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Thread ID: 9651 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-09-09
2003-09-09 07:01 | User Profile
Muslim Rape of Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia
[July 22, 1998] -- Simon Ayasanjaya has a good business going these days. He sells chastity belts, although he doesn't call them that.
They're "anti-rape" harnesses, and they're selling like hotcakes.
"You want to be safe from assault?" asks a small newspaper ad in Jakarta newspapers. Then buy a "safety corset" made of imitation leather and stainless steel, complete with combination lock, it says.
Ayasanjaya has struck it rich by patenting a tragic modern version of the Victorian chastity belt. There's a simple reason: Amid the horrifying riots that left more than 1,000 dead in this troubled country in May, Chinese women -- some just young girls -- were subjected to a systematic campaign of brutal, ugly rape.
For ethnic Chinese women, that awful assault has turned their homeland into a republic of terror.
For Ayasanjaya, it means good business. He sold just a few hundred of the sad devices after putting them on the market in mid-July last year. After "the tragedy in May," sales have shot up to around 5,000 units, he says.
Republic of Rape
There is perhaps no better evidence of the terrible crimes committed against Chinese women during the riots than the success of Ayasanjaya's anti-rape belt.
Though human rights groups have protested and even filed a $4 billion lawsuit against the Indonesian government on behalf of victims of the May riots, little has been said so far about this horrifying, public campaign of mass sexual assault.
Slowly, piece by piece, the abominable story of the public rape campaign is emerging. The government and army have promised to investigate the awful attacks, but few expect them to confirm the worst tales of terror.
Many even believe that the Indonesian army -- dominated by Muslim Indonesian natives -- encouraged and condoned the anti-Chinese rampage that was set off after soldiers gunned down six students at a Jakarta university. The riots were described at the time as a "democratic uprising" against the repressive regime of former President Suharto. Now it looks like they were primarily a sick orgy of violence and rape, directed against the affluent Chinese minority that dominates commerce in this massive Southeast Asian nation.
According to a recent report in the Sydney Morning Herald, during the riots young Chinese girls were pulled from their cars and raped in the street -- while a mob of angry Indonesian men watched the vulgar crime.
**Elsewhere, Muslim gangs bashed their way into Chinese homes where they raped wives and daughters, often forcing their fathers to watch, before looting the houses for anything of value and then, as a final insult, setting their homes on fire.
The rapes were -- according to the worst reports from witnesses -- atrocious and indiscriminate. Pre-adolescent children were attacked. Elderly women were violated. After being raped, some were pushed back into their houses.
Then the houses were torched -- with the victims inside.**
The Indonesian Human Rights Commission says it now possesses detailed evidence of 168 rapes of women and children, including evidence that 20 of those victimes later died from their wounds or were simply slaughtered by their attackers, the Herald reported.
"For the Chinese if you are raped it is not just a deep social shame, it is a curse, you can no longer be seen as a human being," a woman identified only as Ester, who runs a telephone hotline for the anti-racism group National Solidarity, told the Herald. "I got a lot of calls from victims and relatives who were so scared they wouldn't even give their names, they would just hang up."
"It is true that every time there are problems in Indonesia the Chinese are attacked, but public rape is very deviant behaviour. We have heard of mass killings before, but not mass rapes," Ester said, according to the Herald.
Worse than the massive rampage of sexual psychosis is the fact that the military appears to have done nothing to stop the rampage. Ethnic Chinese residents in Indonesia have claimed that, while Indonesians threatened to loot and burn their homes, they were specifically forbidden from carrying anything that seemed like a weapon.
"There is no protection and no justice in this country anymore," one witness wrote in a "Yellow Ribbon Campaign" distributed via e-mail across the Internet. Other messages tell of unspeakable gang rapes by mobs of "evil and savage" men.
One man claimed that he and his small group of Chinese neighbors were left defending their homes with nothing but sticks.
Another report claimed that -- in a final gesture of total perversion -- videotapes of some of the awful rapes are now being sold on the streets of Jakarta.
Time to Heal, or Time to Flee?
On the Internet, sites dedicated to emigrant Chinese society have been overrun by messages -- sometimes pleading, sometimes viciously angry -- demanding that all ethnic Chinese residents leave Indonesia. Despite the fact that for years many Chinese have worked and lived in peace with native Indonesians, many ethnic Chinese clearly believe that the worst is yet to come.
They may be right. According to new reports from Reuters on Monday, angry mobs in the Indonesian province of East Java have begun attacking Muslim homes and businesses owned by locals simply because the owners are believed to support Chinese merchants.
"Anonymous telephone calls have made me scared," one ethnic Chinese trader, who asked to have his name withheld, told Reuters. The trader said he was about to flee to Bali -- another Indonesian island -- to escape the violence.
And according to a report last week in the the Sydney Morning Herald, riot gangs haven't given up their addiction to mayhem. Armed with paint for now, they have begun "marking" Chinese homes for future attacks with a sinister color code: red means the building should be burned, black means its residents should be killed, and green means that the place should be looted, the Herald reported.
Who Will Stop It?
Indonesia's new president, B.J. Habibie, has bemoaned the rape spree as an "atrocity" and called for an all-female investigation into the crimes. And to begin the process of racial integration, he has called for a law outlawing the use of the words pribumi and non-pribumi -- pribumi is the Indonesian word for "native" -- on signs in shopkeepers' windows. (Since the riots began, many businesses now post signs advertising the ethnic backgrounds of their owners as a defense against racist looting attacks.)
On Friday, dozens of Indonesian women held a protest at the Defense Ministry in Jakarta to protest against the terrible rape campaign, and against the fact that almost nothing has been done to make sure it won't happen again.
As police looked on, the women marched with banners saying "Rape is a whole life of terror" and "Indonesia! Republic of Fear, Republic of Terror, Republic of Rape," according to Reuters.
But if the Indonesian army is left to enforce the peace, there will be little peace of mind for Chinese women. On Friday, the leader of the Catholic Church in East Timor -- the blood-stained former Portuguese colony that was violently occupied and seized by Indonesia in 1975 -- accused the military of waging a 20-year campaign of rape to smash the resistance of East Timorese who want independence for the region.
"If you ask me about rape, I am telling you the women of East Timor have gone through this since 1975 until now," Bishop Belo, a Nobel Peace laureate, said Friday.
Get Your Corsets Now
Until Indonesia's army demonstrates that it is actually willing and able to stop the terror campaign, the country's Chinese women may have to get used to Simon Ayasanjaya's anti-rape belts.
Of course, Ayasanjaya is ready to fulfill the demand. The only serious problem, he says, is that high school girls sometimes forget the number to release the combination. He tells them not to change it too often and to chose a number easy to remember.
Advertised as "easy to wash, wrinkle free, practical, comfortable and hygienic" the corsets have pink or white covers, and come in various styles.
The price is low by most countries' standards, but high in poverty-stricken Indonesia. The corsets carry a base price of 100,000 rupiah ($8 US) apiece -- unless you order one of Ayasanjaya's special designer versions, like the "diamond" corset, or the "hot" model.
Those, of course, cost a bit more.
[url=http://www.tabloid.net/1998/07/22/rape_980722.html]http://www.tabloid.net/1998/07/22/rape_980722.html[/url]