Source APC Newsgroup: act.indonesia
Source APC Newsgroup: act.indonesia
Written by: tapol@gn.apc.org
Date: 08 Nov 1998 06:09:55
Subject: ST: Rapes in Indonesia: What Really Happened?
From: tapol@gn.apc.org (TAPOL)
Subject: ST: Rapes in Indonesia: What Really Happened?From Joyo:
Straits Times Sunday, Nov 8, 1998
Rapes In Indonesia: What Really Happened?A fact-finding team issued a report last week confirming that gang rapes did
occur during the May riots in Jakarta and that the upheaval could be linked to
senior military figures.The investigation had to overcome cultural taboos, official denials and
silence from its victims. Indonesia Correspondent SUSAN SIM, who spoke to two
rape victims, reports.JAKARTA -- Her left foot stops its nervous tap long enough for her hands to
show where they tried to stab her. "Here," she says, pressing the right side
of her abdomen where the scar is, her face scrunched up in concentration.The aluminium rod did not penetrate her there. But it did elsewhere, with so
much force that it tore into her vagina and urinary tract, rupturing both."I felt it go right," she says, miming the movement of the rod. "The doctors
say I can still have babies," she adds, as her new friends look away. (We are
going to send her to an overseas hospital for a complete check-up, "Auntie
Polly" whispers.)Lina (not her real name) is 20, but looks barely 16 in her slim, almost
adolescent frame. She was raped by three men on the afternoon of July 2, in a
house in the rich, Chinese-dominated Jakarta suburb of Sunter.The undergraduate had just taken a shower and was asleep in her room when she
felt a hand groping her. As she stirred, another hand was clamped over her
mouth. Other hands held down her arms and legs. They tried to turn her over."But I struggled and fell on my back. So they stabbed me in the front. They
looked like builders ... in their 30s. They didn't say anything."She thinks the attack lasted 15 to 20 minutes, but now she recollects it as a
quick blur of activity."I must have fainted because I couldn't breathe with that hand over my mouth.
"When I woke up, they were gone. I felt pain when I tried to get up. Very bad
pain."She spent a month in hospital as doctors operated to repair her reproductive
system.Now three months later, the only visible scar is on her right hand, where the
rod cut into a finger as she tried to stop her rapists from stabbing her.It was a flat, L-shaped aluminium rod, like the edge of a table, she insists,
annoyed when one of her minders describes it as a curtain rail.Her new aunts and uncles are from a loose network of social workers and
concerned souls who, horrified by the violence that shredded families and
communities here in May, are now trying to help the victims, especially the
women gang-raped then.As Lina lay in her hospital bed, unwilling to involve her widowed mother in
her trauma -- "the story will become too long if I tell her" -- these
strangers adopted her and began planning her rehabilitation. In a foreign
land.One of them, 44-year-old Chairul, lost his wife and two teenage daughters when
a mob burnt his shophouse in Jakarta's Chinatown.Out helping other victims in another area then, he later returned to find his
wife's body on a dining room table, a daughter under a bed and another in a
closet.Lina reminds him of his lost daughters. "It's a shame she's got no father to
help her like a father should," he says, feeling guilty, too, that he was not
at home to help his own family when the mobs struck.Now, his gas supply business disrupted, he devotes most of his time to
locating rape victims and finding them safe houses. Like Lina, who calls him
"papi", Dutch for Daddy."She has to leave Jakarta because the police are harassing her," Aunt Polly,
an activist with an ethnic Chinese rescue group, takes up the story."They want her to say the two men they caught are her rapists so they can
close her case."The week before, in mid-September, Jakarta police had brought the two men,
apparently construction workers picked up in Sunter, to the scene of the crime
to re-enact the rape on her."We wouldn't let them see her because it is too risky. Other victims have
disappeared," she says.She believes Lina's rape is not an isolated, spontaneous act of crime but,
like those which occurred during the May riots, part of efforts to terrorise
the ethnic Chinese community in Indonesia.For unknown to Lina, the owner of the house in Sunter she was staying in at
the time of her rape had received a letter two days earlier threatening
unprintable atrocities against Chinese men and women.The anonymous letter was also received by many other ethnic Chinese
households.A joint fact-finding team appointed by the government agrees that Lina's case
appears to fit a continuing pattern of sexual violence in the aftermath of the
May riots.The riots which swept Jakarta then were the high-point in an escalating
pattern of violence which led to the resignation of President Suharto, it
says.In the report issued last Tuesday, the team said it could confirm the gang-
rapes of at least 66 women, the majority of whom were ethnic Chinese females
raped in their homes or workplace in the presence of onlookers.Fourteen of them were also tortured. Another 10 women were attacked sexually
but not raped during the three days of anarchy.Although the team could not ascertain if the rapes were "premeditated or mere
excesses of the riots", it concluded that nine cases which occurred before and
after the unrest here "were linked".These included two rapes in Jakarta on July 2 and two in Solo on July 8.
