Epilogue

Abstract

In December 19981 visited Indonesia again. In May of that year Suharto had resigned as President after a period of considerable unrest. On 12 May four students from Trisakti University had been shot dead by security forces. In the following days houses and shops were looted and burned and an estimated 1,190 people were killed. The Chinese community was particularly hard hit. A team of volunteers, mainly feminist women and a priest, gradually unravelled the pattern these riots had followed. Their findings strongly suggested the systematic involvement of the armed forces. This suspicion not only applied to isolated incidents, as the army command would have it, but should be seen to amount to institutionalized state violence, they concluded. The team also discovered the systematic rape — often gang rape — of women who were also sexually tortured. There were 168 women victims of this.¹ The military reacted angrily and initially denied any rapes had taken place at all since no one had dared to report them. Later, a fact-finding team composed of non-governmental oiganizations and the military found 85 women willing to testify that they had been sexually assaulted, of whom 52 testified to having been raped.