Kate Lamb - 'A vigilante state': Aceh's citizens take sharia law into their own hands
Everyone in the village
saw it, either in the flesh or later when it was immortalised on YouTube. Local
children even stuck their heads through the grates of a fence to watch, their
attention trained on the spectacle in front of them: a young couple being
doused in sewage. Humiliated but
compliant, the couple sat on the edge of a well in Kayee Lee, a village in the
Indonesian province of Aceh, as the liquid ran off them in thick black
streams. By the time Roswati
arrived at the scene, about 70 people had gathered to watch her son and his
girlfriend being publicly shamed in the courtyard of the mosque, the village
equivalent of the public square.
“They were standing
there looking at them like thieves,” says Roswati of the local youths involved.
“I asked them, ‘Why did you do this,’ and they said, ‘Wait till we burn your
house down.’ Roswati and her
husband, both rice farmers, had been visiting friends in a nearby village,
leaving their son, 24-year-old Maulizan, and his girlfriend Shirley, 19, at
home alone. In the sharia-ruled province of Aceh, that is a criminal offence. Known
as khalwat, or the “seclusion” or “indecency” law, in Aceh it is
prohibited for two mature people, not married or blood-related, to be together
alone in an isolated place. The offence is punishable by caning and a fine of
up to 10m rupiah (£508).
But Maulizan and
Shirley weren’t arrested and charged by Aceh’s sharia police. Instead, it was a
posse of young men from the village that burst into the house, demanded to see
their IDs and then forced them down the dusty village road to the mosque. In March there were
four such cases in the provincial capital and surrounds alone, where ordinary
Acehnese took it upon themselves to play judge and jury, raiding, arresting and
shaming people who had allegedly violated Aceh’s militant moral laws.
A few unmarried
couples, two university students suspected of being gay, and a transgender
woman accused of soliciting for sex, were all rounded up – not by known
vigilantes but ordinary residents, before they were eventually handed over to
the sharia police. Five are still in custody pending trial at the religious
courts. Based on a special
autonomy agreement, Aceh is the only province in Indonesia
that can
legally adopt sharia bylaws. Formalised in 2014, its criminal code outlaws
alcohol, adultery, homosexuality, pre-marital sex and gambling, and regulates
what women can wear. Last year the province
attracted international condemnation after two gay men were flogged, 83 times,
for having sex. The effect of the punishment, the first in Aceh’s history,
rippled through the province. The public spectacle
attracted thousands and included sermons by religious scholars on the dangers
of homosexuality, reinforcing already deeply entrenched homophobia.
Kamal Fasya, an
anthropologist from Aceh’s Malikussaleh University, said of the recent
vigilantism: “It has happened again and again. Young people, especially
uneducated young people such as in Kayee Lee, shaming them, hitting them in
public. “It’s like an
infection,” he adds. “It’s contagious.”
In several cases this
March it was young Acehnese men, some as young as 15, who carried out the
attacks with the backing of their village chiefs. Not once were they themselves
reprimanded or arrested. In another case the
attack was unplanned. On 12 March, a man delivering water to a beauty salon
claimed he caught its transgender owner having sex with a man. He called in the
mechanic next door and together they restrained the couple, confiscating the
keys for their motorbikes so they couldn’t escape, and called the police… read
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