Damming Daming

What, no job?

I began this year by writing about the rape, mutilation and murder of a young woman in Delhi. Last year I wrote about Amina Filali, a sixteen-year-old Moroccan girl who was forced to marry her rapist as a way of preserving her family’s ‘honour.’ Subject to continuing abuse, she killed herself in a particularly horrible way – she swallowed rat poison.

Rape is a dreadful crime, even when it isn’t accompanied by additional acts of brutalisation and violence. It is an act based not on desire but on hatred, on the worst forms of human depravity. Women everywhere deserve the protection of the law. Potential rapists need to understand that, if caught and convicted, they face the severest of penalties. Instead the law, as in Morocco, simply adds to the crime, often by stupid insensitivity on the part of judges and senior legal officials.

The whole world was shocked by the savagery of the Delhi attack, which saw the victim disembowelled. One would have thought that a new sobriety would have descended, at least for a time. Alas, the whole world did not include Indonesia, or at least it did not include Judge Muhammad Daming Sanusi.

Daming, a judge for twenty-four years, serves as head of the South Sumatra High Court. Earlier this month he was in Jakarta, the capital, being interviewed by the House Commission for a possible place on the country’s Supreme Court. This is clearly a serious position for serious people, and who could possibly be more serious than a senior lawyer? After all, they are the guardians and upholders of the law, the protectors of the innocent. Who could possibly be more serious than Daming? Well, the answer has to be, just about anybody.

During the course of the interview he was asked whether the death penalty in rape cases was a necessary change to the law, which at present carries a maximum sentence of twelve years imprisonment. "Both the victims and the rapist", he responded, "might have enjoyed their intercourse together, so we should think twice before handing down the death sentence." Apparently, after a moment’s silence, the panel laughed. It was all a great joke, a joke that just happened to have been made not long after an eleven-year-old girl died after being gang raped in broad daylight in the streets of Jakarta.

Unfortunately the ordinary people of the land, those without sound legal sense, or a sense of humour, failed to see the joke. Thousands took to Facebook and Twitter. The condemnation of Daming was damming. Those who previously laughed discovered, on reflection, that it wasn’t so funny after all. Politicians from the country’s main parties said that they would not support his candidature. He himself, in a contrite and tearful public statement, said that his remark was merely intended to ‘ease the tension’.

"I have three adolescent daughters", he said, ‘and one of them told me that she is very embarrassed and that she felt as if she did not know me at all." He knows her, though; he knows that she might enjoy being forced to have sex. Oh, but wait a minute; it’s never one’s own that are the subject of such observations; it’s the children of others, those who do not matter.

Commenting on his words, the Indonesian Child Protection Agency said;

Has Daming felt what it’s like to be a rape victim or a member of the victim’s family? It’s extremely inappropriate for a Supreme Court judge hopeful to joke about the suffering of people and their feelings.

The sad thing is that this is not the first time that a senior public official has been responsible for such crass insensitivity. Rape is a crime, you see, where the victim is at fault. Last year Fauzi Bowo, the governor of Jakarta, advised women against wearing ‘provocative clothes’ while using public transport just to avoid being raped. This came in the wake of a series of sexual attacks on public minivans, including that of a university student who was subsequently murdered.

Apologies, tears and family disapproval notwithstanding, it’s all too late for Daming. On Wednesday the House Commission appointed eight new justices. He received not a single vote. But the matter does not stop there. On Friday the Judicial Commission, Indonesia’s highest legal authority, recommended that he be dismissed from his existing post. Imam Ashori Saleh, the Commission’s deputy chairman, said that Daming should be removed because his rape remarks breached the judicial code of ethics. The Supreme Court now has fourteen days to decide his fate.

