Abandoned huts among rice fields are becoming a place in one of the regions of Indonesia where violators of the self-isolation regime are sent due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So the authorities of the Sragen area on the island of Java are trying to make people respect their decisions: if they are not afraid of the virus, they hope that the quarantine with ghosts will scare them
In one of the regions of Indonesia, a potent remedy has been invented against violation of the self-isolation regime. In the Sragen regency located in Central Java, those who do not follow the authorities' instructions to stay at home during the COVID-19 pandemic are now sent to abandoned villages where they are housed in empty houses. Local residents believe that ghosts are found in them - in the hope that fear of the supernatural will convince potential violators to stay at home, since the calls of officials and doctors do not work on them, the authorities took this step.
The head of the Sragen regency issued a decree providing for this type of punishment for quarantine violators at the end of April - after residents from other parts of Indonesia began to arrive in the region, including from the capital, who refused to comply with mandatory self-isolation for 14 days. “If they do not obey the order of self-isolation, several villages have asked me for permission to quarantine them in abandoned schools and homes,” Sragena head Kusdinar Untung Yuni Sukovati told local media. - I gave permission. They will be locked up if needed - in a haunted house if needed. But we will still feed them and look after them."
Since then, five people have already been quarantined in the haunted house - for two they have equipped an abandoned hut among the rice fields in the village of Plupu, for three more they have put beds in an empty house in the village of Sepat. Intruders placed in haunted houses were locked outside. The punishment seems to have worked. One of the violators, named Henry Susanto, admitted to the French media that he never saw the ghosts. “But what happens happens. Lesson learned,”he said.
Indonesia is not the only country where unexpected measures are being taken for those who oppose the government's decision to introduce quarantine. India is especially different: here, violators of the self-isolation regime caught on the street are forced to squat, write an apology or perform yoga asanas, be beaten with sticks or even frightened with COVID-19 infection. For example, police officers from the city of Tirupur, Tamil Nadu state, having found at the end of April three men without protective masks gathered on the street by a motorbike, decided to teach violators a lesson in an unusual way - they locked them in an ambulance car with a patient who was there and said that the man diagnosed with COVID-19.
The video, which was later leaked to the network, shows how the intruders are desperately trying to avoid contact with the "patient" and even squeeze into the glass when he goes to them. “It was only when they realized that there was a patient with COVID-19 in the ambulance that they were afraid for their lives. People don't understand how terrible the virus is because they don't see it. But he could be anywhere,”one of the officers said in the video. He added that the man inside the vehicle was just an actor who could not infect the quarantine violators.
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In India's neighboring Pakistan, quarantine violators are also forced to squat or crawl - videos are also appearing on the network in which people caught in the street bent over in an uncomfortable position with their heads tucked between their knees and pressing them to their ears. According to some experts, the origins of such punishments are in the colonial feudal history of both countries. “British Rajahs used these kinds of punishments,” a professor at Kuad-e-Azam University in Islamabad explained to TRT World. “However, this type of punishment has been part of South Asian culture for millennia. Moreover, it was part of the Hindu caste system, adapted by followers of other religions in other regions."
Author: Anna Vinogradova
