Looking critically into the abyss of depravity

Ati Nurbaiti, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Are human beings basically decent, or do they simply go raving mad at the touch of a button?

Is evil genetic, or ingrained in certain cultures? In any case, the capacity of humans for violence knows no bounds, as witnessed by people like Radhika Coomaraswamy.

"It's power, and hate," that drives people to such actions, the lawyer says. She was the Special Rappporteur on Violence against Women at the United Nations, from 1994 to 2003.

She was the one that victims of rape in the May 1998 riots in Jakarta wanted to talk to. They were Indonesian -- yet they did not want to open up to fellow Indonesians except for one or two who got threatened themselves.

Apparently, the women agreed to speak to her not only because she was from the UN -- but she was also a foreigner, she was heading back to New York so there was no way that she would tell their terrible secrets to anyone in town. "They didn't trust any Indonesian," she said.

The National Commission on Human Rights has yet to progress on its prying open of the 1998 riots. No surprise; even the UN report to the Indonesian government by Coomaraswamy was ignored, along with her recommendations.

Chief among them was a witness protection program, which is absent in the country to this day. There was no way any of the riot victims would speak up in public; photographs of their own rapes turned up in the mail.

The response to Coomaraswamy's report, or the lack of it, was typical, she said, with respect to the findings of UN teams that "upset governments."

For a country under transition, maybe Indonesia has got too many problems already to pry open closed cases. It is indeed difficult, Coomaraswamy says, to bring suspects to trial in such cases. "But once you fail to punish (perpetrators), it gets worse, it creates a culture of impunity; the whole fabric of society begins to rip."

She was in town last week to address talks on the antitrafficking bill, where she shared her experience in meeting victims of violence of another kind, the one that borders on what is seen as self-consent and abuse -- the flesh trade.

The "law-and-order" approach in legislation on trafficking, like that in South Asia, she says, does not automatically give a victim's life back or make things better for her. An activist at the talks last week confirmed the dilemma: "We surely want tough penalties, but what if the perpetrator is the girl's father?" Another said, "when we managed to bring the girl home the parents complained, 'now we'll have to seek extra money again'."

As in Indonesia, governments are used to the traditional approach of legislation -- which is heavy on retribution -- while it is best, she says, to follow countries introducing the "restorative approach" for victims.

This means "making mandatory the social services" for victims such as counseling, placing the victim's needs firmly in the law, not just dumping them on ministries of social affairs with small budgets.

Without a comprehensive approach addressing issues such as poverty, the law, instead, becomes a derisory issue even among those whom advocates might categorize as victims. In a Bombay suburb in India, Coomaraswamy recalls how she was once scolded and "lectured about middle-class values of sexuality" by sex workers. They were angry at suggestions to help their rehabilitation, and said they just needed "assurance for their children's education."

Coomaraswamy concludes that "the law may not be enough" for cases related to trafficking. Other ways must be found to deter people from, for instance, selling off their children even if they are poor. Shaming and embarrassing those involved could be one way, she says.

The images of victims she has met stick with her: The teenage Nepali girl, who was sold by her boyfriend to a brothel, after which she developed HIV/AIDS; the young Indonesian Chinese "clinging to their clothes" as they told her their stories, and also a rape victim from Rwanda.

The Tutsi woman whom she met in Rwanda had been raped, macheted and forced out of hospital because of her ethnicity, had survived on berries in the forest, and had chopped off her own, gangrene-infested arm.

"It is this resilience" of victims that is inspiring, she says -- while countless, silent others, "have become broken."

Coomaraswamy, who graduated in law from Yale University in the United States, still expresses shock when asked to cite the worst cases she has come across. "East Timor," she says, of the destruction and killings after the 1999 referendum, which some have explained away as caused by mere "emotion" among heartbroken patriots at the loss of Indonesia's province in a "UN-rigged" poll.

She said the testimonies from this area, which she sought for another UN report, reflected cases of impunity involving a military "beyond civilian control": The TNI, she said, "had simply 'lost it'." However, all TNI officials brought to the human rights ad hoc trial have been acquitted.

Although cases like these are from the recent past, and while armed conflict is still ongoing in various pockets, her feeling is that "we're moving out" from models of the use of violence involving state institutions. However the tendency now is towards no less violent "religious fundamentalism," she said, involving followers of all kinds of supposedly peaceful faiths.

Coomaraswamy, who has written books on law and human rights, no longer lives the privileged life of a UN official. Then, "it was easier," she said, despite seeing all kinds of abusive people, the impact of their crimes, and all the trouble going into the reports to the UN and to governments that dismissed them.

At the UN, "You were aloof, detached. People tend to give you the benefit of the doubt and take your objectivity for granted": Now, it's more intense, everyone is watching you, it needs much more energy."

She is referring to one of her current jobs chairing the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission, which receives some 700 cases a month. She first faced resistance, having stayed abroad for many years.

But some of that criticism has died down, she said, as the rights body with Coomaraswamy, her four colleagues and their 200- strong staff seem to have played a role in the decline of extrajudicial killings and torture in custodial places.

Respite from daily pressure, she said, comes from Indian music, classic and jazz. Sources of inspiration, says the recipient of many awards, are the victims she has met.

South Asian countries, and others in Asia, she notes, are indeed becoming more democratic, but this does not, in itself, lead to "a culture of human rights". While there has been "tremendous awareness of individual rights" this has so far come, she says, with "no awareness of other people's rights".

Outside the interview venue, in just another Jakarta rush hour, motorists vied and honked, bumper to bumper, for their own individual right to a section of the road.