Let the team do its job
For ordinary Indonesians it may be confusing enough, but for those who actually lived through the traumatic experience of being raped during the May riots and the people close to them, it must be a real tragedy that what began as a sincere effort to help them has turned into a public argument over whether the attacks actually took place.
Worse, it appears that although a government-backed fact- finding team is still hard at work investigating all the rape reports it can get, attempts are being made to make it look as if such claims -- mostly regarding victims of Chinese-Indonesian descent -- have been fabricated in order to discredit the government.
Earlier reports quoting social workers and volunteer assistance groups have cited at least 168 rape cases that presumably occurred in Jakarta and a few other big cities during those chaotic days. The actual number of rapes, however, cannot be reliably known since the difficult job of investigating each and every case has yet to be completed.
In the meantime, pressure from ethnic Chinese communities in various countries outside Indonesia for the government to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice has been mounting. It is certainly easy enough to understand the government's uneasiness under the circumstances. Hence, apparently, the authorities' insistence that no proof of the alleged rapes has yet to be found -- the obvious implication being that such claims could well be part of a malicious smear campaign designed to show Indonesia in a bad light.
Like it or not, such a stance by the government cannot simply be dismissed as a defensive maneuver to ward off the rape accusations. Consider, for instance, the many photographs seemingly depicting rapes from the May riots currently being disseminated on the Internet. Many of these pictures have been traced to pornographic websites and have nothing to do with the riots. But proving a rape is unquestionably difficult, even under "normal" circumstances, as rape victims and lawyers well know. Add to this the fact that some of the rape victims have allegedly been threatened to remain silent, and it becomes easy to understand some of the obstacles that both the fact-finding team and the government are faced with in investigating the cases.
Be that as it may, letting the argument drag on for much longer clearly will do nobody any good. It would make it even more difficult for the fact-finding team to reach out to the victims and obtain the necessary proof to take the cases through their due legal course. Should the debate continue, it could mean that the suspicions abroad that the government is making no real effort to investigate the cases could increase. Worse, the matter could become a political issue, with most undesirable effects on the stability of our society.
Under the circumstances, the best thing that we all -- members of the fact-finding team, the government, political and community leaders and the community at large -- could do is to refrain from issuing statements or making remarks that could hamper the effort to establish what really occurred during those tumultuous May days. We must allow the team to complete its work unhampered. Considering the personal and ethical integrity of its members, there should be no doubt that the team's only interest will be to uncover the truth and bring whoever may be guilty to justice.
If all this should fail, President Habibie's initial idea to invite properly accredited and reputable foreign investigators to help in the process may not be such a bad idea. After all, our peace of mind and credibility are at stake.