January-February 1999:
Kosova: Prospects for Peace
Breaking the Culture of Fear
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Breaking the 'Culture of Fear'
By Judith Mahoney Pasternak
ctivism
was a dangerous business in Indonesia for most of the last three decades. Under
the Suharto military dictatorship, the lucky protesters merely went to prison.
Others-many others-lost their lives.Human and civil rights had been all but suspended since the bloody 1965 coup in which Suharto and the military overthrew Indonesia's first post-independence government. More than a million Indonesians-including a large proportion of Indonesia's leftists or left-leaning peasants, workers and women's movement activists-were slaughtered in the years following the coup; at least 200,000 more died in East Timor after Indonesia's 1975 invasion and illegal annexation of that nation (NVA, Sept.-Oct. 1997). A compliant Parliament-mostly appointed by Suharto and military-rubber-stamped the dictator's decisions.
In the late 1980s, Yeni Rosa Damayanti, a young biology student studying rainforest ecology, became convinced that the forest's ecological crisis was inextricably connected to her country's crisis in human rights-that logging in Borneo, for instance, wouldn't stop until the Suharto government that profited from the lumber was forced to stop jailing, torturing, "disappearing" and murdering its opponents. In 1989,Yeni Rosa joined the student wing of the pro-democracy human rights movement; a rising feminist consciousness led her to the struggling Indonesian women's movement as well. After a 1994 student-led protest in the House of Parliament, she spent a year in jail, then continued the more-or-less clandestine organizing that had gotten her jailed the first time. She was arrested again and threatened with death.
But this past May, a plummeting economy and widespread student-led protests forced Suharto's resignation. Although it remains uncertain to what extent the new government under President Habibie will actually reduce the power of Suharto's formidable, U.S.-supported military machine, activists like Yeni Rosa are cautiously beginning to come out in the open.
Now 31, Yeni Rosa is on the staff of two Indonesian groups, Solidamor (Solidarity for Peace in East Timor) and Solidaritas Perempuan (Women's Solidarity for Human Rights). When we spoke last October in New York City while she and an East Timorese colleague were on a U.S.-Canada speaking tour, Yeni Rosa's measured assessment revealed a new, if guarded, optimism about Indonesia's future
What are Solidamor and Solidaritas Perempuan?
Solidamor work[s] within Indonesian society from the political level to the grassroots level to try to change Indonesian opinion on East Timor. We try to influence not only the people, but also the political parties and the media. The Indonesian people only have information from the government, [which tells them] that East Timor is "naturally" part of Indonesia, that the East Timorese want to be part of Indonesia, that they "owe" their prosperity to Indonesia and that opposition is Communist or Communist-agitated. I've worked with the East Timor issue since 1991, when I was a student activist and met East Timorese students.
What about
the women's group?
Solidaritas Perempuan-Women's Solidarity for Human Rights-was originally an NGO working for women migrant workers. Now it's an association for human rights, to influence the democratization process in Indonesia to include women's rights in its agenda. We feel we've been cheated. We fought together with the men through World War II and during the independence war, and then after independence there was no significant improvement in women's positions-women are still in the kitchen.
We had a very big setback under Suharto. Women were depoliticized. Right after independence it wasn't that bad; in the '50s and early '60s, there was a women's movement. Their numbers were huge, claiming five million, the biggest in the world at the time. They were working on improving women's positions in society and the economy, in the factories and [among the] peasants. But the biggest part was accused [in 1965, when Suharto took power] of being Communist and of being immoral. The big women's organizations were one of the major targets of [the Suharto terror]-now forgotten, as the '65 massacre is forgotten.
During the early '90s, when I was a student activist, I worked with some women's organizations. At the time women's organizations were not in the center of the political struggle. Because they were [focused on] women's issues, male activists didn't take them seriously. Now they've taken on general political issues, so male activists listen. If I hadn't been in prison, male activists [still] wouldn't listen to me. I can push my own agenda because I have legitimization. Women's Solidarity for Human Rights puts violence against women as our next three years' theme. We demand demilitarization in open and public demonstrations-we were the first to demonstrate in front of the military headquarters-and they don't ignore me any more. Before that, they said women's issues were marginal, not a priority, not important enough, we took away attention from the main problem, which was Suharto and the military.
How openly
did you work under Suharto? When were you in prison?
We had underground networks, students' networks-never really open. [But] we were trying to break up the culture of fear and give people more information, so we started to make open demonstrations. Usually we took cases of land disputes, because so many farmers had been kicked off the land for development projects like golf courses and chemical plants.
We had the demonstrations openly, but we were quite careful in designing them. We had levels of danger for different locations. The one that got me to prison was in December 1994, when we kind of miscalculated. We were in front of Parliament House, and we demanded that Suharto be taken to court and the military stop using military force dealing with civilians, and we also demanded dissolving the military extrajudicial bodies. Then the military came-the first time the military came into Parliament House. We were 200, and the military were 200. Some MPs were nice and sympathized with us, but they could not do anything to protect us. Twenty-one of us were arrested, and I got one year. I was released December 1995, one year plus one day after I was arrested.
