days ago executed two men for abducting and selling 15 children, many of whom were taken as babies or toddlers and have not yet been reunited with their parents, state media said.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported that Hu Minghua, 55, and Su Binde, 27, were executed on the order of the Supreme People's Court.

Hu was convicted of kidnapping and selling nine children from April 1999 to Oct. 2005. Five of the children, all boys now aged from 3 to 6, have been returned to their families, while the parents of the remaining ones have not been found.

Su was convicted of abducting six children between Sept. 2005 and July 2006. The police rescued five of the children while a sixth remains missing.

Child trafficking is big problem in China, where traditional preference for male heirs and a restrictive one-child policy has driven a thriving market in baby boys, who fetch a considerably higher price than girls.

In the UK, a religious education teacher who had sex with one of her 15-year-old students after seducing him on Facebook has been jailed for 32 months.

Madeleine Martin, 39, a mother of two teenaged girls, had sex with the boy in the back of her car in a country park, at a shopping centre and inside her family home in Knutsford, Cheshire, UK.

Judge Jonathan Geak of the Manchester Crown Court also ordered her to be put in the Sex Offenders Register. The court was told that she fell for the boy after she was assigned to help him with his difficulties with schoolwork last year.

She soon began giving him gifts, including a mobile phone, and contacting him on Facebook.

In Ireland, Roman Catholic Church leaders spent decades sheltering child-abusing priests from the law and most fellow clerics turned a blind eye, an investigation ordered by Ireland's government concluded.

Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who handed over more than 60,000 previously secret church files to the three-year investigation, said he felt deep shame and sorrow for how previous archbishops presided over endemic child abuse - yet claimed afterward not to understand the gravity of their sins.

In Bangladesh, a court jailed two men for severely beating a pregnant crocodile at an Islamic shrine. Judge Abdus Salam Khan convicted the men of torturing the crocodile and sentenced them to two years in jail with hard labor.

In Australia, a kangaroo startled by a man walking his dog attacked the pair, pinning the pet underwater and slashing the owner in the abdomen with its hind legs. Chris Rickard was in stable condition after the attack, which ended when the 49-year-old elbowed the kangaroo in the throat.

Also in Australia, the state of Northern Territory plans to round up about 6,000 wild camels with helicopters and gun them down after they overran a small town in the Outback in search of water, trampling fences, smashing tanks and contaminating supplies.

Again in China, the police raided a store, which is licensed to sell flowers, birds, fish and worms and stopped 800 cats from ending up on the dining table. The storeowner had for the last six months been catching stray cats or stealing them from owners for sale to restaurants throughout the country.

Also on the subject of foreign maids in Malaysia – a raid last weekend by the Immigration Department on a disco in Bukit Bintang found a handful of off-duty Filipino maids working "overtime" as guests relations officers (GROs) aka bargirls.