Intervention delivered on March 24, 2000 by Ester Jusuf on behalf of the Society for Threatened Peoples.
Agenda item 6 (Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and All Forms of Discrimination)
Madame Chairperson, Ever since the rise of the New Order regime 35 years ago, many minorities in Indonesia have to face racism and discrimination of Indonesia.
This is achieved through many pieces of legislation. Some of them are specifically targeted at the Chinese ethnic. A minimum of 62 such enactments are currently known to be valid law in Indonesia. These enactments regulate various sectors such as religion, economy, education, custom and culture and are to the effect of restricting the rights of the targeted ethnic in those fields. However, we are glad that President Gus Dur has eliminated one of the regulations by Presidential Decree, even if this is far from being adequate.
As a result, racial violence has become a common phenomenon in Indonesia. In 1998 women of Chinese descend were targeted for rape, the rest of the ethnic Chinese community for assault, looting, and murder. Such atrocities occurred in major cities such as Medan, Makassar, Jakarta and Solo. Racial riots occurred also between the Dayaks, Malays and Madura in Kalimantan in 1997. More recently in Maluku, mass-killings occurred between civilians belonging to two different religious groups. On a smaller scale, anti-Christian violence also occurred in Mataram and anti-Chinese riots in Pekalongan.
The military has been passively involved in all racial crimes by having failed to give protection to Indonesian citizens of particular ethnic, and the above mentioned racial riots serve as blatant examples of such omission by the military.
There has never been serious prosecution for racial crimes nor has there been any sort of protection scheme for victims and witnesses. The few remedies, which were only rarely offered, were in the form of show-arrests or superficial symbolic reconciliation.
Madame Chairperson, These racial division and violence in Indonesian society are based on a well-supported and well-nurtured sense of hatred and stigmatization on the ethnic Chinese. The use of officially approved words and terms with very strong negative racial connotations to describe Indonesians of Chinese descent have the effect of building a thick dividing wall between the citizens of Chinese ethnic and all other ethnic groups.
