"This Is What Happens to Enemies of the RI": The East Timor Torture Photographs within the New Order's History of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Abstract:In 1997, at the very end of both Indonesia's occupation of East Timor (1975–99) and President Suharto's "New Order" military regime in Indonesia (1966–98), a collection of some 260 photographs taken by Indonesian soldiers of their East Timorese torture victims was uncovered and circulated internationally. Of these photographs, approximately seventy depicted acts of sexualized violence against women and girls. In this article, we situate these photographs and the forms of violence depicted within a larger etiology of sexual and gender-based violence during other periods of mass violence under the New Order regime. In particular, we highlight the similarities of gendered violence perpetrated against women and girls in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation of that territory, in Aceh during the DOM period ("military operations" period, 1989–98), and against suspected Communists in the mid-to-late 1960s. We focus on the gendered violence perpetrated against those deemed to be "internal enemies" of the Indonesian state. We argue that the highly gendered forms of violence used to harm, humiliate, and destroy these women both identified the victims as "internal enemies" and justified the violence being perpetrated against them.