Torture, forced sodomy, slave labour… or was drug rehab centre in Indonesia a needed safe space that saved thousands of lives?
- Former patients of the centre claim they were slaves who faced regular torture, but others say it saved countless men from losing their lives to drugs and crime
To some, Terbit Rencana Perangin Angin is a criminal, a man who set up a fraudulent rehabilitation facility to supply slave labour to his oil palm plantations and torture those supposedly under his care.
To others, the former regent of Langkat, Indonesia, is a saintly figure who provided free treatment to countless young men in the grip of a violent drug emergency.
His drug rehabilitation centre in Langkat Regency, made up of two large metal cages that sat in a grassy field behind Perangin Angin’s home, opened to the public in 2011 as a kind of halfway house to treat local male addicts.
Police on the scene discovered the two rusty cages at the bottom of a short slope behind the former regent’s home, with 65 men locked inside, some of whom were emaciated and begging to be released, according to the authorities.
The cages were made up of two square concrete cells, with wooden platforms inside on which the men slept in rows, and were equipped with a single squat toilet each and fronted by metal bars, open to the elements.
