Grief hangs heavy over Bekasi farmer's modest home

By Johannes Simbolon

BEKASI (JP): Grief hangs over the house which stands a stones throw away from the dirty river that separates the Bekasi and Bogor regencies. It is only one kilometer away from the Jagorawi toll road, in the middle of a vast field which a developer wants to turn into a housing estate.

It was in this house that a group of criminals brutally raped a mother and her two teenage daughters in the presence of Acan, the husband and father, in the early morning of Monday, July 24.

It is the house that has made hundreds of people cry and rage.

The birds perching in the lush trees around the house where silent on Friday. The three cows -- the most valuable property Acan has except for his large plot -- were also quiet in the stable to the right of the house. They sullenly watched reporters take turns examining the partly concrete house.

Acan had locked himself up alone in the house. When it was time for the midday prayer, the potato farmer in his forties left his house, eyes to the ground, and washed in the bathroom on the right side of the house. He was going to pray.

Reporters who had spent long hours waiting for Acan to leave hastily greeted him. He quietly answered, but his face quickly turned gloomy when a reporter tried to ask for details of what had happened on the fateful Monday.

He locked himself in his house.

It was the last time he was seen. Yesterday the police moved him to the police station where his wife and daughters are staying.

The man looked crushed.

"Blood stains were found on the bedsheets," reported the local newspapers.

The rapists reportedly robbed several houses before coming to Acan's house. They took nothing from Acan's house although he offered all his property, including his cows, to the them in exchange for his wife and daughters.

"Both of the girls, like their mother, are very pretty or, as we usually term it, bunga desa (the village flowers)," said Wartono, Acan's brother-in-law's gardener.

The day before the rape, recalled Wartono, around five men passed the house and asked for directions. It was Acan's wife who answered them, he said, while one of her daughters was then taking a bath in the outdoor bathroom. The bathroom walls are only one meter high and the men could see the upper part of her body, he said.

It was reported that the rapists arrived at the house at 2 a.m. They soon herded at machete point the five youngsters in the house -- Sarto, Acan's hired gardener, Ali, Acan's son, and three of Ali's friends, who were sleeping on the veranda -- to the empty room beside the house. Two of them, said Sarto, took turns guarding them, while the rest broke into the house and dragged Acan to the living room and tied him up. Then they took turns raping his wife in the kitchen and his daughters in their bedrooms.

The night was full with cries and tears.

The days that follow are full with anger, sympathy and discussions about rape, who some describe as nothing but animals with human faces.

The police have not caught anyone yet.