Stop Sudah English-revised-March2012 - International Center for ...

disease is new to me, but the medical examiners suggested I take antiretroviral medication regularly. Now my weight
is back to normal. I’m healthy and can work in the field and live normally. 95
One wife did not know that her husband had HIV/AIDS until he was very weak and could not get up. The
wife took her husband to the hospital and he was treated for two weeks.
No doctors or nurses wanted to come and check on my husband’s condition. It was as if they were scared and
disgusted to see us. Finally . . . a doctor . . . said, “You can take him home tonight.” . . . That night I was forced to
carry him home . . . He worked for the state electricity company (PLN) after being unemployed for several years. But
then he started getting drunk a lot and rarely came home, and it turns out he was going to prostitutes. He had affairs
with two women. One of them has already died . . . [It was when] he knew he would die before he confessed and
expressed regret and apologized to me. 96
A woman who lived with her husband in Nabire also tested positive for HIV/AIDS. Her husband came
home drunk. He got angry and said that his wife was no good, and sold betel nut in order to meet other
men. He beat his wife and chased her with a machete, so the wife ran away and hid at her family’s house.
When the husband realized what had happened, he asked her family to persuade his wife, and then she
returned home to her husband. The wife knew that her husband was ill when he went to the hospital and
officials said he had HIV. After that the wife did not want to meet her husband and left him in hospital
until he died. After her husband died, the wife was examined in 2009 and it was found that she too was
infected with HIV. 97
2.6. Layered Violence: Victims of State Violence Become Victims of Domestic Violence
One very pathetic phenomenon is experienced by victims of state violence who are then ostracized by their
own families and eventually become victims of domestic violence. The Documentation Team found at least
fourteen victims of this “layered violence”. In the 1980s, soldiers caught a woman and her three-month-old
child, and then raped her. Nearly twenty years later her husband left her, with the excuse that the victim had
been violated:
I . . . was ordered to go into the forest to look for my husband . . . [I was] followed by six soldiers. After that I was
taken to the post . . . beaten and raped by soldiers—two Papuans, three non-Papuans. After two days, I was taken
to the hospital because my genitals . . . were bleeding and had to have stitches. After I was examined by intelligence .
. . [I went home] . . . My husband finally married again in 2005 . . . I feel it’s not fair at all because what I
experienced was to save my husband. 98
One woman became a victim in 1968 during a firefight between Marines and the OPM in Marsyom Village,
North Biak. The victim, along with her family and other villagers, fled into the forest and lived there until
1980. After returning to the village in 1980, the victim’s husband went to look for work in Merauke due to
economic hardship, and has not returned until now. She received news that her husband has married again.
In this difficult situation, the victim alone supports her children by selling betel nut:
In the end my husband left me, didn’t look after me, I alone pay for my children’s expenses. Some have . . . dropped
out of school, some have no work. I myself sell and look for food until now. All this time, the man doesn’t take
95 WAM25 narrative.
96 SOR22 narrative.
97 Field notes on NAB01 case.
98 KJ07 narrative.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! 49