High Commissioner of Human Rights

United Nations, New York NY10017

We are concerned about the recent atrocities committed against the Chinese minority in Indonesia. The High Commissioner must intervene directly and immediately because:

1. The scale of violence. Massive burning, looting, killing and public gang rapes targeted the Chinese. Most of these crimes have not been investigated. Surviving victims live in daily fear and continue to pay protection moneys to the perpetrators.
1. Some victims reported that the military organized and initiated the attacks. The newly installed President Habibie needs military support, and may neither investigate nor punish the persecutors. He said in an August WSJ report, "I have done the utmost I can do...I don’t know how to do [get the Chinese to return], I cannot." Habibie has done all he can, and is unlikely to act without the High Commissioner’s intervention.
1. Habibie and his government fail to acknowledge that these atrocities are the results of decades of racist government policies. They tag all Chinese minority (most of them local born) as untrustworthy, and bar them from most government and military positions. As a result, the ethnic Chinese are totally defenseless in times of unrest. Without changing these laws and policies, they make easy and continuing targets and scapegoats.

We think it is unlikely that the racist Indonesian rulers will investigate, punish, and stop these atrocities. In the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we applaud Special Rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy’s November fact finding in Indonesia. We urge the SR look into the long standing practice against the Chinese ethnic minority in Indonesia and recommend that the Government repeal existing discriminatory laws.

Signed,

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The United Nations High Commissioner