The Straits Times, 21 July 1998

JAKARTA -- Human-rights workers who are investigating scores of organised gang rapes during the three days of rioting here in May say they and the victims have been receiving threats from unidentified men.

The threats against the workers at women's crisis centres and some victims who have called the centres' hot lines indicate the involvement of people who are able to monitor their activities and listen in on telephone conversations, said Ms Ita Nadia of Volunteers for Humanity, a private aid group.

"We have received telephone calls and anonymous letters terrorising our workers," she said. "They say they will rape the females and castrate the males."

Reverend Sandyawan Sumardi, who heads the private Jakarta Social Institute, said he had also received threats.

Threats have also been made against witnesses, family members and hospital workers who had treated the victims of the assaults.

The investigators said they had confirmed the rapes of 168 women during the riots. Of this number, 20 died during or after the assaults.

They said they presumed that many other women had either fled the city or were too traumatised to report their rapes.

Some had been cowed into silence by the threats or by rumours of further attacks and rapes, investigators said.

Others have committed suicide. And they said they had heard reports of additional rapes and sexual assaults in the weeks after the riots.

Most attacks, like the looting and arson, were directed against the ethnic Chinese, who have often been made scapegoats in times of conflict or hardship.

The human-rights workers said their investigation reinforced their belief that the rapes, some involving girls as young as nine years old, had been organised and coordinated in the same way as the looting and arson.

Nearly 1,200 in Jakarta died in the May 13 to 15 riots that helped end President Suharto's 32-year rule on May 21.

A growing body of reports from witnesses has confirmed that many of the attacks on property and residents, including the rapes, were instigated or carried out by organised groups.

Photographs purporting to show the victims of the rapes have been circulating, some of them on the Internet. But Ms Ita believed that these were not photographs of riot victims and that they were intended to sow fear.

Because of fears that security forces were involved, victims have avoided reporting the rapes to the police, said Ms Kamala Chandrakirana, a spokesman for Volunteers for Humanity.

At first the government seemed to doubt the reports.

But after meeting women's groups this month, President B. J. Habibie set up a task force to study their reports and condemned "this inhuman episode in the history of our nation".

Said Ms Kamala: "At first he was saying, 'I don't want this case to be blown up and give a bad name to the Indonesian people'.

"He was not clear on it at first."

But as he heard the women out, his face took on a look of shock and he asked them to draft a statement for him on his office computer, she added. ---- New York Times.