Former students of an Islamic boarding school on Indonesia's Lombok island accused their former head teacher, Ahmad Imanuddin Sumar, of sexual assault and gathered evidence. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
Yusron Azzahidi's stomach lurched when he heard the voice on the phone. He had called his sister's number after she texted him urgently asking him to call. But it was not her on the line — it was Yusron's former head teacher. He was in Yusron's family home. "I knew. I knew exactly what he wanted to talk about," Yusron says.
Ahmad Imanuddin Sumar, known to his students as "Abah" ("father"), had a reputation to uphold. He was the widely respected leader of an Islamic boarding school on the Indonesian island of Lombok. And Abah had discovered that Yusron and his old school friends had been collating testimony from several students who say he sexually assaulted them.
Sexual abuse in Islamic boarding schools has been described as a national emergency by Indonesia's National Commission on Violence Against Women. But many cases never reach the courts because the victims are persuaded to withdraw their allegations, or are pressured into staying quiet, legal experts say.
And now Abah was on the phone to Yusron, making exactly that kind of demand. "Cover the shame of your teacher. Everyone makes mistakes, my child," he sobbed. What he did not realise was that Yusron was recording his every word.
Yusron began investigating Abah a year previously, sparked by a revelation one night by his former classmate Ziadatur Rahmah. They had both been star pupils at Lombok's Abu Barokat school. Now they were at university — Yusron in the capital Jakarta, and Ziadatur in Cairo, Egypt — and had begun reminiscing over the phone about their school days.
One night Ziadatur, known to her friends as Zia, told Yusron that Abah had sexually assaulted her when she was 16. She had needed to go to the toilet during class and Abah had intercepted her in the school gardens and asked her to accompany him to his house which was on the premises. Once inside, he had told her he loved her, she told Yusron.
"He pulled me down so I was sitting on his lap… Then he started kissing me… He was stroking and touching my body," she later told the BBC World Service, too, explaining that he told her to do the same to him. Luckily, she said, one of his children began banging on the locked front door. Abah signalled to her to leave and she bolted out the back. But the effect was devastating. "I felt very dirty, ruined, and I was lost."
Yusron, when he heard Zia's account, was unsure what to do. Their school had inculcated them with the motto: "Sami'na wa ata'na" ("We hear, and we obey"). But he also could not stop thinking about it. So he suggested that he and Zia, together with her school friends Wanda Hamidah and Mahima Eka, gather corroborating evidence to support her testimony. And slowly, as they spoke to their old classmates, other recollections emerged — the friends sharing their findings with each other on WhatsApp.
The most significant was from a friend of Wanda's. She recalled seeing a younger girl crying in the school bathroom during their final year, late at night. And that Abah had come looking for her, red-faced and panting. This girl, Sukma Rohana, was still at the school. She told the BBC about her ordeal.
When Sukma was 17, Abah had asked her to join him for new year's prayers, she told us. When she entered Abah's house, he had covered her mouth and told her to lie down, she said, before he stripped below the waist.