The fact of the matter is that he has become a political embarrassment. Personally speaking, I have little doubt that if this business had been confined to Indonesia’s old boy network of lawyers and politicians the whole thing would have passed without repercussion. It just a little levity, after all, no need to let some casual words detain us unnecessarily - Judge away, Judge Daming. Alas, the levity made an ass of the law and a laughing stock of the victims of crime. Sometimes, just sometimes, ordinary people can make a difference, if their voice is joined in common purpose.

Tobacco Boy

I read a truly shocking story today in the Daily Mail about a two-year old boy in Indonesia who has a forty-a-day cigarette habit. Yes, that's right, forty a day! Ardi Razal's health has been ruined and he now struggles to move himself, according to the report. His mother, Diana, says that he is totally addicted. All of her attempts to stop his puffing have been abandoned in the face of his tantrums;

If he doesn't get cigarettes, he gets angry and screams and batters his head against the wall. He tells me he feels dizzy and sick.

His father, Mohammed Razal, a fishmonger living in Musi Banyuasin in South Sumatra, does not seem to see a problem, believing his son looks perfectly healthy. All I can say is that he needs to look just a little harder. More than that, he needs to ask himself how healthy his son is likely to be by the age of ten, assuming he ever makes it that far.

Although this would appear to be an extreme example, Indonesian authorities are worried by the number of young children taking to smoking in a culture where tobacco is king. According to official statistics, 25% of children between three and fifteen have tried cigarettes, and there has been a sharp increase in smoking among those aged between five and nine.

The usual panaceas are being offered as solutions; that there needs to be a ban on tobacco advertising and a campaign illustrating the effects of passive smoking. This does not, it seem to me, to go anywhere near understanding why, and by what means, children as young as two have become hardened smokers.

We all have choices to make in life, risks we freely chose to take with our eyes open. Ardi Razal clearly did not acquire his habit by free choice or overnight. Admittedly without knowing all of the facts -the report does not make the precise circumstances of his addiction to tobacco clear- I can only conclude that his parents are feckless, irresponsible or uncaring, perhaps a combination of all three.

The Other Island Nation

I read with considerable interest the detailed report on Indonesia in the latest edition of The Economist (September 12). We hear so little about this vast and divergent island nation in England, little beyond occasional stories about local terrorism. So, the report or, rather, series of reports, covering topics like politics, religion and economics, offered a welcome chance to deepen my understanding.

I suppose it tells one something about Indonesia that it does not feature all that often in international news, because news is generally about bad things, like the Bali bombing of 2002. But good things have been happening in Indonesia, a country in some ways just as much of an economic powerhouse as China, but a lot more tolerant and a lot less oppressive. It’s worth stressing that Indonesia is the world’s third largest democracy, one with a Muslim population higher than any other in the world. Islam here has little of the backward-looking and reactionary face occasionally displayed elsewhere in the world.

There is also a mood for change and reform, focused, most particularly, on the person of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the country’s incumbent president, widely known simply as SBY. It is largely thanks to his guidance that Indonesia has sailed through the worst of the economic storms that have beset the rest of world over the past year. Even the separatist conflicts in Aceh, Ambon and Sulawesi, which have long beset the country, have abated to a significant extent, in large measure thanks to the President’s efforts, allowing for degrees of local autonomy. Before the Jakarta attacks in July, terrorist incidents were also rare. SBY himself was a senior officer in the army during the Suharto days, but emerged unstained by the allegations of atrocity and torture that clung to others in the military.

I suppose the one area of major concern, the thing that certainly concerns me, is the fate of Indonesia’s rainforests, under continuing commercial pressures. Logging continues to be a major problem, destroying an asset that can never be replaced. In Riau province on the island of Sumatra the decline in the area covered by virgin rainforest in recent years has been truly alarming. Yes, I can see the need for economic expansion, for ensuring that people have a livelihood, but the forests and their wildlife are in themselves a valuable ‘commodity’ that would continue to offer benefits to the country far into the future, far after the last paper mill is closed.

I visited Singapore and Malaysia a few years ago. I’m really sorry now that I did not cross over to Sumatra.