Let the team do its job

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.