Lina is now officially a statistic in the quest to discover the truth behind
the May riots.ACCUSATIONS AND COUNTER-CLAIMS
GINA is not. Like perhaps countless others, she has been too ashamed to tell
anyone about her gang-rape on the night of May 13. Until recently.>From one of the Eastern Indonesian islands, 21-year-old Gina (not her real
name) was working in a Chinese restaurant in Roxy, west Jakarta, when a crowd
of men sporting short hair, singlets and boots broke in."I tried to run. I said I'm Muslim even though I'm not. But they caught me and
raped me." There were four rapists.To this day, she cannot talk about what they did to her. Neither has she been
to see a doctor."I have no money. I'm too afraid to tell anyone. And I'm too ashamed to go
home. In my hometown, if a women is raped, she is shunned."One month after the rape, Gina sold some jewellery and bought a train ticket
to Bali to begin life anew, where I met her in her new workplace.No one knows how many other Ginas, non-Chinese women raped in Chinese-owned
establishments, there are; they could have been among the first rape victims
when the looting and plundering first erupted in Roxy and other Chinese-
dominated areas in west Jakarta on the night of May 13.But most reports, including the fact-finding team's, suggest that ethnic
Chinese women were the primary victims of the May rapes and sexual harassment.Some accounts even describe how several would-be rapists released their
victims when the women said they were Muslims, not Chinese.Others, like the Internet story of Vivian, with its claim that her rapists
invoked the name of Islam, have added religion to the ugly brew of racial
animosity already borne out in the mob's usual choice of targets: Chinese-
owned shops and homes.Leaders of Indonesia's largest Muslim organisation, the 35-million-strong
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), have already gone on record to express their fear of
sharpening racial and religious polarisation as a result of such rape
accounts."The Muslims have been cornered, because it was reported that the rapists
yelled the words 'Allahu Akbar' before they raped their victims," a mailer
advertising an NU-organised public forum in August said. "This barbarian
action will never be done by people who fully understand and practise the
religion," it added.Still, it noted, "since the Jahiliyah era (the age of ignorance before the
arrival of Islam), the act of raping women has been assumed to be the most
effective way to conquer certain races".The fact-finding team's conclusion: "No facts have been discovered about the
aspect of religion in the sexual violence."It declined to confirm suspicions, voiced by some human rights advocates, that
the rapes were symptomatic of an ethnic cleansing operation, like in Bosnia.Nor, it indicated, could it say definitively that the rapes were merely the
anomic actions of hooligans taking advantage of chaotic times.The notion of a Serbian-style masterplan to drive out the Chinese through the
rape of its women is one that many Indonesians -- scholars, legislators and
blue-collar workers alike -- have difficulty dealing with.The adamant rejections by Abri chief General Wiranto and other senior
government officials of the validity of the rape accounts have also
contributed to a murky climate where fear now jousts with outrage to undermine
the credibility of those documenting the violence.SIFTING FACT FROM FICTION
ADDING to the confusion is the bandwagon effect that has turned rape into a
cause celebre in a society well-known for its susceptibility to rumour-
mongering and completely Asian in its shunning of rape victims as stains on
family honour.Outrageous tales of continuing gang-rapes of young Chinese girls in shopping
malls have fuelled hysteria, making it even harder for objective observers to
sift fact from fiction.Damaging, too, have been the slew of pornographic photos of alleged rapes and
graphic accounts from supposed victims posted on the Internet; the anonymity
and instant global reach of the Net proving far too malleable to those out to
dramatise the Indonesian rapes for their own reasons."There's more mystery than reality," says noted political scientist Mochtar
Pabottingi of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Lipi). "I'm reluctant to
say there were organised rapes as portrayed until I see hard facts."Still, troubled by the suggestion in some accounts of a religious vendetta at
work, he corrects himself the next day. He does not doubt the rapes occurred."But non-societal forces like criminals must have been involved," he says
tentatively.Drug-crazed gangsters, "Pavlov-trained" convicts, "cold-faced" military types
-- these were the rapists someone unleashed in Jakarta in mid-May.And subsequently silenced, hence the corpses, minus their hands but still
wearing military boots, which turned up on the beaches of Pulau Seribu off
Jakarta in July.Figments of a public imagination turned voyeuristic?
Invoking a cruel mastermind was the only way Dr Rosita Noer could come to
terms in July with the viciousness of the attacks that left two young sisters
she examined mutilated so severely.She learnt of their ordeal from an ethnic Chinese member of a government
committee for the assimilation of minorities that she chairs.The family had already gone into hiding when she received the call on May 15.
Taking security precautions "like a spy", the medical doctor-turned-
entrepreneur visited the family and persuaded the sisters to let her examine
them."I was shocked," she says, closing her eyes as she recalls the details. "The
intestines were punctured. The damage to the womb ... Can you imagine what
pain they were in? How can human beings do that to two sisters? They asked me,
'What have I done wrong?'"I can only hope that disclosure will help bring to court whoever organised
this, whoever gave the orders for this."The girls' family declined her offer of medical aid. They died of infection
one week after the gang rapes, aged 18 and 20.In all, Dr Noer, one of the first few non-government activists to call
attention to "hundreds" of mass rapes during the riots, says she saw six rape
victims, although "the others were too ashamed" to let her conduct a medical
examination.Convinced that the rapes were perpetuated to create mass terror, she theorises
that the rapists were trained either by deprivation or conditioning.
"Psychologically, men can be trained to rape. Like Pavlov trained his dog to
work for its meals."And although she counts many generals among her friends, she says it is only
natural that suspicion falls on rogue military elements."You and I can't train people to shoot, burn so many shops, rape, loot,
sexually harass women. Who knows military techniques?"+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TAPOL, the Indonesia Human Rights Campaign
111 Northwood Road, Thornton Heath,
Surrey CR7 8HW, UK
Phone: 0181 771-2904 Fax: 0181 653-0322
email: tapol@gn.apc.org
Campaigning to expose human rights violations in
Indonesia, East Timor, West Papua and AcehJoin us to celebrate TAPOL's 25th anniversary on
20 October 1998. Contact us for ticket details.
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