Truth can be so puzzling
The age of reason has left us and confusion reins supreme. In a seemingly self-perpetuating cycle, confusion ripples from person to person, leaving in its wake a society unable to tell true from false. When the government joins the fray, positive bewilderment is the only result.
Even today, important events in the nation's history remain a mystery to the public. This confusion extends to events as firmly etched on our collective consciousness as the 1965 abortive communist coup and the subsequent transfer of power from then president Sukarno to a certain general Soeharto.
Even crime has not escaped from the fuddled advance of this uncertainty. Time and again crimes which demand an answer have been carefully wrapped in confusion and put on the shelf for the nation to forget. Time and again the confusion has been whipped up into a mesmerizing spell which has brought a forgetful glaze down upon the public's eye. And forget they did.
Forget they did the shooting of four University of Trisakti students, four small steps toward president Soeharto's downfall in May. Forget they did the brutal 1996 torture and murder of Marsinah, an East Java labor activist.
Under Soeharto, many officials, if nothing else, made great strides towards creating a thoroughly befuddled society simply because they were not allowed to speak the truth. The star of this tragicomedy was a certain minister who, when dealing with the press, never did fail to ask for "presidential guidance" every time he opened his mouth.
Today, many thinking people, those who still can, have called for the government to end this chronic confusion. They have urged the government to rewrite and clarify the important events of our modern history, and thanks God, the government has agreed.
Although this may take state-sponsored confusion out of history, where crime is concerned it still holds pride of place. Last Friday an 18-year-old woman was found dead in her home. Her throat had been slit and multiple stab wounds inflicted to her body. The victim, Marthadinata, who was also known as Ita, had been working with the Volunteers of Humanity to help women raped in the May riots. Speculation has subsequently emerged that she was killed specifically as a result of these activities.
Many activists engaged in similar work have for some time now claimed that a campaign of intimidation and terror is being waged against them as a result of their investigations of the rapes and the riots.
Despite this, the police were extraordinarily quick to announce that Ita's murder was a criminal act, and a criminal act alone.
Ironically, the efficiency and speed with which they moved to back this assertion up did not help to calm the situation, indeed it caused great confusion -- understandable given the notoriously low esteem in which the law enforcement agencies here are held.
It is worth noting that human rights groups have said 130 women were raped during the riots, while a number of establishment figures have publicly disputed these reports. Leaders in the Armed Forces (ABRI) have repeatedly insisted that no evidence has been found to support these claims, although how far they have dug in search of the truth is open to question.
One story now in circulation has it that Ita was herself a rape victim. But to prevent this story from sowing further confusion and uncertainty, Jakarta Police chief Maj. Gen. Noegroho Djajoesman moved swiftly to inform us all that it was nonsense.
Now, even with a suspect safely behind bars, many people are bewildered by the way in which this investigation has been handled.
Confusion again reins supreme, except in one small corner of the puzzle. Police at the scene of the crime claim to have been unable to photograph the victim for lack of a film in their camera. That has parted the curtains of confusion because it is simply unbelievable.