Aceh confronts 'rumah geudong', its own house of horrors

SIGLI, Aceh (JP): It is still unclear who torched the spooky mansion in Bili Aron village on Aug. 21.

But the rumah gedong (mansion) with its traditional Acehnese architecture has already passed into infamy for the terrible acts allegedly committed between its walls.

Locals say the military used it as a detention house where hundreds of people were allegedly tortured, raped or killed, their corpses flung into makeshift graves in the backyard.

Nearby residents say they often heard screams coming from the house but were silenced by fear from investigating.

Numerous graves are believed to dot the grounds. But workers excavating two grave sites last week found only fragments of finger and arm bones and blood traces, the latter indicating violence had occurred recently.

Some locals believe the bodies were dug up and hurriedly moved to another site after former president Soeharto finally stepped down on May 21, his departure threatening to lift the lid on the Aceh atrocities.

Facing an asphalt road and distinguished by its elevated main building and a check post at its gate, the house stood on about two hectares. It was surrounded by tall grass and trees bearing coconuts, melinjo (a type of nut) and bananas. Beyond are carpets of vast paddy fields.

Once the home of Acehnese aristocrat Jaffar Achmad, it was renovated by his descendants in 1983. The mansion was taken over for military use in 1990 after it was vacated by Jaffar's offspring the previous year.

The military renovated the house, building small cubicles separated by wooden partitions. It then became a place where locals feared to tread.

Only when combat troops began their withdrawal from the province on Aug. 18 could people finally confront the ghosts of the past.

Three days later, about 30 men and women, including widows and women whose husbands allegedly never returned from interrogation, gathered at the site to give their accounts to a visiting National Commission on Human Rights fact-finding team.

With tears streaming down their faces and speaking haltingly, several women showed the investigators cells in which they were imprisoned, gang-raped and tortured.

A woman in her 20s recounted how a male interrogator forced her to strip and then humiliated her by shoving an oiled banana into her vagina.

Others told how difficult it was to survive after their husbands died or disappeared. A woman said her neighbor had given birth to a child conceived from a rape at the center.

"The Apa Suh has lied again. They promised to return my husband yesterday, but nothing happened," said Zubaidah Cut whose husband, Yunus, was picked up on Aug. 8.

Apa Suh is the term villagers use for the Army's Special Force (Kopassus), which spearheaded the Red Net Operation against separatists from 1991 until Armed Forces Chief Gen. Wiranto stopped it on Aug. 7. But cases of illegal detainment reportedly persist.

Zubaidah believed her husband may have been tortured in the mansion.

Male torture victims also voiced their pain, saying their maltreatment was all the more senseless because their province contributed so much to the nation.

Tengku Abdul Wahab Daud, who claimed he was detained and tortured for 35 days until his release on June 5, said he was picked up in Lampoih Saka village on April 30. He was accused of aiding his relative Idris, whom the military branded a wanted Free Aceh Movement activist.

"I thought I was dead," he recalled. "Even the Japanese occupation troops would stop torturing when a prisoner of war begged for pardon. This wasn't the case with our soldiers."

His interrogator, who had beaten him black and blue, forced him to submerge himself in a tank full of human waste.

"They treated me like a dog," he told The Jakarta Post as he joined thousands of curious onlookers in watching the excavations.

Wahab told of witnessing a fellow detainee, Tengku Abbas Lhok Bruek, who had suffered severe torture, was stripped naked and hung by his feet from the roof.

"He screamed and screamed in vain for mercy. Then an interrogator told a terrified female prisoner ... to fondle his genitals."

Wahab said he was warned upon his release not to tell anyone about the experience or the torture center.

When the rights commission visited, the power and telephone line were already cut off, making the structure seem like a ghost house.

The strange assortment of items remaining included a bicycle chain hanging from the roof, medicine bottles, a wooden bed, portraits of Acehnese heroine Cut Nyak Dien and hero Teuku Cikditiro, telephones, an announcement board, a Fighting Jack movie poster and a crumpled national flag.

Less than an hour after the commission investigators left, a group of teenagers set fire to a compartment in the basement that witnesses say was used to store corpses.

The building was engulfed in flames, and with it the plan to make it a monument to the country's atrocities of the modern era was also destroyed.

Two different versions exist on who set the fire and why.

One says the arsonists were citizens venting their anger at the terrible acts. They reportedly feared the dreaded soldiers would return as soon as the team left, which reportedly happened after a previous House of Representatives team visit.

But skeptics says the act may have been orchestrated by local officials fearful that the building would exist as a painful reminder.

Abdul Gani Nurdin, chairman of the Peduli HAM Aceh, a non- governmental organization on human rights abuses in Aceh, said the fire was set by locals with the house owner's consent.

Owner Cut Maida denied she or her parents were involved.

"The claim is completely baseless," she told the Post by telephone two days after the incident. "We very much regret the burning because the house has historical value that can't be measured in terms of money."

Long before the property was surrendered to the military, her parents had planned to convert it into an Islamic boarding school (pesantren).

"Our ancestors say that the house boasted a divine blessing that fire could not burn it, which was proven during the Dutch colonial time.

"Now, fire has destroyed it because rapes and all those crimes occurred there," she said.

The arson is regretted by many, but some are no doubt breathing a deep sigh of relief. When the fire raged through the building, much essential material evidence also went up in smoke. (pan)