Since the Indonesian armed forces launched new military operations at the beginning of May, conditions for the population of Aceh have rapidly deteriorated. A massacre in Central Aceh resulted in scores of deaths. The death toll in the first half of 2001 exceeded one thousand, most victims being civilians. NGOs working on human rights and humanitarian issues are in constant danger, forcing many activists to flee, in fear for their lives. Para-military militias are now being trained and armed by the army. Peace talks in Geneva did nothing to end the slaughter.
On 11 April, Presidential Instruction No IV, Inpres IV/2001, was issued providing for a six-point "comprehensive programme" for Aceh, intended to restore the machinery of local government to the province. However, the "security" aspect is the only one to have been put into action. Well before the Instruction was announced, units of the army's elite forces and cmpanies from various parts of the country were getting special training in counter-insurgency at the training base of KOPASSUS, in Batu Jajar, Bandung, ready to be sent to Aceh.
Three days after the Instruction was announced, the armed forces (TNI) commander-in-chief, Admiral Widodo, announced the creation of a special army command known as KOLAKOPS (Komando Pelaksanaan Operasi TNI), for Aceh under the command of a KOPASSUS officer, Brigadier-General Zumroni. The joint police/army operations are known by the name OPSLIHKAM (Operasi Pemulihan Keamanan), Operation for the Restoration of Security. The command went into action on 2 May and since then the level of military operations has steadily intensified. Counter-insurgency operations, mainly in the countryside, are in the hands of the army while the police confine their activities to the towns and cities.
Very early on, extra troops were sent to Aceh to strengthen armed protection of the gas field and liquefaction gas plant installations in Arun, North Aceh, following Exxon/Mobil's announcement that operations had been suspended from 9 March because of the security situation. The shutdown of one of Indonesia's primary sources of foreign exchange was an additional reason for new military operations to be conducted.
Jakarta's interests lie elsewhere
While Aceh descends deeper into all-out war, Jakarta's attention is focused on the scramble for power within the political elite. The national press devotes little attention to Aceh while most reports that do appear are based on army handouts. The lack of news reporting is partly the result of threats to journalists and pressure on local newspapers about how events are reporting, coming from both sides of the conflict.
The military operations have been conducted at the time of a virtual power vacuum in Jakarta. In June, parliament decided to call a special session of the supreme legislative body, the MPR, on 1 August to consider impeaching President Wahid. Vice-President Megawati is widely expected to take over as president.
As compared with Wahid who has been in conflict with the armed forces leadership over wide-ranging reforms and over his intention to issue a decree that would enable him to dissolve parliament, Megawati is very close to the armed forces. While Wahid was very reluctant to issue Presidential Instruction of 11 April (Inpres IV/2001) which gave the TNI the legal basis for renewed military operations, Megawati is known to unreservedly support the military and its declared aim of preventing the secession of Aceh at all costs. At a limited cabinet meeting on 14 June, she was quoted as expressing her confidence that this year's celebration of independence day on 17 August would be blessed by a "special gift", the final solution of the Aceh question. The armed forces are working to her agenda (almost certainly designed by her TNI advisers), not Wahid's, which explains the intensity with which the operations have been conducted.
Another factor driving the TNI's determination to "finish off" GAM is the need to provide conducive security conditions to persuade the giant US oil company, Exxon, to resume operations which were suspended on 9 March. The continued closure is having a severe impact on the economy in lost revenues and foreign exchange earnings and now poses a threat to Indonesia's overseas market for the LNG produced by the Arun natural gas fields in Aceh. Deputy director of the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, YLBHI, Munir said the decision to launch new operations ignored the fact, as history has shown, that military operations have never solved anything in Aceh, going back to the Dutch war against Aceh in the 19th century. He described the TNI's determination to "solve" the Aceh question as an attempt to compensate for their defeat in East Timor. The military want to reinforce the myth that they, not civilian politicians, are the only ones capable of solving conflicts and restoring peace in Aceh. Munir said that if the TNI were really interested in resolving the Aceh situation and rolling back the growing distrust towards Indonesia, they could easily do this by putting past perpetrators of human rights on trial [Detik. com, 28 April 2001] This remarks applies with equal force to the situation in West Papua.
Massacre in Central Aceh
The day before talks between Indonesia and GAM were resumed in Geneva on 30 June, reports were received that twenty people had been killed in the village of Menderek, Timang Gajah in Central Aceh. While the security forces claimed they were all members of GAM, a GAM spokesperson insisted that only four of the dead were their members, and all the others were ordinary civilians. As the days passed, it became clear that the massacre in Menderek was the tip of the iceberg. The death toll mounted with reports from local hospitals and an Indonesian Red Cross team saying by 2 July that 62 bodies had been found, many with gunshot wounds and many charred beyond recognition. In mid July, TAPOL received a list of 184 people who had been killed in Central Aceh, along with the place of burial. The list was described as "preliminary".
