Michele Landsberg

Indonesian rape victims wait for justice

THE INDONESIAN military may well have learned a new and evil lesson from Bosnia or Rwanda: One way to devastate your enemy is to degrade, rape and destroy the enemy's women. In all the historic waves of Indonesian riots and violence against the ethnic Chinese - who are a tiny but economically powerful minority in Indonesia - there have never before been reports of gang rape.

Last spring, as the Indonesian economy crashed, non-government groups began to document a sickening reality - at least 180 verified, brutal rapes of Chinese women and girls. The evidence mounts daily that these assaults in and around Jakarta last May, which occurred during anti-Chinese rioting, were planned and orchestrated, possibly by members of the military. (More than 1,000 people were killed; thousands of shops and houses were looted and torched).

Now let the Indonesian rapists learn a new lesson: just three days ago, a Rwandan war leader accused of mass murder, torture and rape was found guilty of genocide at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. In an historic first, the judge ruled that ``acts of sexual violence constitute genocide.''

Some day, the men who recruited and incited the Jakarta assailants may also stand trial, in the eyes of the world and in the dock of international justice, for what they have done to the Chinese women.

The first accounts that leaked out to the world on the Internet were jolting - all the more horrific because of their broken English and agonized blurting of detail. These accounts told of young women and little girls gang-raped in front of their screaming parents, women stripped and degraded in the public streets, raped and mutilated women thrown into the flames of burning Chinese shops.

They were targeted not for any wrong they had done, but merely for the accident of their being born into a certain ethnicity. As gangs stormed into apartment buildings and ransacked the living quarters above shops, they singled out the ethnic Chinese women and even girls as young as 10 for ``acts of brutal torture,'' according to the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights. A little girl coming home from school found the family home in flames - and was promptly seized and raped in front of her neighbours. Ten Chinese women who took refuge in a bank during the riots were stripped and made to dance naked. Ita Nadia, a social worker at a women's crisis centre, has told the press of victims who have since committed suicide, and of many others who were threatened with death if they dared report the crimes to police.

Following Indonesia's staggering descent into chaos - from Asian tiger to globalization road kill - nearly half the population of 200 million is poor to the point of desperation. In the face of a likely rebellion, public anger was swiftly focused on the Chinese minority by hate propaganda, including racist flyers which mysteriously appeared immediately before the riots. Emerging evidence points to the possible guilty role of General Prabowo Subianto, the ferocious son-in-law of the former dictator Suharto, who was forced out of office after the riots last May. Prabowo has recently admitted to ordering the ``disappearance'' of more than two dozen murdered political dissidents, and was dismissed from his job just last week. Suspicion about his role in the organized riots and gang rapes circles persistently around him like flies around carrion.

Suharto's successor in office, President B. J. Habibie, reacted all spring and summer to reports of the rapes with denials, hedging, indignation, victim-blaming and excuses. Leading conservative Muslims in his government insisted that the whole story was an ``anti-Islamic smear.'' But in fact, a prominent Muslim opposition leader, Amien Rais, is among those who have helped document the rapes, and the country's largest Muslim organization is working closely with the Christian human rights activists and women's grassroots groups that are alerting the world to the crimes. In the last few weeks, President Habibie has finally apologized for the rapes and sworn to call the perpetrators to account. We can assume that his long-delayed avowal of ``deep concern and sensitivity'' is in truth a sensitivity to international pressures.

That's why it would be tragic if the media-saturated western world grew jaded about these acts of war against women. . . The rapes should sear our consciousness with a burning awareness of how closely meshed are the twin bigotries of sexism and racism - hatreds that go hand in hand.

I, for one, intend to urge the United Nation's Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, to bring these crimes to the attention of the U. N. General Assembly this fall. You can write to her at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, No. 8 Kynsey Terrace, Colombo 8, Sri Lanka. The fax is 94-1-696-618; e-mail is ICES CMB@sri.lanka.net

Michele Landsberg's column regularly appears in The Star Saturday and Sunday.