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Indonesia's black death

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Sydney Morning Herald - November 7, 1998

As terrorised villagers turn to murder, the May riot findings have fuelled fears that disgraced Indonesian special forces are running death squads, reports Louise Williams.

The victims were dead, their heads had been severed, but the crowd was not satisfied; so it dragged the battered corpses along the rough rural roads, the naked bodies dangling from ropes behind motor bikes. Earlier the mob, in the Javanese city of Malang, had impaled one head on a large bamboo pole and paraded the trophy through town, under the grey shadow of a wet season rainstorm. On the same day last month, about an hour by car to the south, another mob went on the rampage, but the two corpses there were publicly burned.

Last weekend three policemen were beaten to death on the nearby island of Madura, and in West Java this week a young woman was beaten, stripped, hanged and set alight in Serong, a rural town about 90 minutes' drive from Jakarta.

In the past three months about 200 people have been murdered or lynched by angry mobs, in a campaign of terror which began in the port town of Banyuwangi in East Java, the gateway to the resort island of Bali.

At first, security forces claimed the black clad "ninja killers" were targeting practitioners of "black magic" or witchcraft who were visiting doom upon poor rural towns reeling from the hardships of Indonesia's economic crisis. Unable to stop the slaughter, military and police looked on as locals took up knives, sickles, sticks and guns to form vigilante squads and unleash revenge.

But now an even blacker scenario is emerging: that the killings are part of a political conspiracy to sow fear and create chaos which will slow the pace of democratic reforms in Indonesia.

This week, a leading political figure, Amien Rais, claimed that former President Soeharto and his loyalists were behind the brutal murders. They wanted, he argued, to use spreading terror to distract a hungry and angry populace from seeking revenge over vast wealth accumulated by the Soeharto family during his 32-year rule.

Equally possible, he said, was the desire of the armed forces to use the instability to move back into the dominant position it had under the Soeharto regime, in the name of securing the country against such threats.

Indonesian politics has long been laced with conspiracy theories. But this week one of the most damaging of recent times was confirmed by the Government-appointed fact-finding team investigating the May riots, and now questions are being asked publicly about possible links between the terror campaign and some of the same actors on the political stage.

The team concluded that the riots which engulfed Jakarta and provincial cities were not spontaneous acts of violence by an embittered populace.

Certainly, the bitterness was there. The economy was collapsing, members of the pro-democracy movement were being plucked from streets to vanish into secret torture and detention centres, the political pressure cooker of President's Soeharto's rule was ready to explode. But the team found that the conspiracy went right up to the "highest decision-making levels". Two key serving generals of the Indonesian military – one the then commander for Jakarta, the other the then commander of the Strategic Reserve – were named this week in the report as either provoking the chaos or failing to protect the city, where at least 1,200 people died.

And among those provocateurs who came with iron bars, molotov cocktails and petrol to wreck and burn thousands of shops, malls and houses, then invite the bitter populace in to loot, were "elements of the armed forces". The riots report paints a disturbing picture of a splintered military, dogged by dangerously politicised factions acting outside the chain of command.

The violence, the report concluded, was "geared towards the creation of an emergency situation which would require the invocation of extra-constitutional powers in order to keep the situation under control". Thus, Soeharto and his military allies could crush the political reform movement. The human suffering and fear seemed beside the point.

The fact-finding team confirmed an alarming link between politics and violence in Indonesia. But perhaps more worrying is the reality that a new brutal round of political manipulation may be under way in the form of the campaign of murders and lynchings across Java.

Rais said: "I am very sure Soeharto's hand are involved... Soeharto and his cronies want to fight back, they don't want reforms to run smoothly, they want to use the terror to distract the people from issues like Soeharto's wealth. A few respected figures have already indicated that a similar link may exist here, too. If this proves true, the seeds of national disintegration that even now are stirring may grow to threaten the unity of the nation."

The story of the killings which began in East Java is terrible. The victims were supposedly practitioners of black magic. Then came the killings of members of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia's largest Islamic organisation, which had formed a political alliance with pro-democracy figurehead Megawati Sukarnoputri. Several local officials in East Java claimed members of the military were involved. The Commission for Victims of Violence, a human rights organisation, found signs of organisation: the assassins were outsiders who came with maps and appeared to be trained.

So terrified were the people of the rural areas that vigilante squads were formed and the lynchings began. But locals say the victims of the mobs are not real "ninjas", but lunatics mysteriously dumped on the streets. The man whose head was paraded through Malang was a drifter suffering from mental illness.

In the weekly Detak magazine's latest issue, a deserter from the elite special force, Kopassus, tells of a training school for killers and provocateurs in West Java. Kopassus forces featured heavily in the May riots conspiracy, and the riots report this week recommended that Prabowo Subianto, the son-in-law of Soeharto, be brought before a military court over his role in the kidnappings of pro-democracy activists ahead of the riots. Prabowo has been dismissed by a military honour board.

The former Kopassus officer claims the shadowy school recruited men to provoke the May riots and, more recently, about 200 trained paramilitary officers to launch the terror campaign in East Java. The idea, he says, was to get through to Bali to disrupt Megawati's political congress last month, but security was too tight and her support too strong on Bali. Instead, he says, they settled for "butchering the sorcerers" in Banyuwangi, the large port town where ferries cross to the tourist island of Bali. "The idea was to create chaos," he says.

This week, as Jakarta filled with tens of thousands of troops ahead of the "special session" of the People's Consultative Assembly to rewrite restrictive political laws, Governor Sutiyoso told residents not to fear the massive military presence. "I am quite sure that these "ninja' killers will be scared off should they see such tight security. If they were to see very light security, who is there to stop them?" he said, immediately raising the prospect of the fear campaign reaching the capital.

One diplomat warned that Prabowo, and the largely discredited Kopassus he once commanded, would not accept the kind of humiliation and blame present in the riots report. "I think there is some kind of Kopassus role in the East Java killings. I wouldn't put it past these guys to inflame conflict now they are out of the system and discredited." Said another: "What the riot report does is validate the conspiracy theory, and that may be applied later to other issues."

However, the political scientist Arbi Sanit dismissed both conspiracy theories and said the riots were part of the clash between the reform movement and the status quo. In Java, he said, the killings were a result of a split in society between Islamic leaders and believers in the traditional forms of magic.

"During an economic crisis the split intensifies. The political system here doesn't work as a problem solver so the people find their own solution. But, these splits can be used for political gain, for one person to make his political enemies look bad."

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