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Jakarta arms Aceh militias as toll soars

Source
Sydney Morning Herald - July 12, 2001

Lindsay Murdoch, Jakarta – Indonesia has started forming East Timor-style militias in oil- and gas-rich Aceh, where scores of civilians are being murdered under the cover of a brutal crackdown against separatist rebels, say Acehnese leaders and human rights workers.

The death toll in the province at the tip of Sumatra has soared to 848 this year, most of them since the launching in April of a Jakarta-sanctioned military operation to crush the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).

A top Acehnese leader, Mr Hasballah Saad, yesterday appealed to Jakarta to order the military to stop attacking civilians and to allow international observers to monitor the conflict.

"Grave injustices are being committed," Mr Hasballah told the Herald. "The violence is only turning the Acehnese further away from Jakarta's rule. The people are being radicalised." Mr Hasballah said that of the 848 deaths he had confirmed this year, more than 460 of them were neither members of the security forces nor GAM fighters.

"Many are women and children," he said. "There are sinister forces at work ... we don't know who is doing most of the killing. So international observers should be allowed to go there to monitor the situation." Human rights activists in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, say the extent of the violence over the past several weeks is largely unknown because the security forces are intimidating journalists and human rights workers to stop them going to many rural areas.

Mr Mohammad Nazar, the head of the Aceh Referendum Information Centre, said the military killings were worse than ever before. "We cannot investigate and the local journalists are too intimidated ... but we know massacres are being committed on a horrific scale," he said.

In one of the latest incidents, 16 people were burned to death when a hand grenade was thrown into a small hut. Military spokesmen claimed all of the victims were GAM members. GAM denied the claim, saying only four were fighters and that the rest were innocent civilians. Up to 40 bodies were found several days ago in one remote gorge. The dead have included babies, school children, school teachers, civil servants, rebels, soldiers and police, human rights activists say.

With Indonesia's President, Mr Abdurrahman Wahid, embroiled in a political crisis that threatens to plunge the country into crisis, the escalating violence in Aceh has received little media coverage in Jakarta and has prompted virtually no public debate.

When his cabinet approved a battalion of about 800 specially trained troops to be sent to Aceh in April, Mr Wahid claimed they would only be involved in a limited operation to protect so-called vital installations such as the ExxonMobil gas fields. But within days troops started attacking villages suspected of harbouring GAM rebels, human rights activists say.

Several weeks ago, a further 300 troops from the elite Kopassus special forces were sent to the province, bringing to about 30,000 the number of armed troops and police stationed there. Kopassus troops trained and armed the militias that rampaged through East Timor in 1999.

Reports from central Aceh say the training and arming of pro-Jakarta militias by Indonesian security forces has alarmed locals. The squads are being formed in an area dominated by an estimated 260,000 Javanese settlers, many of whom arrived in the province under a government trans-migration program.

Tempo magazine this week quotes a military spokesman as confirming the formation of the militia, saying it was part of a long-established civilian home defence force.

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