Men have been fo-rced to do a load of press ups for not following Indonesia’s Covid regulations and failing to wear a mask.
The unusual pun!shment has been described as ‘de-grading’ by a human rights group but is just one of the strange things that courts in the South Asian country have been fo-rcing people to do if they v!olate the rules.
Some have been made to d!g gr-aves, others have been sent to clean riverbanks and pu-ll up we-eds. One was reportedly even made to l!e in an open co-ffin.
It’s pretty odd, that’s for certain. Indonesia needs to take the Covid-19 cr!sis seriously, as the country currently has the highest loss toll in their region with more than 10,000 loss and 271,000 confirmed cases as of this Saturday, according to the Johns Hopkins University Covid-19 Resource Center.
However, human rights activists really don’t think that this is the way to go about pun!shing people, for falling afoul of the laws.Rivanlee Anandar, from the Commission for Missing Persons and V!ctims of V!olence, told VOA Indonesia that police officers and members of the country’s military are being used improperly to oversee these pun!shments.
He said: “The military should focus on national defe-nce. There [are] no indicators or instruments to measure the effe-ctiveness of involving the military in handling the pa*demic.”Their role in picking up people who have tested positive [for] Covid-19 is too much. In several malls, they even take people’s temperature.”
One woman who was found not wearing a mask in her car was told that she could either clean the se-wers or pay a fine after she was pu-lled over.Evani Jesselyn said: “I was alone, in the car, wearing my mask. However, suddenly I felt it was a bit hard to breathe, so I pu-lled my mask a bit to breathe some fresh air.”She was then taken immediately from being pu-lled over to a court where she waited for an hour in a crowded room to see a judge.
Jesselyn explained: “I was sc-ared to jump into the crowd, and quite upset as well because I was alone inside the car and healthy and they asked me to go to the crowd with no social distancing.”Eventually, she was given a fine.M.Hendra Suhartiyono, a spokesperson for the police, said that the fo-rce had been drafted in to help out the regional governments in their efforts to get the v!rus under control. He went on to ar-gue that sa-nctions, including the public service pun!shments, are ideas that come from the regional governments. He said: “We have to uphold local wisdom.”
This Article First Published On LADBIBLE