"Violence Against Chinese Christian Women in Indonesia Warrants Asylum, Ninth Circuit Panel Rules," from the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, with thanks to Twostellas:
Violence against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, particularly against women and Christians, is sufficiently pervasive to require that a Chinese Christian woman be found eligible for asylum, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.Overturning a ruling by a divided panel of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the court ruled that Marjorie Kinda Lolong's petition for review be granted. The attorney general will now have the final decision as to whether Lolong, who applied for asylum while here as a student in 1998, may remain permanently in the United States.
Senior Judge Betty B. Fletcher, writing for the Ninth Circuit, noted that elements within the Indonesian military have been linked to the violence, even though the country's president and other leaders have called for tolerance.
"Evidence of the government's willingness to control the perpetrators of ethnic and religious violence in Indonesia fails to rebut the
overwhelming evidence of the government's inability to control those forces," Fletcher wrote.The jurist cited a "voluminous record that documents ongoing discrimination and violence against the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia," which the court addressed in another asylum case last year.
Lolong, the judge noted, filed her application just months after
riots in which dozens of ethnic Chinese women were raped; the State Department has estimated the number at 300. Lolong testified that one of the victims was a friend of hers, and that another friend had escaped a rape attempt; both women became afraid to leave their homes, she said.Fletcher also cited evidence that anti-Chinese violence has spread to areas of the country where it had been rare. "Indeed, the Indonesian government's decision to permit Chinese language press and cultural displays has caused heightened resentment and acts of retaliation," the judge said....
Let me get this straight: it was the government's own fault that violence broke out and 300 women were raped? Because they allowed "Chinese language press and cultural displays?" Oh, come now. Even the good judge Fletcher must blush at the absurdity of this kind of moral equivalence.
IN INDONESIA, ETHNIC CHINESE FEARFUL
Women from minority raped in an apparently organized campaign
By Uli Schmetzer
Tribune Foreign Correspondent
July 29, 1998
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Weeks later, Aileen remains traumatized by the men who broke into her room and raped and mutilated her. They singled her out, she is convinced, because she is Chinese.
Scores of Chinese women report similarly brutal experiences in Indonesia this year, victims of a vicious expression of ethnic hatred in a nation with a history of interracial blood feuds.
Trying to project an image of stability in a country that has seen its leader toppled and sections of its capital burned by rioters over the last few months, President B.J. Habibie apologized recently to Indonesia's ethnic Chinese residents for the apparently organized rapes of Chinese women.
Government ministers admit Chinese women have been gang-raped ever since mobs in mid-May torched more than 5,000 Chinese stores and shopping malls, led by agitators yelling, "Death to the Chinese."
Intelligence sources believe the rapes are part of a campaign by paramilitary groups in league with Jakarta's organized crime groups. Its purpose, they say, is to frighten an affluent Chinese minority into leaving the country -- and their property.
Intimidated by rapes, threats and extortion, the Chinese face a wrenching dilemma: If they stay they could be targeted; if they leave they may lose their property and livelihoods.
"I would never think of leaving," said a Chinese businesswoman in East Jakarta. "I was born here and so were my parents. Like every Chinese who stays, we now pay protection to the army and people who come around asking for money to buy food. That's the way it is now."
Usman Lubis, a member of the Indonesian People's Advisers Assembly, a kind of senate, has urged the government to give those Chinese who fled abroad after the May riots a deadline to return. He advocated that the government cancel the business licenses and confiscate the property of all Chinese who fail to return before the deadline.
"I feel it is time for the government to give opportunities to the native Indonesians to run the economy in their own country," he said.
Lubis' statement echoed the belief of most Indonesians. They believe that ethnic Chinese -- who comprise 3 percent of the population of 200 million but own an estimated 75 percent of the private economy -- must give up part of their disproportionate wealth to salvage the country from economic turmoil.
Such threats are unlikely to influence Indonesia's Chinese tycoons, who have transferred to Singapore alone an estimated $80 billion of their assets this year. Their funds, know-how and financial networks are essential if Indonesia is to recover from its crippling recession.
Aileen, 24, is still in the hospital. She does not want to speak to anyone, nor does her Chinese landlady in East Jakarta's Sunter district. The district is a middle-class area inhabited by ethnic Chinese who make their living from ground-floor shops and reside above them. The windows ar% shuttered now, the doors triple-locked.
The landlady rents out rooms above her shop to Chinese working women from the countryside. She was warned by an anonymous phone call that the raid would come, three days before it did on July 2.
In broad daylight, the four masked men broke into the shop. Upstairs they found only Aileen, a waitress, asleep. The other women had gone to work. Left in a pool of blood, Aileen was taken to hospital for surgery.
"The same phone caller warned me afterward to keep quiet or else they would know how to find me," the landlady said.
Volunteer women workers, many of them indignant Indonesians, have been told to stop their investigation into the rapes or face retribution "because you're giving the country a bad name."
