Subject: SMH: E.Timor rape victims too afraid to
give evidence
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 1999 07:56:43 -0500
From: "John M. Miller" <fbp@igc.apc.org>Received from Joyo:
Sydney Morning Herald 29/03/99
*East Timor rape victims too afraid to give evidence
By LINDSAY MURDOCH in Jakarta
Dukai's Timorese family disowned her when, as a young and pretty woman, she believed
the promise of marriage of an Indonesian soldier garrisoned in the East Timor town of
Viqueque.
The soldier reneged on the promise after having sex, and her life as a sex slave began.
Dukai, now 39, says the only way she could survive was by cleaning the military
barracks in return for food. But other soldiers took turns to sexually abuse and often
rape her, and she now has five children by five different soldiers. "My children are
children of war," she says. A newly released United Nations investigation says the
Indonesian military has used violence and rape against women as a weapon of intimidation
and torture in East Timor and other areas of conflict in Indonesia, including Irian Jaya
and Aceh.
The special rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Commission, Dr Radhika Coomaraswamy, also
reported that ethnic-Chinese Indonesian women raped during last May's riots in Jakarta
have been threatened to stop them telling their stories. None of 52 victims of sexual
assault and rape who she interviewed had filed charges.
Some of the victims were even sent photographs of their own rape, accompanied by a
warning that the pictures would be widely distributed if the women dared speak up, Dr
Coomaraswamy said in her report released to a UN human rights panel in Geneva.
Indonesian authorities had not taken claims of mass rapes seriously even though
17-year-old Ita Martadinata, the daughter of a women's rights activist, was murdered in
her Jakarta home after receiving death threats and anonymous letters, she said.
Dr Coomaraswamy called on the Indonesian Government to introduce a witness protection
program and arrest and prosecute soldiers and others guilty of atrocities against women.
"Otherwise the legitimate process of politics and governance will always be
subverted by shadowy forces who rule civil society through use of terror." Dr
Coomaraswamy said she had been unable to establish exactly how many women had been raped
during the violence that forced the resignation of president Seoharto. But women's rights
groups documented 168 rapes during the unrest while a government-appointed fact-finding
team reported last November that 76 women were sexually assaulted, most of them
ethnic-Chinese Indonesians.
"The Chinese community appears to be terrorised by the events," Dr
Coomaraswamy said. While conducting her investigation she found the new Government in
Jakarta, led by Dr B.J. Habibie, open and willing to listen but said some police and
military officers were not. "When you have impunity some of these things
happen," she said.
A spokeswoman for the Communication Forum for East Timorese Women, a foreign- funded
organisation, said repeated attempts to bring Indonesian soldiers to justice for abusing
Timorese women had failed because Indonesian authorities refuse to take action.
"We know who the soldiers are but they have apparently been transferred out of
East Timor and the military keeps stalling out attempts to bring them before an ABRI
[military] tribunal," the spokeswoman said.
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