Reports of serious disturbances in Central Aceh, of numerous houses having been burnt down, began to emerge earlier in June. On that occasion, the attacks appear to have come from GAM units, seeking to drive out the Javanese. Until then, Central Aceh was a region of calm; even during the DOM period (1989-1998), the district was untouched by the horrors that struck elsewhere.
There is a sizable Javanese population in Central Aceh, consisting not so much of recently arrived transmigrants but of people from Java and Tapanuli who settled in the province many decades ago. It is here that the security forces first began to set up and train para-military militias, recruited primarily from the Javanese. This is what seems to have angered local GAM units.
Central Aceh is also the home of a distinct ethnic group, the Gayo, who till recently, kept a distance from Acehnese aspirations. They have now been drawn into the conflict with some of their members joining forces with GAM.
According to reports from an observer in Central Aceh, Brimob and army troops have emptied three-quarters of the villages in some parts of Central Aceh. Gardens have been ravaged, animals killed and houses razed. Tens of thousands of Acehnese have fled their villages, suggesting a comparison with the huge displacement of the population of East Timor, in the wake of the ballot in August 1999.
On 7 July, AFP reported the discovery of 29 bodies in Matangkuli, North Aceh, scattered in a ravine in the Krueng Tuan and Salak Mountain range in Matangkuli, 31 miles west of Lhokseumawe. The bodies bore marks showing they had died violent deaths. The agency quoted a local journalist as saying 400 residents of Central Aceh had taken refuge in the Matangkuli area after being forced to flee their homes by military-led militias; they had taken a week to reach their destination. Other sources suggested that the victims were local residents who had fled their homes when troops made "sweepings" in their villages.
These reports prompted TAPOL to call on the British government to press for the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions to conduct an investigation in Aceh.
Monitoring the mounting death toll Meanwhile, elsewhere in Aceh, human rights NGOs have been attempting with great difficulty to keep a tally of the numbers killed. The Legal Aid Institute (LBH) in Banda Aceh said on 1 June that they had recorded 155 deaths since Inpres IV/2001 was announced on 11 April, an average of 25 deaths a week. Estimates of the number of deaths since the beginning of 2001 had reached one thousand by the end of June. Almost daily reports in the latter half of June suggest that there were on average five killings a day.
While all sources agree that the numbers dying are increasing throughout the province, it is not always possible to establish who was responsible. The security forces and GAM invariably give contradictory accounts. In those cases where monitors have been able to record the testimony of local people, the security forces are almost always to blame. Faisal Hadi of the Aceh Coalition of Human Rights NGOs highlighted the problem of accurate monitoring: "In the field, the soldiers or the police seem like they regard all of the Acehnese as GAM. But when people make a report or complain to their [local] commanders, they always say that you have to give the name and the unit of the soldiers [responsible]. But it's very hard ... because they frequently don't wear their official uniform, just put on a black shirt." (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 21 June 2001) Here are some examples of what has been happening. On 18 June, a couple and their 18-year old daughter were found dead on Lampu'uk beach in Aceh Besar with bullet wounds in the chest and their faces smashed beyond recognition. The police said they had died during an armed clash with the "rebels" but GAM said there had been no armed clash. Local people said the family had been kidnapped by an armed group riding a Kijang vehicle. (Cordova Post, 30 June 2001) In a widely reported incident, three schoolboys were killed on the same day as the above incident was reported. The killing occurred following the gunning down outside a school in Krueng Sabee, West Aceh of a member of Brimob by GAM. In revenge, police raided the school. Although it was a Sunday, schoolboys were there to register for a university entrance exam. During the raid, the police rounded up thirty youngsters and two members of staff."The three students died after being taken to the police headquarters which is about two kilometers from the school," the source said, adding that several other students were injured. (AFP, 18 June) On the same day too, five bodies were discovered by the roadside in Babah, Buloh, BlangPidie. The bodies had gunshot wounds and had been tortured. The security forces said they died in a round-up of GAM members, while GAM said the five men had been kidnapped by soldiers on 13 April. (Cordova Post, 30 June) Such a confluence of reports on a single day is now becoming the norm in Aceh.
NGOs targeted
Ever since the abduction and brutal murder of Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, the founder and chairperson of the International Forum on Aceh, in August 2000, there has been a deliberate campaign by the security forces to undermine and destroy the community of NGOs in Aceh dedicated to alerting national and international opinion about the human rights situation in Aceh. In December 2000, three volunteers working for RATA, the Rehabilitation Action for Victims of Torture in Aceh, were gunned down by a unit consisting of members of the security forces and civilian associates. The murders were widely condemned and eight men were arrested, including four soldiers. However, four have since escaped and there is no news about whether the others are likely to go on trial.
Three months later, a well-known member of one of the joint monitoring committees working for the Humanitarian Pause was shot dead twenty minutes after leaving a police station where he had been questioned. He had been summoned in connection with the case of five women who were given protection by Kontras-Aceh (Committee for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence), after they alleged that they had been raped by members of Brimob. The women were later taken into police custody where they reversed their story, according to the police, now accusing GAM of having ordered them to accuse Brimob members of rape. The murdered man, Al Kamal, killed along with his lawyer and their driver, was travelling in a car clearly marked as belonging to the joint monitoring team.
