BY PIP HINMAN
When Indonesian judge Asril Marwan on December 30 sentenced Joy-Lee Sadler to four months' jail and Lesley McCulloch to five months, he declared that McCulloch should have received a harsher sentence because her actions "could have threatened national security and the territorial integrity of the Republic of Indonesia". The women could have been sentenced to five years in jail.
The prosecution unsuccessfully tried to make charges relating to the possession of military secrets stick.
A four-month jail sentence for the "crime" of misusing a visa sounds pretty grim, especially if that jail is in Aceh. However, the sentences took into account the time that Sadler and McCulloch have already spent in jail.
Sadler was released on January 10 after being on hunger strike for three months. She became quite ill, in part due to not being able to receive treatment for her HIV-related illness. The previous week, Sadler had been so ill she was allowed out of jail to seek medical treatment. However, she was refused treatment at three different clinics because of the stigma associated with her illness. She said: "I felt so sick I thought I would die. And just briefly, I felt it would be a welcome relief."
Sadler has vowed to return to Aceh and initiate an education program on HIV and related illness in Aceh.
McCulloch is due to be released in early February. Her January 2 message from Aceh is typical of the courage and determination she has shown throughout her ordeal: "We both have a dream for the coming year; that those who have campaigned so tirelessly for us will now turn their attention to the broader issues of injustice in Aceh ... Our solidarity with the Acehnese working for peace and justice will make a difference."
The Indonesian judge's decision to impose short sentences reflected the amount of pressure that the international solidarity movement has applied on Jakarta over the cases of the two women.
Sadler and McCulloch were picked up at a military check-point in south Aceh on September 10. They were beaten, sexually harassed, dumped in jail and were refused access to lawyers for weeks. A campaign for their release was immediately launched by solidarity groups in Britain, Scotland, Australia and the US, with some high-profile politicians taking an interest.
Scores of academics and others signed protest letters and messages, which inundated various Indonesian ministers' offices. In the US and Australia, pickets and rallies were also organised, and Â鶹´«Ã½ of the mass media reported the cases.
While these were the first such sentences to be handed down to foreigners in Indonesian legal history, Damien Kingsbury, a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Victoria, said the punishments appear to have been a compromise.
"There is little doubt that the TNI [Indonesian military] was angry with McCulloch and wanted to punish her personally", Kingsbury commented in an article in the January 1 Melbourne Age. The treatment the two women received from the TNI sends a clear signal to researchers and academics that it will not tolerate "foreign interference in domestic issues", especially "those who continue to expose the TNI's uglier side".
[Pip Hinman is national coordinator of Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific. Visit < http://www.asia-pacific-A href="mailto:action.org"><action.org>.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, January 22, 2003.
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