Team confirms 66 women raped during riots, army unit likely involved
Jakarta, JP.-
JAKARTA, Nov 3 (AFP) - A joint fact-finding team said
Tuesday it had confirmed that 66 women, mostly ethnic
Chinese, were raped during the May riots in Indonesian
cities and pointed to the possible involvement of an army
unit headed by a son-in-law of former president Suharto.
The chairman of the Joint Fact Finding Team (TGPF),
Marzuki Darusman, said the team had found cases of sexual
violence during riots here, in Medan, North Sumatra and
in
Surabaya, East Java, in May.
The team found 52 victims of rape, another 14 victims
of
rape accompanied by violence and a further 10 victims of
sexual attacks, Darusman said.
There were also four cases of sexual harrassment, he
said.
"Not all the victims of sexual violence were from the
ethnic Chinese (group), but the majority of the cases of
sexual violence during the May riots were suffered by
women
from the ethnic Chinese (group,)" Darusman said.
The victims, he added, were also from various classes
in
the society.
He also said that the team had found victims of sexual
violence before and after the May riots and said that
they
were linked to those during the riots, but he gave no
further details.
"It is fair to suspect that the headquarters of the
Kostrad (army strategic command) is implicated," he told
journalists
The team also found that the unrest was also linked to
a
meeting held at the Kostrad headquarters on May 14, he
said.
The riots in Jakarta, one of the most violent the city
has witnessed, took place on May 13-15. They left massive
devastation and over 1,000 people dead, mostly looters
caught by fires in buildings.
Kostrad was then under the command of then-Major
General
Prabowo Subianto who is married to a daughter of Suharto.
Prabowo was in August dismissed from the forces
following
the findings of a military probe team that found him
involved in the abduction and torture on several
activists
earlier in the year while he headed the special forces.
In one of its eight recommendations, the team said that
the government needed to investigate the unrest further,
including a probe of the meeting at the Kostrad
headquarters as well as the possible role played by
Prabowo
and military units involved.
Darusman made the results of the TGPF probe public
after
they failed to meet and formally present them to the four
ministers and two senior government officials who had set
up the team and gave it its mandate to investigate cases
of
violence during the May riots.