I was lucky. Our sentences were light because our numbers were big and because we were arrested when demos were widespread. There was a lot of media coverage and support from students. And there was a lot of support from the international world, from Amnesty International and others. In Indonesia, you had to be careful in calculating your move and make sure a lot of people knew about your case. If nobody knew about your case, you were dead.
What's the connection
between your work on women's issues and your work on East Timor?
In Women's Solidarity for Human Rights, our theme is top violence against women, and there's terrible violence against East Timorese women done by the male chauvinist machinery that is the military. Men can talk openly and say, "I was kidnaped, tortured, etc., by the military," but in culture[s] like [these], how can women say, "I was raped by the military"? I have an East Timorese friend, a woman, who says that in East Timor, women who were raped by the Indonesian military were socially punished by their own community. People closed doors in front of them. Violence is violence, but rape make you "responsible for your own suffering."
That's true in Indonesia as well, isn't it?
What about the mass rapes and the murder of Marthadinita? [Marthadinita, known
as "Ita," was a 17-year-old activist and the daughter of an activist, working
with a group called Voluntary Team for Humanity on issues around the mass rapes
of ethnic Chinese women by members of the Indonesian military during civil disturbances
in Indonesia in May 1998. The military and the government have denied that the
rapes ever happened. Ita was murdered last Oct. 9 under circumstances that many
took as an attempt to silence those who insist the rapes did happen. Jakarta police
arrested a man with a criminal record for the murder. (See NVA, Nov.-Dec.) Women's
Solidarity for Human Rights is also a member of the Voluntary Team for Humanity,
although Yeni didn't know Ita.]
It's terrible. They tried to make it [the murder] look like a criminal issue-they arrested a neighbor accused of murdering her and "leaked" a forensic report that said she had a long history of anal sex and that she must have worked as a prostitute to support a drug habit. Ita's family was forced to go to the press conference in the police headquarters and forced to confirm what the police said.
And the Voluntary Team for Humanity didn't protest, had no press conference, didn't say Ita [herself] was one of the rape victims, but it's obvious she was. The Voluntary Team is composed of activists and rape victims and their families and others. It's so broad it's hard to take a radical step because you have to consider the safety and comfort of the victims and their families. I'm disappointed in the way the terror has silenced them, but I hope it's only temporary. I hope more people will dare to say openly that this is a political murder, that it has something to do with the rapes and something to do with the military.
Will it get better
now that Suharto's gone? What do you expect?
It's hard to say what's expectations and what's hope because we're in a very uncertain period. It's better to say what I hope, influenced by reality.
First of all to build a new society based on pluralism, respect. I hope Indonesia will be free from the military-the Indonesian people have started to talk about Suharto, but the military is still untouchable. I hope we'll have multi-party democracy. And I hope we'll have more of an economy of the provinces, with respect for each community's specific traditions and knowledge. Women's Solidarity for Human Rights is concerned with the culture of local groups. Suharto preferred unity: Farmers couldn't grow their own seed, they had to use seed from the government. But Women's Solidarity for Human Rights is campaigning for a federated state, not centralized. And of course I wish that women's issues would be a central part of any changes-law, politics, the culture, the economy.
What's
the impact of Indonesia's economic crisis on this?
The crisis is very serious and devastating. Even though the economic crisis brought Suharto down, it also pushed Indonesia into the global economic system, which is unfair for a country like Indonesia. It pushes us down to dependency. It's not free market, it's compulsory market. It woul be free if people had a choice, but they have no choice. They have to follow the International Monetary Fund path or be damned. I don't know what will happen to our small farms because if we have to follow that path everything will be industrialized with no protections for small farmers and small traders. How can they compete with industrialized goods?
What's
your worst-case scenario?
Everything will be capitalized, privatized. There's a cement factory in West Sumatra, my province. The land belongs to a clan, but the clan lent it to the government for the factory. [When the economy went into crisis], the IMF forced the government to sell the factory, including the land-but the clan doesn't want to sell it for private ownership. People in Sumatra are protesting.
Things like that will happen. There will be a clash between tradition and norms imposed by capitalism, and we'll be trapped by debt. The IMF and especially the United States are controlling us-politically, economically, socially, Indonesia is under the control of the United States. It would be okay if it were in our interests, but what if it isn't?
So
how do you get from here to that pluralistic, multiparty democracy you hope for?
We are trying to use the IMF-as long as the Western democracies and the political system are benefitting us. Many things do benefit us, like due process and reducing the influence of the military in civilian affairs. And for women's issues. But after we are strong enough-Indonesians and Malaysians and Philippines-we want to get out of the octopus hands of Big Brother and build our own small effective markets instead of big dependent ones. We will try to find an alternative economy, more people-oriented, more Earth-oriented. We don't know whether we can do that, but we will try.
For more information, contact Solidamor (Solidarity for
Peace in East Timor) at solidmor@centrin.net.id and Solidaritas Perempuan (Women's
Solidarity for Human Rights) at soliper@centrin.net.id or the East Timor Action
Network, PO Box 1182, White Plains, NY 10602;
etan-us@igc.org; www.etan.org.
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