Andrew Marshall – Of all the hardware currently deployed in Aceh, US-supplied bombers, British-made jets, tanks, armored troop carriers, assault helicopters, warships" it was a slate-gray Japanese sedan that unnerved us journalists the most.
The car bore a large sign reading "Press," yet it carried several uniformed men with guns. Who were they? Rebels of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM)? Not likely: the car was spotted several times in broad daylight in areas controlled by the Indonesian military (TNI).
More likely, we thought, the passengers were soldiers deliberately misusing press stickers to besmirch our independent and noncombatant status, and to draw us into the line of fire by making vehicles carrying journalists legitimate targets of either GAM or the TNI.
It worked. By the end of the campaign's first week, at least seven real press vehicles had to brave a hail of bullets. Then, as journalists began to report on the mounting military atrocities against civilians, several reporters – Indonesian and foreigns – were interrogated by the police or army, and at least three received death threats.
The 54 Indonesian journalists "embedded" with various TNI units fared no better. They arrived in Aceh frightened, partly because they wore military uniforms and were indistinguishable from the troops and partly because their military keepers had told them GAM knew all of their names and intended to assassinate them.
Foolishly, I had assumed the presence of embeds might curb the worst excesses of the troops. Fat chance. Two embed teams have witnessed TNI atrocities and been warned – in one case, on pain of death – not to report them. "Before, the embeds were afraid of GAM," says an Indonesian colleague in Lhokseumawe in northern Aceh. "Now, they're more afraid of the TNI".
The brutal, unchecked crackdown in Aceh is transporting Indonesia back to the dark days of the Suharto dictatorship, exposing the military's reformist claims of recent years as a sham. With the Aceh campaign entering its third week, TNI's strategy – if that's the word – is shockingly clear. First, saturate the benighted countryside with trigger-happy soldiers and flush out any GAM suspects on a tsunami of civilian blood. Second, frighten into silence anyone who dares to report on the gory consequences, such as the summary execution of eight young men and boys at Peusangan in northern Bireun district.
The Indonesian government has told foreign journalists and aid workers to stay out of the province, because it does not want Aceh's plight to be internationalized as East Timor's was. But reporters are not the only ones who have been intimidated.
Fearful of reprisals from men in uniform, morgue workers in Aceh now write "loss of blood" as the cause of death on corpses delivered with execution-style head wounds.
Meanwhile, in Jakarta, the office of leading human-rights activist Munir, one of the lone voices against the campaign, was trashed by Pemuda Panca Marga, a military-backed youth group that most people associated with the Suharto regime and assumed had died with it. The upshot of all this: nobody really knows what's going on in Aceh anymore.
But then nobody really wants to know. Polls show the majority of Indonesians support the conflict – which the military has successfully portrayed as a noble battle for national unity rather than, as an Acehnese friend described to me from hiding, a ruthless campaign against a single ethnic group.
The reaction overseas has been similarly muted. So far, protests from abroad have been pro forma or nonexistent or, in the case of Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer, who wholeheartedly threw his support behind the Aceh campaign only days after the Peusangan massacre, bordering on cold hearted.
The US is too anxious to maintain good relations with its war-on-terror allies to do anything but urge the TNI to make its soldiers' actions more transparent, a plea the TNI notes and then ignores – as the US allows it to do. If anything does disrupt US-Indonesia relations, it will not be Acehnese blood but that of two American teachers murdered in Papua last August, possibly by the military.
With GAM now almost irrelevant to Aceh's future and without anyone – Jakarta, the media, activists, aid workers, foreign governments – to bear witness, the military has been free to launch what many Acehnese feel is the endgame for their people. Part of this includes the replacement of the province's 114 subdistrict chiefs with retired soldiers, which would give the military a stranglehold over the province and allow the uninterrupted plunder of natural resources such as timber.
It is a future the generals would wish upon other parts of resource-rich Indonesia – for example, restive Papua province – and one that appears inevitable considering the lack of protest or even debate over their blood-soaked Aceh adventure.