JEDDAH, 24 December 2007 — Pilgrims of certain countries have voiced complains related to accommodation, transportation and food. Organizers of these pilgrims said they were looking into such complaints.
The Indonesian Religious Affairs Ministry’s Haj Management Committee operating in the Kingdom said there had been no significant food deficiencies, but some pilgrims still did not receive their share of food.
“It’s possible to encounter such problems when nearly three million pilgrims are at one place. However, as and when we met problems, we could overcome them,” an official of the Indonesian Religious Affairs Ministry’s Haj Management Committee, said yesterday.
“This problem was sporadic and settled immediately. In fact, it’s not that they didn’t get any food. They got it at the end, although they first had to wait a little longer than the rest.”
Problems of accommodation and transportation also surfaced during the Haj operation. “Many pilgrims faced problems with transportation because the organizers had not provided buses, even for those staying a long distance from worship centers,” a member of Indonesia’s Haj team said.
“Some pilgrims had to wait all night before receiving accommodation in Madinah,” he said.
The local authorities allocate tents to a country based on its number of pilgrims. The space given to Indonesian pilgrims was in accordance with data submitted to the authorities, an Indonesian Consulate official said.
Some 210,000 Indonesians performed the pilgrimage this year. The Haj Management Committee reported up to 125 Indonesians died during the pilgrimage. Most of them were elderly people and died of fatigue. The pilgrims would commence leaving for their homeland this week.
Sri Lankan Consul General Abdul Latif Mohamed Lafeer, who performed the pilgrimage with his family, said his country’s federal minister and leader of an eight-member goodwill delegation, A.H.M. Fowzie, personally inspected the arrangements for the island state’s pilgrims and found some shortcomings in accommodation.
“Some pilgrims got better accommodation than others,” the consul general quoted the minister as saying. In all 5,500 Sri Lankan pilgrims performed Haj, 1,500 more than last year.
Three of the pilgrims died of natural causes, he said. The pilgrims start returning home by SriLankan Airlines from tomorrow.
South African Consul General Mahdi Basadien said in all 5,000 pilgrims from his country successfully performed Haj. Five elderly people lost during the stoning ritual were found the same day.
The first group of South African pilgrims returned home yesterday.
A.R. Antulay, India’s federal minister for minority welfare and leader of Prime Minister’s Haj goodwill delegation, on Saturday met with Minister of Information and Culture Dr. Iyad Madani, at his office in Jeddah.
Antulay, who was accompanied by Indian Consul General Dr. Ausaf Sayeed, congratulated the minister on the successful completion of Haj 2007 and appreciated the excellent arrangements made by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah.
The two leaders also discussed ways and means of further increasing the relations between the two countries and in particular strengthening of people-to-people contacts.
There have been 146 deaths among India’s 157,000 Haj pilgrims, including five who were killed in a road accident on Madinah-Makkah highway before Haj, according to Dr. Suhel Ajaz Khan, consul (Haj, P&I) at the Consulate General of India.
“We received complaints about some pilgrims lost in Mina during the pilgrimage, and soon we started verifying them,” he added.
