John Aglionby, Banda Aceh – A British academic and her American colleague have revealed the extent to which they have allegedly been assaulted, intimidated, harassed and forced to witness hour-long torture sessions while being detained in Indonesia.
Scottish academic Lesley McCulloch and her American friend Joy Sadler go on trial today after spending most of the past 11 weeks in a 15-foot square room with no external windows.
Accused of violating their tourist visas, they said yesterday that they will not contest the charges. They are expected to be released within the week.
Lesley McCulloch, 40, from Dunoon in Argyll, and Joy Sadler, 57, from Iowa, speaking exclusively to the Guardian from their prison cell, accept that they did not have clearance to be researching the 26-year-long separatist conflict in the province on the northern tip of Sumatra and its effects on the local population when soldiers arrested them on September 10.
Ms McCulloch announced their strategy in a two-hour clandestine meeting she and Ms Sadler held with the Guardian yesterday in their cell at the Aceh police headquarters, their first in-depth interview since being arrested.
Both women and their lawyer are convinced that the main reason the process has dragged on for so long is because the army and intelligence agencies are enraged by Ms McCulloch's research papers on Aceh, particularly about the military's alleged myriad illegal businesses in the province.
"The level of pure hate towards Lesley has been so great," Ms Sadler said. "I was really honest to God afraid they would take her out. I've never seen such hate." At the beginning of their ordeal they were kept round the clock in the sparsely furnished cell. Ms McCulloch has a back condition.
"We just had to stay in here," Ms McCulloch said. "But then I couldn't walk and ended up in the emergency department of the hospital. The doctor told the commander we had to be allowed to walk and we had to have mattresses – which we didn't have – and chairs." But they say their treatment has been luxurious compared with the regular severe beatings suffered by other inmates, which the women claimed often keep them awake at night.
"Sometimes the torture sessions would go on for half an hour and sometimes an hour," Ms McCulloch alleged. "Then they might take the prisoner back to the cells for a bit and then they would drag him out again.
"Once Joy went to help a guy who had been beaten and when she came back I asked her if he was afraid but she said he was in such a terrible state she was unable to notice any emotions." Ms Sadler has refused to leave Ms McCulloch, even when her health started to deteriorate rapidly due to her catching illnesses related to her HIV-positive condition.
The American nurse has since received medicines flown in from her doctor in the US.
Ms McCulloch said she is hugely indebted to her fellow prisoner. "Joy's been my buffer zone," she said. "From early on they wanted to process her case quickly and get her out of here but she insisted that her case remained linked to mine and the lawyers said she has been my protection." One of the ways the women said Ms Sadler was able to ingratiate herself with the chief detective, senior commander Surya Dharma, was by tending to his officers when they fell sick and allegedly helping to patch up local detainees after they had been tortured to extract confessions. "They call me Mother Teresa," Ms Sadler said.
The picture the women paint of life in detention is a combination of regular harassment and intimidation towards them interspersed with moments of genuine kindness and incomprehensible idiosyncrasies. One of the regular latter acts is the vase of scented fake flowers the women are given every month even though the officers do not have the budget to buy the paper and ink needed to take their statements.