Yanti (not her real name) recalls the night last year when she and two friends escaped from a house in Sarawak, where they were being kept along with their weeks-old babies.

One jumped first, then the other two slowly brought their babies down from the rooftop. Upon touching the ground, they ran to the dark jungle nearby. The three others and their babies reached a police station the next morning with the help of a passerby.

When the police, with a tip from the Indonesian consulate in Sarawak, raided the house, they saw shocking proof of a new form of human trade - in babies - that activists say is still being carried out by cross-border syndicates.

''Dozens of babies, aged under one month on average, have been smuggled in and sold at thousands of ringgit each," said Hairiah, director of the Women's Association for Legal Aid (LBH APIK).

LBH APIK, which campaigns against the trafficking of women and children and based in West Kalimantan, is the same group that gave 23-year-old Yanti and her friends shelter and legal advice after their escape and return to Pontianak in Kalimantan.

New level

The Indonesian consul in Sarawak, Israfly Rasoul, also says that baby trafficking from the West Kalimantan of Indonesia to Sarawak state of Malaysia has been increasing since the 1980s.

Indeed, the babies in the house in Sarawak where Yanti and her companions were being held were for sale. Five of the six Indonesian women held there were in advanced stages of pregnancy, and one had recently given birth.

But while the problem itself is not new, the syndicates in West Kalimantan and Sarawak are now employing new methods and bringing the trade to a new level, Hariah told a recent national forum on women and child trafficking held here.

In the past, Indonesian and Malaysian brokers purchased babies born in Indonesia and carried them across the border. The babies were then sold to childless couples in Malaysia.

But after several arrests by police, agents are now luring pregnant Indonesian women to Sarawak by promising well-paid jobs and providing them with fake documents to go across the border. Once in Sarawak, they are kept in houses where their babies would be born and ready for sale immediately.

High demand

Frans van Dijk, regional director of Terre de Hommes Netherlands who is based in Jakarta, said the reason for baby trafficking in the case of Indonesia is no different from that of Vietnam and Cambodia where this trafficking is said to be the highest in the region.

''Probably there is a high market demand for babies (to be adopted). It answers why they continue to do it despite the high costs and risk involved,'' he said.

Dijk, however, said that while Vietnamese and Cambodian babies are known to be smuggled to China, there has not been sufficient information to say whether Malaysia was the only market for Indonesian babies or whether they would be sent from Malaysia to third countries later.

The demand factor was also confirmed by an Indonesian baby broker, Kim Gek, who was arrested in November while trying to sell a two-month-old baby in Batam, an Indonesian border town 20km from Singapore.

In an interview with the local media, she said that the demand for babies is high among Chinese women in Singapore and Malaysia who did not want to get pregnant but wanted to adopt children.

"They believe that delivering a baby will ruin their figures and make them less attractive. Meanwhile, a baby can be bought cheaply in Batam," Kim Gek said.

She added that the prices of babies depended on their look. Chinese-looking babies with almond-eyes and fair skin received the highest bid of US$4,700 to US$6,600, while Malay-looking babies go for US$2,600 to US$3,900 dollars.

It does not help, Van Djik said, that not enough action has been taken against cases of baby trafficking in Indonesia. "For this case in Kalimantan (that involved Yanti), not a single person has been arrested and went through serious investigation," he said.

No law focuses specifically on the selling of babies and activists say Indonesia has only one law on women and child trafficking.

'A commodity'

As a result, the 842km border that lies between West Kalimantan and Sarawak that is the route for many types of illegal smuggling, now serves as a route where a number of pregnant women from Indonesia enter only to face severe abuse.

Yanti was not pregnant when she came to Sarawak, but thought she would get a highly paid job using the fake documents provided by her labour agents.

While working at a cafe, she had a Malaysian boyfriend and got pregnant. Her labour agent refused to give her salary and her boyfriend disappeared. Heavily pregnant, she was sent by the labour agents to a boarding house in Kuching, Sarawak's capital city, that was run by a middle-aged Malaysian Chinese woman.

There she met several pregnant Indonesian women. "There were 30 of them, all pregnant," Yanti described in the Jakarta-based Tempo magazine.

"They have four rooms on the second floor, each occupied by five or six pregnant girls. Babies born were sold immediately.''

They were locked up and their passports taken away. But all were treated well physically to make sure they gave birth to healthy babies. Midwives were called to the house when a woman was about to give birth.

"If they had buyers coming, they would wash and powder all the babies and put them on display on the ground floor. The mothers were told to stay upstairs. Once a baby is sold off, the mother would be returned to work," said Yanti.

The fact that the Indonesia-Malaysia border is a busy one also makes detection of trafficking difficult. At the checkpoint at the city of Entikong in West Kalimantan alone, more than half a million people passed through between 1998 and 2001.

Fifty-five footpaths also link West Kalimantan and Sarawak - among them three routes frequently used by baby traffickers, groups like LBH APIK say.

In a sense, the trade in babies highlights the negative aspects of open borders and economic liberalisation. "Everything has become commodity which you can buy and sell," Van Djik said.

Minister of Women's Empowerment Sri Redjeki Soemaryoto says the government is now working with non-government groups on a draft law on the eradication of trafficking in women and children, but how soon this can come into force remains to be seen. - IPS