Credit Wikipedia
# 7490
An article appearing in the Jakarta Globe today (h/t Shiloh on FluTrackers) indicates that Indonesian officials regard the warnings from Saudi Arabia not to allow `the elderly, chronically ill, pregnant women, or children’ to make the Hajj this year due to MERS-CoV threat as mere recommendations, not a mandate.
As you may recall, last Friday in KSA MOH Updates Health Protection Advice For Umrah & Hajj) Saudi Arabia’s MOH recommended that certain vulnerable groups including the elderly, immunocompromised, chronically ill, pregnant, and children postpone their Umrah or Hajj plans this year due to the MERS-CoV threat.
Later that day Crof carried an even more assertive report from the Arab Media (see Saudi Arabia: To halt MERS, no Hajj visas for old and sick) which appeared to move these visa exclusions beyond mere `recommendations’.
On Saturday (see KSA Limits Hajj & Umrah Visas Over MERS-CoV) we saw additional reportage from the BBC, with pretty much the same message.
The following report indicates that in Indonesia, at least, these restrictions are not being viewed as binding. A small excerpt follows, so you’ll want to click the link to read the report in its entirety.
Indonesia Denies Further Hajj Restrictions Amid MERS Concerns
By Dessy Sagita & Arientha Primanita on 8:36 pm July 17, 2013.
(EXCERPT)
Indonesia, already stinging from a 20 percent reduction in hajj pilgrims this year, has no plans to introduce additional restrictions on candidates. The Ministry of Religious Affairs already bars the chronically ill from completing the pilgrimage. Anggito Abimanyu, the ministry’s director-general of hajj and umrah, called the warnings a mere recommendation.
“From all I know it is a recommendation,” Anggito said. “We are not obliged to follow it. Everyone who is on the list will go on hajj this year”
Some 168,000 Indonesian Muslims will make the pilgrimage to Mecca this October, completing what will be, for many, a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Islam’s holiest site. Indonesia has the largest hajj quota in the world, but waits in this Muslim-majority nation can still stretch to more than a decade.
Last year, this article reports that 382 Indonesians died while making the Hajj, most of them elderly.
