Reuters in Jakarta – Three Indonesian humanitarian volunteers attached to a Danish-sponsored rights group have been tortured and shot dead in Aceh, underscoring the growing threat to aid workers and civilians in the rebellious province.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International accused plainclothes security forces of torturing and then summarily executing the three on Wednesday on a road near a village in North Aceh. A fourth aid worker managed to escape, while one patient, a recent victim of torture, was also killed.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty said initial reports indicated members of the elite Police Mobile Brigade were involved, along with soldiers. Police in Aceh, where rebels have fought an independence war for decades, denied the accusations, saying the three aid workers were killed by separatists of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).
The killings follow the murder of a leading Aceh human rights activist several months ago and an upsurge in bloody clashes between soldiers and rebels that have made a mockery of a ceasefire agreed in June.
"This is all GAM's doing. Most of the time they commit crimes, turn around the facts and make us look like the bad guys," Aceh police spokesman, Kusbini Imbar, said, adding there were indications the three had been tortured.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty said that after a vehicle carrying the aid workers was stopped on Wednesday, the three were tortured, then lined up along the road and shot in the head.
"The Indonesian government is allowing its security forces to target humanitarian workers in Aceh, just as it allowed militias to target such workers in West Timor," the two international rights groups said in a statement obtained on Saturday.
"The international community should be every bit as outraged over these executions as they were over the brutal killing of three United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) workers in September, and take equally firm action."
Foreign governments and the UN slammed Indonesia over the UNHCR murders, carried out by members of pro-Jakarta Timorese militias who killed hundreds of people and laid waste to much of East Timor when the territory voted for independence last year.
The three aid workers killed in Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, were local volunteers of an organisation called Rehabilitation Action for Torture victims in Aceh (Rata), Human Rights Watch and Amnesty said. Danish diplomats in Jakarta were not immediately available for comment, and RATA officials could also not be reached.
Independence demands have simmered for decades in Aceh, where the military has waged a brutal war against rebels and the central government has exploited the province's natural resources, including its reserves of oil and gas.
Highlighting the headache Aceh poses to the beleaguered government of President Abdurrahman Wahid, a separate local human rights group said more civilians had been killed in violence there this year than in any year in the past decade.
The Forum for Concern for Human Rights, quoted by the official Antara News Agency on Saturday, said 676 civilians had been killed in violent acts so far in 2000. "Hundreds of victims died in violent acts such as gunshots, grenade explosions, torture, stabbings, hackings and burnings," Antara quoted the group as saying. It added that 124 police and military personnel had been killed, along with 41 rebels.
While it was unclear how many civilians had been killed this year as a direct result of the rebellion, the figures underscore the depth of violence in Aceh, home to four million people out of Indonesia's 210 million.