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Stateless Ethnic Chinese to get Indonesian Citizenship
After decades of waiting, some 140, 000 stateless ethnic Chinese will finally get Indonesian citizenship before the year end, Indonesia's Law and Legal Affairs Ministry announced.
According to the announcement issued by the ministry Wednesday, 145,070 out the 208,820 registered stateless ethnic Chinese in Indonesian in 1993 has sent in applications for citizenship, Antara News Agency reported Thursday.
Among the applications, 139,788 have been approved and 3,974 returned because they were incomplete.
The ministry said that the government hoped to speed up the naturalization process for all the stateless ethnic Chinese so that their citizenship could be granted by December.
It added that the government had already simplified the bureaucratic procedures to obtain Indonesian citizenship for these people in line with the 1995 presidential decree.
The problem of the stateless ethnic Chinese in Indonesia dates back to the early 1960s when the government barred Indonesians from having two nationalities.
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