So far, social workers such as Ita Fatia Nadia have documented 182 rape cases in Jakarta, mainly during May and early June. She believes these cases are a small fraction of the total.
Most of the information checked out by her organization came from relatives after the victims had been taken out of the country. The majority of rape victims were flown by their families or by Chinese networks for treatment to Perth, Australia, or to Singapore.
"Traditionally, Chinese families refuse to publicize their grievances. They have no faith in the authorities and try to protect the victims from future stigmatization. Mothers will always say it didn't happen to their daughters, even if we know from the circumstances it did," said social worker and Sinologist Myra Sidharta.
Social workers found that about 20 of the rape victims were killed by their assailants. Two others committed suicide when they found they were pregnant.
One girl described how six men raped her. Her younger sister was stabbed to death when she spat into a rapist's face. Her uncle offered money to the attackers but was killed. Her aunt was raped and her parents beaten.
A report by the National Committee on Human Rights concluded: "Chinese-Indonesian women were raped repeatedly by many in front of their neighbors. Some were asked to dance naked.
"The rapists wanted to scare and disgrace the victims and to fill Chinese-Indonesians with terror."
rape is part and parcel of islam.
Does anybody remember some time ago the news reports & secret filming about that twat nick griffin & the bnp ?
he said "islam was a wicked viscious religion"
which we all agree it is.
However he also qouted from the koran the sura which authorises the rape of captured infidel women.
there was a big outcry about his discription of islam as "wicked viscious" but nobody even talked about his quote from the koran and refernce to the precise sura.
it is the same everywhere.
Scandanavia, Oz, UK, Kashmir, Serbia,
I have read somewhere of saudi clerics saying that infidel women are lawful and should be "taken".
If anybody has any links we can get them out to womens organisation.
Regards
AI
I would like to point out that the majority of indonesians are malay/moslim,where the ethnic chinese are catholic/protestant.
The chinese send there children to schools where they can get an education on par to USA/Europe where-as the malay kids are sent to islamic schools
The chinese invest in there businesses and home
where-as the malays put their money into building mosques or going to mecca.
Indonesia will be a bigger shit should all the chinese leave
Just being a women in islamic country Warrants Asylum where as being a male muslim warannts instant deportation
Sadly this does not surprise me at all. A few years ago I was researching female genital mutilation and came across a story on Indonesia about Christian women in Sulawesi or somewhere having their genitals cut and then forced to covert to Islam (along with the rest of their family). It was all the more shocking because the Muslim women involved were not themselves circumcized! During the Yugoslavian civil wars I read similar accounts of Serbian POWs being forcibly circumcised.
Sexual violence seems to be a pattern within Islamic cultures although one can also see the Hebrew religious texts have many cases of rape, incest and of course ritual genital cutting.
Well, this is the freedom and protection of the sharia in the umma.
"Be silent, be not seen, pay your tax and die quietly."
Geoff
Chinese in Malaysia, and Indians, as non-Muslims, must support Muslim Malays through the disguised jizya of the Bumiputra system, whereby Muslim Malays are given shares in businesses, or forced to be hired by those businesses, and given all sorts of econoomic advantages unavailable to non-Muslims.
In Indonesia, several decades ago, more than 600,000 Chinese were murdered by their Muslim neighbors. Officially the story was that they were "fifth columnists" symapethetic to Communist China. This was nonsense. These were small shopkeepers, traders, farmers just trying to earn a living -- but without the hobble of inshallah-fatalism to keep them from trying, and without the submission-to-authority that, in Islam, so stunts mental growth and ability to think clearly (for one cannot learn a certain kind of mental slavishness, without it affecting the rest of one's thinking).
The murder of 200,000 Christian East Timorese, the occasional terrorizing of Hindus even on Bali itself, the continuing murder of Christians in the Moluccas, are all of a piece, and has its roots in Islam.
But will this be recognized by the governments of the Western world?
apostate_islam
This link may be what you were thinking of. The fact that the cleric concerned was preaching about British Army women in Basra makes it particularly relevant for us.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119325,00.html
It's a story from last year, but not that old.
The 9th Circus is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
'Nuff said.
$$hugh
please get your facts right
In Indonesia, several decades ago, more than 600,000 Chinese were murdered by their Muslim neighbors. Officially the story was that they were "fifth columnists" symapethetic to Communist China.
The muslims with the aid of the CIA where killing anybody who was suspected of being communist,during this bloody frenzy,many muslims where taking advantage of the situation and killing there neighbors either to settle an old score or to take their land.A lot of the killing happened in the small villages and hamlets{kampongs}where there where no chinese.
Hugh this is not the first time you have give wrong info about indonesia,you quoted 2000 churches being burnt last year.So please check the facts before you post
I would like to add that in Medan a few years before the riots in Jakarta.The muslims burnt and looted the chinese shops and businesses.So when things settled down,the chinese returned and converted their premises to swallow houses for the production of birds nest soup,which has proven to be more profitable,and involves less work,and the muslim that where employed before the riots where left without employment.
