Volume 42 | Number 2 Spring 2007
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I. Children Born of Rape and Their Mothers in East Timor
East Timor is one of the world’s newest states,2 but it has inherited complex problems from its history as a Portuguese colony and an occupied Indonesian province.3 The August 1999 referendum on East Timorese independence was organized and administered by the United Nations.4 During the time leading up to the vote, militia forces, backed and trained by the Indonesian military, carried out a “systematic campaign of violence.”5 When East Timorese nevertheless opted for independence from Indonesia, pro-Indonesian militia and Indonesian soldiers initiated a scorched-earth policy—terrorizing the population and committing widespread abuses, including the rape and sexual slavery of women and girls.6
No accurate statistics on sexual violence are available for this period or for the period of forced deportation and internment in West Timor beginning in September 1999. However, a wealth of anecdotal evidence demonstrates that gender-based international crimes in Timor have been widespread since 1975 and were rife during the violence in 1999. Testimonies to this effect have been collected by the United Nations,7 human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International,8 the Indonesian Human Rights Commission,9 Australian journalists,10 and most importantly, East Timorese NGOs themselves.11 The most comprehensive overview of sexual violence in Timor appears in Chapter 7.7 of the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation (CAVR) report entitled Chega!. The CAVR documented 853 cases of sexual violence, but concluded:
The Commission notes the inevitable conclusion that many victims of sexual violations did not come forward to report them to the Commission. Reasons for under-reporting include death of victims and witnesses (especially for earlier periods of the conflict), victims who may be outside Timor-Leste (especially in West Timor), the painful and very personal nature of the experiences, and the fear of social or family humiliation or rejection if their experiences are known publicly. These strong reasons for under-reporting and the fact that 853 cases of rape and sexual slavery, along with evidence from about another 200 interviews were recorded lead the Commission to the finding that the total number of sexual violations is likely to be several times higher than the number of cases reported. The Commission estimates that the number of women who were subjected to serious sexual violations by members of the Indonesian security forces numbers in the thousands, rather than hundreds.12
With statistical data on rape difficult to find, there is insufficient data on how many children were born of rape, or how many orphans are in East Timor at the present time.13 However, anecdotal evidence points to perhaps hundreds or even thousands of children born of war who have been kept and raised by their mothers despite stigmatization and the rejection of these women and children by their families or villages. There are several examples of forced maternity in Timor; one of the earliest examples was cited in a report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur in 1997.14 However, a full study was never undertaken. Evidence suggests, however, that children have resulted both from slavery-like conditions and forced marriage prior to independence, as well as mass systematic rape used as a tool of terror during the post-referendum violence that engulfed East Timor in 1999.15 The Chega! report recounts testimony from survivors about how “[t]his branding of women and their children not only resulted in social isolation, but also often resulted in severe psychological problems within the family.”16
Prior to 1999, an unverifiable number of Timorese women were abducted, raped and impregnated by Indonesian soldiers, often kept captive under slavery-like conditions.17 An example of this pattern of violence comes from the testimony of Beatriz Guterres, one of fourteen East Timorese women invited to Dili by the Commission for Reception, Truth-seeking, and Reconciliation (CAVR) to participate in the Commission’s third national public hearing held on April 28 and 29, 2003 on the theme of Women and Conflict, which was broadcasted on radio throughout the territory:
In 1991 another Kopassus soldier, Prada M, had duty in Lalerek Mutin. When my friends and I were in the rice field he shot in our direction. My friends pressured me so that I would become his wife in order to save myself. Because I was ashamed I stood and said, “OK. I’ll cut myself in half. The lower half I’ll give to him, but the upper half is for my land, the land of Timor.” They said to me, “Don’t be afraid, don’t run. You probably must suffer like this because your husband was murdered, whereas you are still alive. . . . Our lives are the same.” Then Prada M. walked with me and I answered each of his questions only with, “Ya”. . . I was just resigned to my fate. We lived as husband and wife and I had a child.18
Beatriz’s story has many common elements to other women’s experiences of gender-based persecution during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999. She was targeted by the Indonesian military due to her husband’s political activities and interrogated.19 Her husband was murdered.20 Her child died due to illness and she was forced into “marriage” and sexual servitude to three Indonesian soldiers over the following decade.21 She had two children and a miscarriage as a result and was abandoned by the soldiers.22
