Acehnese widows bear the brunt of war
"This was my husband," she says, showing a photograph of the dead body of a tall man lying on a white cotton sheet, and whose skin looked strangely red. "They burnt him to death," she adds, as if to answer the queries forming in the visitors' minds.
Since the picture of her husband was taken in Sept 2000, 22-year-old Fatimah (not the real name) has been carrying it with her wherever she goes. "I want people to know what happened to my husband. The photo is my evidence."
This is Fatimah's cry for justice, one that she has set for herself to do, amid an uncertain life that she and hundreds of other widows share in their war-torn homeland of Aceh, which lies at the northern tip of Sumatra island, north-west of the Indonesian capital Jakarta.
In a clear sign of the human toll of the military operations in Aceh, the majority of the 120 people in the shelter where Fatimah lives are widows of different ages. Like every refugee, Fatimah remembers the moment she lost most of what she had in her young life.
"That day my husband went to work in the rice field," she recalls. "I was at home when I heard gunshots. I didn't feel right so I went out to the field to look for my husband. When I saw the military, I was frightened so I sat down on ground, waiting for them to leave.''
''Only after they had gone did I run as fast as I could to the field. But my husband was already dead when I reached him,'' Fatimah adds.
Military operations
That day was the turn of her village in Northern Aceh to be the focus of military sweeping operations in the hunt for members of rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM), which has been seeking Aceh's independence from Jakarta after decades of resentment over issues ranging from rights violations to a fairer share of the province's natural riches.
Along with Fatimah's husband, three other men and a woman working in the field at the time were also killed in that operation, she says. About 30 homes were burnt down afterward.
Since then, Fatimah and her two children have joined the caravan of refugees who sought refuge here in Banda Aceh.
Having suffered the same losses and struggling against sadness and uncertainty with few mechanisms for healing, the widows turn to one another and share their life stories to release anger and despair.
"Trauma is the biggest problem among Acehnese women, and the help provided now is too little compared to the scale of the problem,'' says Suraiya Kamaruzzaman, executive director of Flower Aceh, the first group set up by Acehnese women in 1989 to deal with the consequences of Indonesian army's crackdown on GAM.
That year marked the start of a decade when Aceh was made a special military operation area (DOM), marked by heightened military operations against separatism and what critics say was the systematic abuse of human rights by the military.
In the post-Suharto era, Indonesian governments made some attempts to reduce what was virtually military rule of the province, but these were caught up in the difficulty of asserting civilian control over the military. Operations and clashes have continued in more recent years, including under President Megawati Sukarnoputri.
Legal action
There appear to be little attempts at present to pursue legal action on past violations, although one trial, which far from eased the concerns of locals and rights activists, was held under former president Abdurrahman Wahid.
Even during the decade of military operations, activists say, many Acehnese women were already left traumatised by the loss of husbands and children, or the burning of their homes or through rape, they add.
The trauma is bound to continue, because there is no sign that the conflict will end in the near future, although attempts at peace talks are underway with the latest discussions held in Geneva earlier this month.
Between 1990-1998, the Coalition of Human Rights group in Aceh documented 7,727 human rights cases of rights violations.
But violence has continued even after the military operation periodended. From Jan 1999 to Feb 2000, the coalition documented nine cases of massacres in which 132 civillians were killed and 472 wounded, 304 cases of arbitrary detention, 318 extra-judicial executions and 138 disappearances.
According to Flower Aceh, women make up the majority of internally displaced persons in the province.
No investigation
As a part of its war against separatism, the Indonesian army undertook operations that displaced inhabitants from some parts of Aceh in Feb 1999. Human rights NGOs say that from June to Augt 1999, there were 250,000 to 300,000 internally displaced persons in Aceh — and no human rights investigation conducted so far.
Although the numbers of refugees fell to a few hundreds in May 2000, it increased again at the end of 2000 due to military operations.
To show that women bear the brunt of displacement from their homes, Suraiya stated that in 2000, one camp had 4,110 refugees that included 712 infants, 818 children less than five year, 52 pregnant women and 112 women who were still nursing infants.
"Trauma can be shown physically when it reached a point," adds Suraiya. "A lot of women cannot sleep well, most of them suffer depression and paranoia. All of them can hardly get help because no help from the government focuses on this problem, while NGOs don't have enough skills and resources to do a good job."
Still, some Acehnese women are finding their own ways to make their suffering known to the outside world.
Fifty-six-year-old refugee Norma (not real name), for instance, could not speak Indonesian but insisted on telling IPS her story in the Acehnese dialect as a fellow refugee translated for her.
Norma says lost her husband and all of her three sons in one day. They were shot and their dead bodies thrown in different spots in the village. One of the sons had been found decapitated by villagers.
This left Norma with 11 grandchildren and three daughters-in-laws, who share this trauma with her.
According to Suraiya, apart from losing their husbands, the torture of young men that many say happened often in the villages during military operations had a tremendous impact on women's psychological state.
"When the torture of the young people was happening in the village, many women heard them cry out," she says. "Sometimes they cried for their mother, and that traumatised every women who heard and automatically felt guilty, as if they could not protect their own children."
According to Suraiya, while violence frequently occurs in the villages, sometimes in Banda Aceh itself people still find dead bodies in the park or in front of mosques.
