“Violence Against Chinese Christian Women in Indonesia Warrants Asylum, Ninth Circuit Panel Rules,” from the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, with thanks to Twostellas:
Violence against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, particularly against women and Christians, is sufficiently pervasive to require that a Chinese Christian woman be found eligible for asylum, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.
Overturning a ruling by a divided panel of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the court ruled that Marjorie Kinda Lolong’s petition for review be granted. The attorney general will now have the final decision as to whether Lolong, who applied for asylum while here as a student in 1998, may remain permanently in the United States.
Senior Judge Betty B. Fletcher, writing for the Ninth Circuit, noted that elements within the Indonesian military have been linked to the violence, even though the country’s president and other leaders have called for tolerance.
“Evidence of the government’s willingness to control the perpetrators of ethnic and religious violence in Indonesia fails to rebut the
overwhelming evidence of the government’s inability to control those forces,” Fletcher wrote.The jurist cited a “voluminous record that documents ongoing discrimination and violence against the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia,” which the court addressed in another asylum case last year.
Lolong, the judge noted, filed her application just months after
riots in which dozens of ethnic Chinese women were raped; the State Department has estimated the number at 300. Lolong testified that one of the victims was a friend of hers, and that another friend had escaped a rape attempt; both women became afraid to leave their homes, she said.Fletcher also cited evidence that anti-Chinese violence has spread to areas of the country where it had been rare. “Indeed, the Indonesian government’s decision to permit Chinese language press and cultural displays has caused heightened resentment and acts of retaliation,” the judge said….
Let me get this straight: it was the government’s own fault that violence broke out and 300 women were raped? Because they allowed “Chinese language press and cultural displays?” Oh, come now. Even the good judge Fletcher must blush at the absurdity of this kind of moral equivalence.