A more acute form of gender-based violence occurred in 1999 during the post-referendum violence: the abuse of East Timorese women in the context of the forced deportation of over 200,000 people into camps in West Timor.23 A leading women’s NGO, Fokupers, has documented forty-six cases of rape during the 1999 violence—nine of them by Indonesian soldiers, twenty-eight by pro-Jakarta militias, and nine by joint attacks.24 “Eighteen were categorized as mass rapes.”25 The Fokupers report states that “[m]any of these crimes were carried out with planning, organisation and coordination,” and that “[s]oldiers and militias kidnapped women together and shared their victims.”26
In the West Timor camps, where tens of thousands of women were forcibly deported, a fact-finding team found, in one study alone, 163 different cases of violence against 119 women, and noted the serious impacts of sexual violence on women’s health.27 Activists including the new First Lady of East Timor, Australian Kirsty Sword Guasmo, have been campaigning to obtain the release of several young women in the refugee camps of West Timor who are thought to be held against their will as “war trophies” by militia leaders.28 In November 1999, several Special Rapporteurs met, including the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, during a joint fact-finding mission together with the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and the Special Rapporteur on the question of torture. In particular, the Special Rapporteur on Violence against women “found evidence of widespread violence against women in East Timor” and concluded that “the highest level of the military command in East Timor knew, or had reason to know, that there was widespread violence against women in East Timor.”29 Lamont and Williams, quoting the Special Rapporteur Coomaraswamy, conclude:
Rape was used by the military as a form of revenge, or to force the relatives out of hiding. Much of the violence against women in East Timor was perpetrated in the context of these areas being treated as military zones . . . rape by soldiers in these areas is tried in military tribunals, and not before an ordinary court of law. Under Indonesian law, for a rape to be prosecuted it required corroboration—including the testimony of two witnesses. Women lived in a realm of private terror, for any victims or witnesses who dared to take action were intimidated with death threats.30
As in the cases of sexual slavery of East Timorese women between 1975 and 1999, children were born to women raped during or after the forced displacement. In an article entitled East Timor’s Children of the Enemy, published in The Weekend Australian, Sian Powell describes such a situation:
His mother is Lorenca Martins, now 23, a wistful East Timorese woman with eyes only for her child. His father is Maximu, a militia thug and rapist. Maximu raped Martins in a refugee camp near Atambua, over the border in West Timor, where she was exiled for six months. A member of the notorious Besi Merah Putih gang (Red and White Iron), he first violated her on December 8, 1999, in broad daylight, in the jungle. “It happened to many women (in the camps),” she says. “If they saw a beautiful woman, they just took her.”31
A child of the new nation of East Timor, five-month-old Rai is much loved by his mother. He is one of the first generation born free, yet his past will imprison him.
He is one of an unverifiable number of children born as a result of both the systematic sexual slavery and forced marriage of women under the occupation and the mass rapes of the 1999 post referendum violence. Although no systematic attention has been given to the status and rights of these children relative to other children affected by the political violence in East Timor, evidence suggests that such children are both at risk of abandonment to orphanages, and, if kept by their mothers, are likely to experience ostracization and impoverishment, due to the mothers’ low social status in post-independence East Timorese society.
Evidence of the relative likelihood of child abandonment as a result of rape in East Timor is contradictory.32 Powell suggests that “[n]o one who works with raped women in East Timor can recall a single instance of a woman abandoning a child because it is the product of rape.”33 However, it is unknown how many people Powell interviewed, and in addition, the women who have received services and support from NGOs may not be representative of the broader population of rape survivors. The Chega! report references at least one case of an unsafe abortion obtained by a rape survivor.34 On the other hand, as Powell suggests, researchers have seen cases where mothers have accepted and chosen to care for these children, despite the extremely traumatic circumstances of their conception.35
For instance, the Indonesian military routinely targeted the wives of guerrilla leaders monitored any communications with the husbands in the mountains, and compromised the women as “unfaithful” wives, thereby isolating them from the community. The first wife of resistance leader Xanana Gusmão, Emilia Baptista Gusmão, bore a child by an Indonesian army officer during the course of several interrogations intended to influence her husband to surrender.36 The child died, but Emilia has said publicly that she would carry the grief of the dead child all her life “because that child was my child.”37
This willingness and ability to accept children conceived under such circumstances, rather than define them as of the enemy, may be explained by the low status of Timorese women and the fact that women’s social status often derives from motherhood.38 It also may be due to the influence of Catholic teachings in Timor. However, comparative work should examine whether anecdotes accurately reflect widespread practice, or the particular media framing of this conflict.
