Harassment stalks people working with rape victims

JAKARTA (JP): Volunteers working with victims of rape, especially from the May riots, say they are still facing terror targeted at them and their families.

Sandyawan Sumardi and Karlina Leksono-Supelli of the Volunteers for Humanity revealed here on Thursday that targets have included gynecologists.

Sandyawan, a priest who runs the Jakarta Social Institute working for the urban poor, cited how a doctor who had just testified before the government-sponsored Joint Fact-Finding Team (TGPF) received a call telling him to "stop meddling".

The caller told the doctor that "they" knew where his daughters' school was and that they would be raped unless he stopped testifying.

"The doctor then said he had to give up, which we understood and respected," Sandyawan said in a discussion at The Jakarta Post. Karlina said one of the callers she answered said: "So you guys still want to continue (investigating the rape cases). Aren't you afraid of being raped?"

Karlina said the terror began soon after the "breaking of the silence" on the rapes during the May riots. In July the Volunteers for Humanity reported to the National Commission on Human Rights that they had received 168 reports of rape, 152 of them in Jakarta and the rest in other cities including Surakarta and Surabaya, in Central and East Java respectively.

"The gap between the demands for evidence" and the condition of traumatized victims, and also continued terror and denials, Karlina said, has been a major hindrance in the progress to solving the crimes. "A victim who had agreed to a medical check- up changed her mind in the doctor's room," she said.

The only victim who "courageously" appeared in a closed session last month at a United Nations sub-commission with Karlina and Sandyawan did not return home given the terror targeted at her family's home, Karlina said.

In a dialog on rapes last month, psychiatrist Dadang Hawari had demanded that the government guarantee the safety of both victims and volunteers.

Karlina said precisely because rapes were difficult to prove there had been efforts to silence victims, volunteers and their families.

Apart from terror, there were repeated denials by government officials of the rapes, Karlina said, despite President B.J. Habibie's condemnation of the violence in June.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch recently urged the government to stop discrediting reports of the rapes, which would make investigations even harder. The government-sponsored Joint Fact-Finding Team is still investigating the May riots, including the reported rapes.

Karlina said the terror against volunteers and also families of rape victims reflected a "strong force" that wanted the cases to remain unsolved. "Society must show that it is able to fight (such intimidation)," Karlina said.

Karlina is a founder of the Suara Ibu Peduli (Concerned Mothers' Voice) group. With other members she has protested the rocketing price of basic needs in Central Jakarta.

Sandyawan and Karlina said the violence against women in the May riots should be seen as inseparable from similar reports of mass rapes in areas like Aceh, in the north of Sumatra and East Timor.

"The real issues of state violence", Sandyawan said, should not be diverted to treating the rapes as individual crimes.

"It's not simply a matter of arresting people and punishing them. We have to solve the whole systemic issue of state violence to end it," he said.

Sandyawan also said that the reported rape cases "should not be separated from the May riots." Both inside and outside the country, he said, "it is as if the victims of the riots, including those burnt in malls, are not interesting to talk about, also because they were labeled as looters."

As many as 1,200 deaths were reported during the riots, with many of the victims dying in blazing malls in Jakarta and Tangerang, West Java. Many could not be identified and were buried in mass graves.

Reports that the victims of the rapes were mostly Chinese- Indonesians have heightened speculation that the reports are aimed to discredit Moslems. But Sandyawan pointed out that many of the victims in the burned malls were not Chinese-Indonesians. (aan/anr)