This incident has been used by the police to accuse Kontras-Aceh activists of maligning their force because they had caused the story to be reported in the press. Besides facing serious charges, Kontras has been forced to curtail its monitoring activities because local volunteers were not able to submit their findings about local atrocitices. Besides the dangers attached to monitoring incidents, they are also too scared to visit shops to fax their reports because of the proximity of the security forces.
Rare glimpse of Aceh's horrors by journalist
Press reports by domestic and foreign journalists direct from Aceh are infrequent nowadays because of a deliberate policy by the security forces to keep the press out. A recent exception was a report in two leading Australian newspapers by a journalist who visited the village of Ujung Reuba, 20 kms east of Lhokseumawe, North Aceh. A young woman, Zubaidad, 25, told him troops had burst into her house, demanding to know where her husband was. He was not at home, she told them, clutching her four-month baby boy. They snatched the baby from her, threw him on the ground outside and poured boiling water over him. Warned that if they left their hut, they would be killed, neither she nor her 15-year old sister dared to go outside to rescue the baby "as the soldiers went on a killing, looting and burning spree through the village". By the time the troops had left, it was too late to save the scolded baby who died next morning and lies buried in a shallow grave marked by a stone.
The village that was home to 385 villagers had been devastated by an attack 6 May. All the houses were burnt or trashed. The journalist, Lindsay Murdoch, no stranger to the murderous behaviour of Indonesian troops on his country's doorstep in East Timor, wrote: "The arrival of hundreds of fresh troops in Aceh has seen the military unleash a wave of largely unreported violence that in some areas is worse than the 1999 atrocities in East Timor. (The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 14 May 2001) Later that month, a Norwegian journalist, Torgeir Norling, thought he would follow up this account with an investigation of his own in North Aceh. When he arrived, with two Acehnese activists in Peudada, they were ordered off the bus, held at the local police station for 24 hours and then told to leave the area, "because they had no official documents". Norling reports widely for Scandinavian and East Asia newspapers. (The Nation – Bangkok, 27 May 2001) According to Dini Djalal, writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review (5 July), Acehnese journalists are routinely threatened and beaten by the police."Yarmen Dinamika, of the local newspaper Serambi, says his office was bombed twice and seven office cars set ablaze in the last two years." Commenting on army press releases that routinely identify civilians killed in crossfire, even children and the elderly, as "GAM members", Dinamika said: "In a conflict like this, the first victim is the truth."
NGOs forced to leave
Under intense pressure and facing constant threats or worse, many local activists have left Aceh for the relative safety of Jakarta or gone abroad. The International Crisis Group, in a special report on Aceh published in June, quoted a witness to the killing of three volunteers of the torture NGO, RATA, as saying that the killings were the work of intelligence operatives who told their victims: "Anyone who works for an NGO is GAM." Another rights activist was warned that the military only trusts half a dozen out of the 300 NGOs in Aceh. (Far Eastern Economic Review, 5 July 2001) On 26 June, the head office in Banda Aceh of an NGO devoted to protecting the interests of children, Yayasan Anak Bangsa, was raided in the night by heavily-armed members of the special police unit, Brimob, some of whom were wearing black T-shirts. A man guarding the premises was forced to open up all the rooms and watched helpless as the intruders ransacked cupboards and confiscated diskettes. They refused to believe that YAB focuses on the plight of children and wanted to know whether it was linked to the Henri Dunant Centre (which oversees the peace talks).
Three days earlier, the Banda Aceh office the Legal Aid Institute (LBH) was raided by unidentified men who destroyed a notice board on which were displayed photos of people who have been kidnapped by the security forces. (Tempo Interaktif 27 June 2001)
International presence crucial
It is widely acknowledged that international observers and the permanent presence of international humanitarian agencies are crucially important to overcome Aceh's isolation, to provide protection to human rights activists and to the population at large. But the intensity of military operations is causing some agencies to leave.
The decision by two UN agencies, the UNDP amd UNICEF, to leave Aceh is a serious setback because the presence of UN agencies is so critically important for Aceh. The UNDP says it decided to leave because the situation was "not conducive", following the collapse of the Humanitarian Pause agreement. OXFAM has an office in Lhokseumawe but conditions in North Aceh are too dangerous for it to venture beyond the city. A Peace Brigades International team of volunteers give what protection they can in several cities to targeted NGOs and activists.
In a letter to the British government in July, TAPOL called for UN monitors to visit Aceh, in particular the Special Rapporteurs on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary and Summary Excutions and on Torture, and the Special Representative on Human Rights Defenders.
Strong warning from Australia
In July, the Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer issued a strong warning to the Indonesian military not to commit the kind of human rights abuses that were seen in East Timor in the past, in West Papua and Aceh, because this could lead to outrage by the international comunity. Launching a government publication about East Timor, he said he was concerned over reports from Aceh that pro-Indonesian militias were being formed." If the TNI go down that path, they will be making an enormous mistake", he said. (AP, 17 July 2001)