I met Ovianto Baharuddin at the Bacilgar Delet government hospital in Istanbul on Thursday. He was lying in bed with his right arm bandaged up to his elbow. There were bullet shrapnels in his arm that the doctors hadn’t been able to remove. Earlier that morning, he and six other men wounded with gunshots from the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara ship were transported by Turkish Airlines from Tel Aviv to Turkey for medical treatment. Next to his bed a Turk who was also shot at on the boat lay also nursing an injured right arm.
Ovianto is one of the twelve Indonesians on the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship of the six flotilla of ships carrying over six hundred volunteers from all over the world carrying humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza, who were shot at by Israeli soldiers last Monday, captured and taken to Israel before finally being released.
The day before ten of his compatriots who were uninjured were deported out of Israel to Amman. Another Indonesian by the name of Surya was shot in the chest and remained in Israeli hospital awaiting deportation. Both were lucky to be alive. Nine people, four of whom were Turks, all aid volunteers, died during the dawn raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara.
I asked the chief doctor of the Bacilgar hospital Dr Ahmet, about Ovianto’s condition. The injury was not too serious and he was confident that Ovianto would recover soon and be well enough to go back home. Indeed Ovianto seemed none the worse for wear. The Turkish hospital seemed to give him lavish attention. During my stay at his bedside a male attendant was always at hand, providing him with anything he needed. The mayor of the municipality of Bacilgar came by to ask him how he was doing.
Who was paying for Ovianto’s treatment, I asked. The Turkish government was footing the bill until he was ready to be sent home.
Ovianto had just finished his dawn prayers on the Mavi Marmara, around four o’clock in the morning when he heard helicopters hovering above the ship. He knew that the ship was in trouble. It was still dark. He and around fifteen passengers on the ship had to stop the Israeli soldiers from getting on the ship. He used water jet to hose them away. His fellow passengers grabbed pipes and whatever objects on the ship they could lay their hands on.
Then the soldiers began shooting and soon they were on the ship. Ovianto’s arm was shot. He didn’t witness any struggle between the passengers and the soldiers. Then the Israeli soldiers rounded them up, cuffed them and took them and the ship to the port of Ashdod.
I asked him if the aid volunteers carried any weapons and sharp objects on the ship and defended themselves with them. They had boarded the ship from Antalya in the south of Turkey. There the ships were inspected by the authorities before making off towards Gaza. The flotilla, according to him, carried nothing other than aid stuff.
In Israel the arrested passengers were separated and put in jail. Ovianto himself was at first taken to hospital. Later on, when they saw his wound was not fatal, he was cuffed again and taken to jail. His jail apparently was better than the others’, he said. Theirs didn’t have air conditioning or toilet. He was not badly treated, but they took everything away from him including his mobile telephone. He was left with nothing but the clothes on his back.
Lying in hospital in Istanbul he did not know what had happened to his compatriots. I assured him that all but one were safely out of Israel and on their way back home. He fretted about not being able to contact his office. I lent him my mobile but we failed to get through to Indonesia.
He was worried because when he was making the trip on the Mavi Marmara he was on leave from work and had now overextended his vacation time. He was a regular employee who was also a member of Kispa, an Indonesian NGO sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. I assured him his employees would know where he was as no doubt the whole of Indonesia was looking forward for his safe return. Dr Ahmet from the hospital estimated Ovianto would be ready to leave hospital within the next few days.
Now the streets of Istanbul were empty of protestors. The previous nights thousands had gathered at Taksim area nearby the popular Istiqlal street waving Turkish and Palestinian flags. There were men, women and children protesting Israel’s aggression towards the humanitarian aid workers. A total of nine people died. Four were Turks.
Turkish president Abudallh Gul whom I had spoken to a day earlier at his office in Ankara, called Israeli’s action piracy. Israel would regret this for a very long time. I asked what he meant by regret. He said Israel had made a big mistake in testing Turkey’s patience. Turkey would make sure that Israel would be punished and receive international censure. This was a wound that would not heal for a long time.
Israel’s action was state terror. It had nothing to do with religion. It was a crime against humanity.
(Desi Anwar: First Published in The Jakarta Globe)
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