All chinese people must have an extra id card which they must pay quite alot for it is like the non muslim tax,and the new goverment is now passing a law so that muslim businesses only pay
50% tax of what the chinese pay.
In the housing area where a chinese friend lives there are a couple of hundred house-holds each house has to pay $1000 to the military for
protection when there is trouble brewing
I am confused by the posting above, which asks me to "please get your facts right." In what way did I get my facts wrong? It seems that what I wrote about the mass murder of Chinese by Muslims was rendered licit by their being Infidels, which appears to be confirmed by what "shiva" says rather than undermined. As for the number of churches destroyed, the information comes from the Barnabas Fund in England. Aren't we actually in agreement, or am I missing something, or have I been misunderstood?
I feel like sending ought a message in the spirit of the telegram Robert Benchley sent to his editors back in New York, upon his arrival in Venice:
"Streets full of water. Please advise."
A very dreadful pattern of ethnic relations evolved in Indonesia over the past fifty years or so.
Sukarno stayed in power by playing Communists and Islamicists against each other. To seek an alliance with Beijing, he allowed the Chinese Communist regime to have a free hand in the educational and cultural life of the Sino-Indonesians (BTW, Chiang Kai-shek, while still on the Mainland, and later, on Taiwan, had expressed sympathy for the Moluccan separatists).
Yet at the same time, Sukarno tried to drive Chinese traders out of the rural areas of Indonesia (with the result that much of the rural economy collapsed, fueling the resentments on which guess-which-two political movements thrived).
Sukarno's "game" ended when he veered too far left, and was overthrown in a military coup led by Suharto. An open season on both ethnic Chinese and Communists was declared, in which Islamicists were especially noted for their ferocity. There has been an exodus of ethnic Chinese ever since (a lot of the anti-Communist ones moved here to Taiwan).
Now that Indonesia is going through another transition, with no figure of Sukarno's or Suharto's stature on the horizon, as well as no real tradition of democratic civility, it is certain that things will be bad for ethnic Chinese and Christians of all ethnicities. Count as well on simmering resentments against "Javanese Colonialism", which is how the Indonesian state has been perceived in a number of places from Aceh to Irian Jaya.
"Violence Against Chinese Christian Women in Indonesia Warrants Asylum, Ninth Circuit Panel Rules,
This is good news in more then one way, as it sets a precedent.
The reason we have a jihad against us, is because we have muslims in ever increasing numbers in the West. No muslims in the West and no terrorism either. We can, if we really wish to, win this war very easily, if we reverse the flow of immigration of muslims. The war will end pronto and may even lead to the reformation or moderation of islam - which will be good for muslims in the main.
In this vein, I have felt for a long time, that we should exchange the persecuted Christians in muslim nations for "our" muslims, in a population exchange, as a more feasible option to expulsion per se. If that is not possible then the best we can do for Christians in muslim nations is give them asylum in the West while setting it off against an overall immigration quota. It may be the way to start a process, which I believe will have to happen if we are serious about winning this war (or more pertinently, not losing the war), and helping the oppressed muslims in the bargain.
Hugh: While violence against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia is a fact that you got right, the majority of the victims of the anti-Communist purge that occurred following Suharto's coup belonged to the peasantry of eastern and central Java, whose religious traditions were a kind of syncretism of Islam, Hinduism, and Animism (if you can imagine such a thing).
Kepha:
I suspect Hugh is aware of the way early Muslim "missionaries" helped gain converts in the Far East without resorting to the Sword -- by mixing in elements of the "native" religion. This isn't a new ruse. Is this any different from Mohammed's initial ploy of praying in the direction of Jerusalem to gain acceptance from the Jews of Mecca and Medina. It was only when this practice failed to impress, that they commenced praying in the direction of the Ka'aba.
JUNGLE JIHAD IN INDONESIA?
The great equatorial rainforests of the Indonesian archipelago, once among the most extensive on earth, have been decimated. Although not specifically a recent phenomena overall-- the huge upsurge in illicit timber operations in Indonesia rainforests since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship and the rise in the popularity of Ousamah bin Looney Tunes among Indonesians may indicate al-Qaeda involvement in illicit timber harvests in remaining Indonesian rainforests. The implications are likely to be tragic beyond comprehension if so.
There is no nation on earth with a greater number of plant and animal species than Indonesia. It is from a natruralist's perspective the most extraordinary place on earth. Unfortunately most if not all of these will thus be doomed to extinction if al-Qaeda is behind the rise in illegal timber harvesting. Because al-Qaeda will tell the people of Indonesia conservation is a crusader movement from the west and because al-Qaeda may well be applying the billions of dollars in illicit foreign exchange towards global jihadism (including the maiming, raping, and murdering of Christians and Chinese mimorities across Indonesia). The decimation for timber dollars will prevail until nothing remains to cut down (maybe ten years from now given current rates of destruction).
Al-Qaeda, if responsible, will turn Indonesia into an arid wasteland and hundreds of millions of Indonesians will likely starve to death.
Isn't al-lah merciful?