TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
End caning in Aceh
The punishment is almost completely reserved for the poor.
Change Size
Public domain?: A man is caned in public for engaging in same-sex relations in Banda Aceh. Two men received 85 lashes each after the Banda Aceh Sharia Court found them guilty of sodomy. (JP/Hotli Simanjuntak)
T
he girl’s face scrunches up in pain as the cane snaps down onto her spine, sending a loud crack throughout the mosque courtyard.
The crowd of around 100 looks on fixated, some spectators look solemn, others look thoroughly entertained as the girl is caned again and again. A few in the crowd cheer, urging the algojo or “executioner,” to strike harder, others jeer when she cries out. Children no older than five years run around eating sweets and playing as if they were at a fairground.
The girl’s crime is khalwat or being in close proximity to a member of the opposite sex that is not a member of her family.
Her punishment is to be publicly caned on a stage multiple times by a man in a hooded black robe. This punishment reminiscent of the Middle Ages is taking part not in Saudi Arabia or an Islamic State-controlled part of Iraq, but in Indonesia’s western-most province of Aceh.
Under Aceh’s Islamic criminal code or qanun jinayat, gambling, selling alcohol, and all consensual extramarital sex — including homosexual sex — can be punished by public caning.
Aceh made headlines earlier this year when two men were caned 83 times each after been caught in bed by a vigilante mob who forced their way into the men’s house.
Whilst the strike of the rattan cane is enough to make some victims faint, it is the public humiliation and shame that the punishment causes as well as the victims being ostracized or shunned by their communities that is the real torture.
