Rape case may fully restore rule of law (Hugh Mabbett on the Sum Kuning case)

[Transcribed from the page images by Claude, Oct 2026 – Tesseract OCR of this clipping was unusable] === [PDF page 1] === Rape case may fully restore rule of law By HUGH MABBETT: Jakarta A JUBILANT crowd in a Jogjakarta, central Java, courthouse this week signalled the end of a grotesque ordeal for a 17-year-old girl eggseller, the victim of a classic case of conspiracy. Three months ago the girl, Sum Kuning (also known as Sumarijem), was kidnapped by four youths and raped by three of them, under threat of death if she resisted. All indications are that the youths, three of them long-haired, come from important families because only connections in high places can explain the events which followed. The police, faced with a rape report which they were either too frightened or too well bribed to act upon, charged Sum Kuning with lodging a false statement "causing unrest among the people." But there were medical reports that she had been raped so the police cast about for another victim and settled upon a noodles and meatball seller named Trimo. He was charged with rape despite === [PDF page 2] === a complete lack of evidence and his repeated pleas that he had never even seen Sum Kuning. Later he was to tell the court the police tortured him. The police also "borrowed" Sum Kuning from the Jogjakarta hospital where she was under treatment for injuries, and kept her without medical treatment for 30 days. They questioned her relentlessly, at times deprived her of food and drink and threatened her with electric torture if she did not go along with the police version. They also held over her head an accusation that at the time of the communist coup attempt in 1965 — when she was barely 12 years old — she had been a member of Gerwani, the communist women's organisation. Local newspapers made inquiries and published their findings. One result was that a reporter named Slamet Djabarudi spent ten days under arrest for publishing an "unauthorised" account of the case. Then came the court === [PDF page 3] === case, held behind closed doors until the judges were ready to give their decision — which they did with the aid of loudspeakers so that hundreds of people around the courthouse could hear. In a decision which took one and a half hours to read the presiding judges, Mrs Lamiah Muljatno (who was assisted by Mrs. Sumarno Abdurrachman and Mr. Sujatno) demolished the police case, mainly on its own contradictions, and described the police methods in a manner which brought applause from the excited crowd. Freed from her ordeal Sum Kuning, who had two nurses attending her during the trial, returned to hospital. Newspapers in Jogjakarta and Jakarta commented happily on the implications for a full return to the rule of law, and praised the judges for their courage. As for the police — quickly it was reported that Dr. Hugeng, Indonesia's police chief, had summoned Jogjakarta's two most senior police officers to Jakarta "to report upon the case."