The intriguing case of the rape in 1995 riots.And the lingering doubt that even rape occurred in riots.

Even if we were to suppose that in May 1998 the streets of Jakarta and Solo were full of angry, hungry and desperately anti-Chinese crowds, not burning, looting nor rapes would be inevitable. It would require some prior exposition, ideas or experiments, if not training, to transform this anger and hatred into any particular foim of collective aggression. Without any precedent, and without a learning process, their action would tum into reckless, structureless and meaningless chaos. Not only raping of women but even less serious harassment (from slapping to verbal abuse) requires specific formal structures of practice, and signifies a range of social meanings beyond the individual aggressors' choice or invention.Fonns of violence, especially in the collective, are never uniform, spontaneous, natural or at random. The possible range of genres and even technical specificities of violence in any given society is not limitless. They are historically bound, and therefore signifying. For the masses in Jakarta, or anywhere else for that matter, to have the disposition and ability to tum into collective agents of 'spontaneous' mass violence, there must be prior ideas, desires, memories, imaginations, history, and perhaps experiments and experiences of doing so. Any of these, or their combination, work as directives in the absence of leadership. 1 i For several months after the May incident, especially during the month of July 199 &, there were maj or and racial-blind lootings 0 f agricultural and aquacultural products across Java (see Forom Keadilan, 199&a). These seemingly spontaneous acts of local residents were driven by economic desperation, informed by many years of prior discourse and practice. However, political gang raping appeared to be beyond the histories, discourses and imagination of the people in turbulent areas during the May 199& violence. It is here that special troops within the armed forces occupied a unique position, being as it were the only social groups in the nation with ideas, training and history, if not personal experience, of political gang rapes in areas like Aceh and East Timor. This is not to deny the epidemy of the more 'private' rapes in the nation, where rapists make effors to cover up the crime they commit (see Prasetyo and Marzuki, 1997). It is also worth noting that despite their high rate, rapes are viewed by many Indonesians as a serious atrocity, sometimes more serious than murder. This sentiment manifests itself in everyday life more than in fonnal policies and legal documents. It is well-known in Indonesia th.     Even if we were to suppose that in May 1998 the streets of Jakarta and Solo were full of angry, hungry and desperately anti-Chinese crowds, not burning, looting nor rapes would be inevitable. It would require some prior exposition, ideas or experiments, if not training, to transform this anger and hatred into any particular foim of collective aggression. Without any precedent, and without a learning process, their action would tum into reckless, structureless and meaningless chaos. Not only raping of women but even less serious harassment (from slapping to verbal abuse) requires specific formal structures of practice, and signifies a range of social meanings beyond the individual aggressors' choice or invention. Fonns of violence, especially in the collective, are never uniform, spontaneous, natural or at random. The possible range of genres and even technical specificities of violence in any given society is not limitless. They are historically bound, and therefore signifying. For the masses in Jakarta, or anywhere else for that matter, to have the disposition and ability to tum into collective agents of 'spontaneous' mass violence, there must be prior ideas, desires, memories, imaginations, history, and perhaps experiments and experiences of doing so. Any of these, or their combination, work as directives in the absence of leadership. 1 i For several months after the May incident, especially during the month of July 199 &, there were maj or and racial-blind lootings 0 f agricultural and aquacultural products across Java (see Forom Keadilan, 199&a). These seemingly spontaneous acts of local residents were driven by economic desperation, informed by many years of prior discourse and practice. However, political gang raping appeared to be beyond the histories, discourses and imagination of the people in turbulent areas during the May 199& violence. It is here that special troops within the armed forces occupied a unique position, being as it were the only social groups in the nation with ideas, training and history, if not personal experience, of political gang rapes in areas like Aceh and East Timor. This is not to deny the epidemy of the more 'private' rapes in the nation, where rapists make effors to cover up the crime they commit (see Prasetyo and Marzuki, 1997). It is also worth noting that despite their high rate, rapes are viewed by many Indonesians as a serious atrocity, sometimes more serious than murder. This sentiment manifests itself in everyday life more than in fonnal policies and legal