TEMPO.CO, Lumajang – East Java Governor Soekarwo has admitted there is not much he can do to save the lives of the 18 migrant workers from the province who are on death row overseas.

“We can’t do [anything]. The provincial government has been there,” he said at the Lumajang regency’s hall on Thursday, April 23, 2015.

Soekarwo said the only thing he could do was ask the Manpower Ministry and Foreign Affairs Ministry to negotiate immediately with the governments in the countries where the workers were bound to be executed.

He took for example that in Saudi Arabia, condemned convicts would be executed if they failed to plead for mercy from the victims’ families. “After the inmates have been executed, only then the families will give their forgiveness,” he said.

The Saudi government, he said, was also rendered helpless if the victims’ families were unwilling to forgive death-row convicts. “There’s nothing the government can do,” he said, adding that even a king could not do much to salvage a death-row inmate.

Earlier reports said 18 Indonesian migrant workers hailing from East Java were facing imminent executions overseas: seven in Saudi Arabia, 10 in Malaysia and one in Iran. Seven of them have been sentenced to death for murders, six for narcotics, three for adultery, one for sorcery, and one for firearm possession.

DAVID PRIYASIDHARTA