Some Indonesia Rape Photos on the Internet Are Frauds
By JEREMY WAGSTAFF and JAY SOLOMON
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Grisly pictures of Indonesian Chinese rape victims
circulating over the Internet and published in major newspapers have stoked
international outrage in the last two weeks. The problem: Some of the
pictures are fake.
Indonesian human-rights groups fear these fakes could create a backlash in
Indonesia and undermine an investigation into what they say were the
systematic gang rapes of ethnic Chinese during riots in May. These groups
allege that people in government and the military used racism to instigate
the riots so they could clamp down on dissent against former President
Suharto.
Indonesians are already skeptical about the rape allegations, and the fake
pictures are likely to make them more so. Indonesian police chief Lt. Gen.
Roesmanhadi threatened Monday to charge human-rights groups with
disseminating false information if they cannot produce evidence to back
their assertion that as many as 168 women were gang-raped.
Widespread publication of the fakes by activists on the Internet, meanwhile,
"is confusing things and discrediting our investigation," said Sandyawan
Sumardi, a Catholic priest and the leader of the Indonesian volunteer
organization that first reported the accounts of rape. "If they continue,
it'll
become very dangerous for the Chinese community here."
To be sure, even new President B.J. Habibie concedes Chinese Indonesians
were raped and beaten. Mobs looted and burned their houses during the
worst three days of the riots, which forced Mr. Suharto to resign after three
decades of autocratic rule. Angry about a sick economy and rising prices,
the mobs targeted the Chinese minority, from the tycoons who control
some of Indonesia's biggest corporations to shopkeepers. According to the
government, 1,200 people died, most of them non-Chinese looters burned
alive in shopping malls.
Reports of the rapes didn't surface until June but have spread rapidly,
largely
via a growing number of websites dedicated to highlighting the plight of
Indonesian Chinese. Newspapers in Hong Kong and elsewhere ran the
pictures, describing them as photos of rape victims.
That the pictures have been accepted so readily illustrates the growing
power of computers and the Internet. At least some of the pictures
circulating -- there are at least 15 -- were culled from an Asian pornography
web site, a gruesome U.S.-based exhibition of gory photos, and an East
Timorese exile homepage on the Internet.
Two pictures portray a woman being raped by two men; several show men in
army fatigues abusing a naked woman with sticks, cigarette butts and
ropes. The most gruesome shows a naked and bloody woman, apparently
dead, violated with a broom handle.
Copies of two widely circulated pictures of a woman apparently being raped
by two men turn up in a subscription-based pornographic Web site called
"Sexy Asian Schoolgirls." The picture files are dated December, making it
unlikely the pictures could be of events during the May riots in Jakarta,
although it is remotely possible since dates on a computer can be faked.
The host of the site wasn't available for comment.
Other photographs have a more complex pedigree. The pictures of men in
uniform abusing a woman with sticks, cigarette butts and ropes belong to a
batch of pictures that also purport to show the rape of East Timorese
women by Indonesian soldiers. East Timorese groups overseas say the
pictures were smuggled out in November and have nothing to do with the
May riots. (The Indonesian government, and some independent observers,
have also questioned these pictures' authenticity, saying they were staged
to promote the aims of East Timorese separatists fighting for independence
from Indonesia.)
"There's been a massive mix-up. I've been trying to find out who is
circulating
the photos. Someone is misusing them," said Judith Clarke of the East
Timor International Support Centre in Darwin, Australia. Its Web site has
carried the pictures since late last year and Ms. Clarke says the
organization believes the pictures to be genuine evidence of Indonesian
human-rights abuses -- but only in East Timor.
The gruesome picture of an apparently dead woman naked and covered in
blood can be found at Gore Gallery, hosted by a 24-year-old resident of
Houston, Texas named Michael Hames. Mr. Hames said the photograph
had been in his possession for at least nine months and doesn't depict an
Indonesian rape victim. "This picture has been floating around the U.S. for
ages," he said. Ita Nadia, a women's rights worker who says she has
interviewed some of the victims of the May riots, was quoted in Hong
Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper as saying the picture is
genuine. She declined to comment for this article.
The origin and content of other pictures are harder to verify. Two, posted on
one site as "Bodies of raped Huaren [Chinese] women," apparently show
two separate, badly burned women, but it's impossible to verify from the
pictures whether the women have been raped or even if they are Chinese.
"We are confident the pictures were taken in May in Jakarta and suggest
rape, but we don't know the cases themselves and cannot confirm they're
rape victims," says Tony Djohan of human-rights group Solidaritas Nusa
-Bangsa, which carries the two pictures on its Web site but doesn't contend
they portray rape victims.
Some Web site owners are aware that the pictures they carry are fake but
said they published them in good faith. Some pictures were still on their
Web sites Wednesday, and several site managers defended publishing
them despite knowing they were not necessarily photographs of Indonesian
Chinese victims of the May riots.
"Proving whether the photos are real or not is not the real issue," said Joe
Tan of Wellington, New Zealand, who helped organize the World Huaren
website. The real issue, he said, "is getting the Indonesian government to
admit there is a problem and doing something about it."
Others aren't so sure. The host of another site, Indo Chaos, says he hasn't
seen any genuine rape pictures and doesn't include any in his site. "Some
lunatics have used the fake pictures to send a message that Chinese
Indonesians are just making up the rape stories," he said.
Another site, "Indonesian Huaren Crisis Centre," has a gallery of pictures it
says it has confirmed as false and asks visitors to point out any other
pictures known to be fake. Pictures like these, the site says, could "reduce
the integrity of our movement." It calls on readers to alert the center to
any
other fakes. But even this site carries one of the pictures from the
pornographic site, calling it a genuine picture of a rape victim.
The attacks against Chinese are merely the latest in a centuries-old history
of racial tension in Indonesia, a poor country that is one of the world's
most
populous. For centuries the Chinese have been resented by the pribumi, or
indigenous Indonesians, for the preferential business arrangements afforded
them by Dutch colonizers. Now 70% of the nation's biggest companies are
controlled by the Chinese, who make up only 4% of the population. Many
others are shopkeepers of modest means who were attacked when inflation
drove up the cost of essentials such as rice, angering their pribumi
customers.
In Indonesia's post-Suharto spirit of probing the misdeeds of the past,
President Habibie has appointed a fact-finding team to look into allegations
the riots were instigated by the military and the allegations of widespread
gang rape. The rape pictures don't help "create the right atmosphere for an
investigation," said the head of the fact-finding team, Marzuki Darusman. "It
has the effect of amplifying the drama."
Mr. Darusman said his team has received copies of many of the pictures
and is aware of questions about their authenticity. "We're not using the
pictures as evidence," he said. There is enough first-hand evidence from the
victims that the pictures won't be necessary, he said. The team is due to
present to the president a preliminary report next month.
But fear of a backlash from the fake pictures grows, and some activists have
urged Chinese in Hong Kong, China and elsewhere to tone down their
protests at Indonesian embassies.
Father Sandyawan says he believes the fakes are yet another ploy by
members of the Indonesian establishment to discredit the investigation. Two
of the photographs mysteriously appeared at his office in an envelope
months ago, he said, while the East Timorese photos have been sold in
Jakarta's black market for months. Disseminating the fakes, he said, "is an
act of terror" to sow even more fear amongst the nation's Chinese. "It's used
to confuse the public," he added. "But we'll provide the real information."
-- Wayne Arnold contributed to this article.