documents. It is well-known in Indonesia that 18 Pierre Bourdieu's widely-quoted notion of 'habitus' is helpful in delineating the point further: Systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, colJectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor (1977: 11 7). Rioting and hooliganism after a soccer match or a rock music concert are good examples in Indonesia of a structured disposition of seemingly leaderless masses, orchestrated by a historical discursive practice without a human conductor. Indonesians' courtesy to strangers is as subject to historical construction as their familiarity with corruption or looting during anti-Chinese riots. These are part of their 'national' discursive resources that are durable but neither permanent nor essential. RACE AND GENDER 317 prisoners convicted of rape are targets for private torture by other inmates. My observation during fieldwork in 1991 that involved regular visits to a prison in Central Java confinned this. Weda (1998) gives further confirmation. Such treatment can be so bad that in one case it entailed death (see Forum Keadilan, 199&b). If we have no hard evidence to prove that specific individuals or institutions within the military committed the gang rapes in May 1998, we have fairly strong reasons to doubt that the masses could have done it, even in the unlikely event they wished to do so. NGO activists have raised similar doubts on the basis of the efficacy and simultaneity of separate atrocities over a large area within a fairly short period. I agree with this conclusion, but for a different reason, as outlined above. Although suggesting a high degree of complicity on the part of the state security apparatus in the riots, by no means do I imply that the violence was necessarily a product of an overt instruction from a commander, who was in charge of well-coordinated efforts to achieve well-defined aims. As we all know, the New Order's state power, which was greatly centralised and personalised, was already in disarray at the time of the riots. 19 While it is crucial to recognise the unique e:\.'Perience and record of the Indonesian military's special troops with regard to political rapes, separating them from the rest of the population, it is equally important to add two things. Firstly, such distinction is not permanent. Novelty or innocence never is. Once (again) exposed to the occurrence of political rapes within their immediate environment, the Indonesian public, especially those living in urban Java, entered a new history, trauma, memory and collective narration. The 1998 incident provided a new and authorised vocabulary in speech, fantasy and practice. The strong racialisation of the May 1998 rapes in the generous media coverage made it possible for some of the ethnic majority to detach themselves emotionally from the horror, and to assign this genre of political violence to a specific group: Chinese females. There were reports of individual rapes in Jakarta and several other cities weeks after the dust settled in ruined Jakarta. They appear to be spillover or residual cases. Such cases included an incident where a family driver kidnapped and raped his employer's 14 year old daughter, whom he had for years been taking to and fetching from school (Hughes and Hindriyati, 1998). No less alarming are the separate stories I heard from several sources about the normalisation of raping Chinese females. In one such story, a schoolgirl asked her classmate: 'Are you Chinese? How come you were not raped?'. In several others, Chinese and other Sinic-looking females passing by public places were interpolated by shouts of 'Rape, rape, rape!'. The Volunteers foHumanity documented similar widespread harassment in Jakarta (TRllK 1998). Discursive practices are mobile and contagious.20 Secondly, acquired discourses at a particular point of their development can be irresistibly compelling. Habitus can be habituating, if not addictive. I like to point this out in attempting to speculate why there should have been such mass gang rapes at all in May 1998, when evidently there was no material or non-material reward to be gained by any of the fragments within the political elite. It is arguable that certain military agents (with or without official instructions) or their proxies took action out of sheer habit, under conducive circumstances, in a combination of crisis, violence and chaos where almost anything goes. , ' Barthean jouissance, rather than any economic gains or political triumphalism, was probably at the heart of the matter. Rapes had been regular and regulated in the military operation zones of Aceh and East Timor. So why not Jakarta? I am more inclined to accept such a scenario than one of the more conspiracy-oriented theories. The May 199& rapes proved to be counter productive to the ruling elite during its final days, and perhaps to the succeeding regime. Both before and after the May violence there were pUblic statements from pro-Habibie figures that seemed to endorse the expulsion of ethnic Chinese from the country to allow economic domination by elite pribumi. 21 However, such statements are not adequate evidence to suggest that there was a clear-cut case of successful conspiracy.