The Silence That Screams

 

In the suffocating heat of May 1998, Jakarta was a city teetering on the edge of something unspeakable. The air buzzed with a restless, electric hum—like the drone of flies over a fresh corpse. Riots tore through the streets, a wildfire of rage and desperation, and in their wake, they left shattered lives and a silence that weighed heavier than the screams. Ita Martadinata, a third-year student at Paskalis High School, was just eighteen, her eyes still bright with the stubborn hope of youth. But that hope was a fragile thing, a candle flickering in a storm that was about to blow it out.

She’d been there when the mobs came, their faces twisted with hate, their hands reaching for whatever they could break—or defile. The mass rapes of that brutal spring weren’t just crimes; they were a violation that clawed into the soul of a city, a wound that festered in the dark. Most victims shrank into themselves, their voices stolen by shame and fear. But not Ita. She was different. She was a spark in the gloom, a girl who refused to let the shadows win. She spoke out when others couldn’t, her words cutting through the stifling heat like a blade.

By October, Ita had found her place among the human rights warriors, a ragtag band of survivors and dreamers huddled in dim rooms, offering counsel to the broken. She was ready to take her fight beyond Jakarta’s scarred streets, all the way to the United Nations. She’d stand before the world and peel back the city’s skin to show the rot beneath—the rapes, the murders, the terror that officials pretended didn’t exist. It was a bold plan, a dangerous one, and she knew it. The threats had started creeping in, whispers on the wind, notes slipped under doors. Keep quiet, or else. But Ita wasn’t the type to bow.

On October 6, 1998, her group threw down the gauntlet. A press conference in Jakarta, voices trembling but defiant, calling for the world to look at what had happened. They demanded an international investigation, a reckoning for the sins of May. The air in that room crackled with something alive, something angry. But anger has a price. Three days later, on October 9—just a week before she was set to board a plane to the UN—Ita’s story ended in a way that still haunts the edges of this tale.

They found her in her room in Central Jakarta, a place that should’ve been safe but wasn’t. The scene was a nightmare painted in red. Stab wounds pocked her abdomen, her chest, her right arm—jagged, ugly marks of a rage that wouldn’t quit. Her throat was slit, a cruel slash that spilled her life onto the floorboards. And then there was the worst of it: a foreign object, forced into her, a final indignity that turned a murder into something even darker. The forensic report laid it out cold and clinical, but the truth was hotter, sharper—a scream trapped in silence.

The cops pinned it on a neighbor, a guy named Suryadi, alias Otong or Bram. A petty thief, they said, caught with his hands in her stuff. Tempo magazine ran his supposed confession on October 12, 1998: he’d killed her in a panic, nothing more. But that story stank like a lie left out in the sun. Too neat, too convenient. The whispers said different—that Ita’s death was no accident, no clumsy theft gone wrong. It was a hit, a message carved into her flesh: This is what happens when you talk. The case went cold, unsolved, a question mark dangling over Jakarta like a storm cloud that never breaks.

The ripples didn’t stop with her. Other activists felt the chill—phone calls in the dead of night, shadows lingering too long outside their windows. Some were told to hush up, to let the past rot in peace. But how do you bury a thing that still bleeds? Years later, in a May 19, 2021 piece in The Jakarta Post, Ita’s name came up again, a ghost reminding the world that justice was still a stranger here.

And then there were the deniers. Culture Minister Fadli Zon, a man with a smile too thin to trust, called the mass rapes a rumor, a fairy tale with no proof. “Just a story,” he said, like he could wave it all away. Amnesty International Indonesia and historians roared back, calling him out for the liar he was. But the damage stuck. Doubt is a slow poison, and it seeped into the cracks of a city already broken.

The violence of May 1998 wasn’t just Jakarta’s curse. It spread like a plague—Medan, Surakarta, Palembang, Solo, Surabaya, Lampung—cities stained with the same blood. The brutality was a beast unleashed: women strangled, mutilated, burned alive. One was yanked off a bus, stripped bare, paraded like a trophy before the assault came. Another case saw three girls, barely old enough to understand, raped one after another by seven men, their innocence shredded in a frenzy. The Joint Fact-Finding Team’s report told of a girl called R, forced to watch her little sisters violated, then thrown into a fire below her shop. She survived, but survival’s a cruel word when you’re left with that kind of memory.

These weren’t random thugs. Father Sandyawan Sumardi saw it up close—muscular men, short hair, voices like steel, moving with a purpose that reeked of training. “Professional,” he told Tempo on October 3, 1998. Organized. Planned. And the Chinese-Indonesians, they were the prey. Their shops looted, their women targeted, their bodies turned into weapons of terror. Academic Chandra Linsa Hikmawati wrote in 2017 that it was structural, deliberate—a patriarchal society wielding rape to break a people. Broom handles, broken bottles—tools of pain, not just lust, but power.

Ita F. Nadia, once head of Kalyanamitra, saw the pattern clear as day. “These rapes were a modus to terrorize,” she told Tirto. Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor—same playbook, different stage. The Volunteer Team for Humanity clocked 168 cases, 20 deaths. The Joint Fact-Finding Team pegged it at 52–53 rapes, hard proof only. Numbers danced, but the horror didn’t. Officials like Colonel Gories Mere and Minister Wiranto turned their backs, called it noise. But the truth clawed its way out, carried by those who wouldn’t let it die.

Ita Martadinata’s room is quiet now, but the echoes linger. A girl who dared to speak, silenced by a blade and a lie. The fight for justice stumbles on, tripping over denial and fear. Jakarta’s streets still hum, but it’s a different tune—one that asks, in the dark of night, who’s next? And in the silence, you can almost hear her answer.