Prisoners in Indonesia’s politically sensitive Papua Province have been left partially blind and deaf after recent beatings and torture by jail wardens, New York-based Human Rights Watch said yesterday.
Papua, the underdeveloped but resource-rich western half of New Guinea island where independence activists have waged a separatist campaign for decades, is geographically isolated and foreign journalists need special permission to visit.
The Human Rights Watch report said more than 20 cases of prisoner abuse had been reported in Abepura prison, in Papua’s north, since August last year. In one case, a prisoner was beaten until deaf in one ear and another had his hand immersed in boiling water, the report said.
Abepura holds about 230 prisoners including more than a dozen who were imprisoned for peaceful political acts, it said.
Foreign ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said the Ministry of Law and Justice would be asked to investigate the accuracy of the report.
“We will clarify the truth of the report,” he said. “We will issue a government response to Human Rights Watch about the accusations of human rights abuses at the prison in Papua.”
The Human Rights Watch report also said political prisoner Ferdinand Pakage was left blind in one eye after a guard hit him with a padlock with a key in it.
A September 22 report on the incident written by senior prison warden Anthonius Ayorbaba said a guard called Herbert Toam hit Pakage because he had been caught earlier wielding a knife.
“Upon remembering this, [Toam] was gripped by emotion and spontaneously hit Ferdinand without realizing the key was still in the lock and it hit Ferdinand’s right eye. It started hemorrhaging,” Ayorbaba wrote.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Law and Justice said the allegations were being investigated.
Human Rights Watch’s Asia director, Brad Adams, called on the Indonesian government to punish any guards who had beaten prisoners.
“Given the scale of abuses, the Indonesian government should open Papuan prisons to international monitoring,” he said.
In March, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was ordered to close its Papuan operations because it did not have government permission to operate there. The ICRC had been visiting jailed separatists there, as well as conducting sanitation projects.
“How can the government turn a blind eye to beatings and torture in one of its prisons?” HRW Asia director Brad Adams said in a statement. “Jakarta needs to put an end to this disgraceful behavior, punish those responsible and start keeping a close eye on what is happening there.”
Indonesia’s criminal code contains no definition of torture and even though the country is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture it has no corresponding law against the practice.
The UN special rapporteur for torture visited Indonesia in 2007 and found that police used torture as a “routine practice in Jakarta and other metropolitan areas of Java.”
A decade of political and institutional reform after the fall of the military-backed Suharto regime in 1998 has not left its mark on the police and prison system, analysts say.
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