Although some East Timorese survivors elect to keep their babies born of rape, numerous children of rape have been abandoned by their mothers. Sister Maria, a nun, whispered to a journalist that in a Catholic orphanage “[m]ost of the children are mixed race, the babies of women raped by Indonesian soldiers.”39 According to Williams and Lamont, this reality is “not a truth openly voiced in East Timorese society.”40 The authors further note that “in the early years following the Indonesian invasion, orphanages were filled with genuine orphans: so many adults had been killed in military operations.”41 Another complicating factor is that even “genuine” orphans (the children of Timorese parents) generally are not treated well by ordinary Timorese; for example, many families adopt one of these orphans to work as a house slave. Now, most of the children in orphanages are children of rape.
Children of rape or sexual slavery that have been kept by their mothers are stigmatized by the wider community. The Special Rapporteur’s report asserted that “[m]any of the women who were raped as virgins are single mothers who have suffered stigma in their communities after giving birth to children of Indonesian soldiers.”42 Media reports confirm that the “victims of militia rape and sex slavery continue to bear the scars of post-ballot violence in East Timor, facing ostracism on their return home.”43 Abuelda Alves of the Timorese NGO Fokupers said bluntly of the women able to return home, often with babies who are the product of rape: “They are viewed as rubbish. Their families are embarrassed. Women who were already married, their husbands reject them.”44 In this context, the extremely low rates of reporting by Timorese women is not surprising, especially those returning from forced deportation in the West Timor camps.45 Generally, women will only speak to nuns or priests, or they will not speak to anyone at all, as noted by lawyers assisting Timorese asylum-seekers.46
The pervasive stigma against rape survivors and their children in East Timorese society is demonstrated by the euphemistic language associated with the issue. According to the translator’s notes for the book Buibere, Timorese people “speak in hints,” and there is not a clear Timorese word for rape.47 When used regarding women, the Portuguese words violacáo (violation) or estraga (damaged or destroyed) are used.48 The implication is that “victims of rape have had their whole sexuality, their ‘womanhood’ damaged, and they will never be the same again.”49
In part, the stigma against survivors of rape and sexual slavery in East Timor derives from the unwarranted or misunderstood association of rape with prostitution, which is deeply stigmatized in Timorese society. During the occupation, East Timorese girls and women were perceived as having become “prostitutes” as a result of rape by Indonesian soldiers, high levels of unemployment, and the need to support themselves and their children, often in the absence of their men who were away fighting or have been killed.50 These women are treated as prostitutes in terms of status, but they are called “wives” in “marriages” because under Indonesian criminal law it is not possible to rape your wife.51 This characterization also holds deeper meanings for a strongly Catholic society. As noted above, another euphemism commonly used in Timor is that of “orphan” to refer to children born of rape. It is difficult to determine whether such obfuscation and euphemisms are a strategy of denial, benevolent protection against the stigmatization of illegitimacy, or a genuine belief that marriage is not meant to be consensual. Victims are ascribed to have agency, despite all evidence to the contrary: “One young woman I knew had four babies, I kept asking her why this had happened again and she just said there was nothing she could do.”52
The picture that emerges in East Timor, then, is that of rape victims and their children experiencing additional hardship deriving from society’s interpretation of the sexual violence and its after effects. The physical, economic, and psycho-social situation of the children is intricately bound up with the social status of their mothers, and vice versa.
Coomaraswamy’s report concluded that the Indonesian state should take responsibility for these children.53 It is not clear what form the Special Rapporteur expected this responsibility to take, whether it be offers of citizenship, compensation, or even the facilitation of paternity suits, and how this would be taken forward in the absence of willingness on the part of the mothers to identify themselves. This exemplifies the problem that, while the prevalence of systematic sexual violence has finally been acknowledged in recent conflicts, and gender persecution is subject to international criminal sanction, international criminal law currently fails to recognize the offense of “forced maternity” on behalf of the mother, or any offense with respect to the child.54 These inadequacies in the scope and definition of genocide have resulted in a conceptual gap in the transitional justice mechanisms in East Timor, as well as a lack of appropriate programming attention by civil society actors. In the section below, I briefly overview existing responses to this issue in East Timor and suggest policies that constructively address the difficulties faced by these women and their children.