The spectre of past human rights abuses in East Timor and West Papua haunts the people of Aceh, where the Indonesian armed forces have begun attacking and murdering civilians as part of its crackdown on pro-independence fighters. John Martinkus, who risked his life in entering the rebellious province, details a disturbing but all-too-familiar picture of military atrocities.
A convoy of 25 military trucks headed in to Aceh with the drivers draping their bullet-proof vests at head height from the side windows as protection against snipers. The minibus I was travelling in followed them across the border without being stopped. Lines of vehicles stretched back on the outgoing side of the highway, and soldiers prevented anyone leaving the vehicles before they had been searched. Some ordered people out of the vehicles to check their identity cards, while others emptied the contents of the minibuses and cars onto the road.
In this kind of situation, it only takes one shout from an overzealous soldier to find yourself being interrogated. Sure enough, there he was, a Javanese sergeant standing by the side of the road peering in to the passing vehicles. Luckily, the convoy accelerated and the minibus followed, and I just glimpsed the shock on his face at seeing what he thought might have been a foreigner go by. I was trying to get in to Aceh on the only route left open, the main highway, which runs 500km through the province's major towns to the capital Banda Aceh. It is along this highway that the heaviest fighting is taking place, as the Indonesian operation to wipe out the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) enters its sixth week.
A few days before, I had been queueing for a flight to Banda Aceh when I was approached by two plainclothes policemen. They produced ID and demanded to see my papers. I was travelling on a journalist visa but my issued press card said: "Not for Aceh." The police told me I would be jailed for five years if I boarded the aircraft.
Now past the border, I kept thinking of the Tasmanian-based academic Lesley McCulloch, who had been jailed for five months last year for being in a rebel area of Aceh on a tourist visa. I attended her trial in Banda Aceh in December, when they were trying to charge her with espionage, and the lies and distortions presented by the prosecution were terrifying. But with the province of 4.5 million -people under martial law, sealed off from the rest of the country by roadblocks, and with a 19km coastal exclusion zone and monitored airports, the chances of working undetected were slim.
Ever since their operation to wipe out an estimated 5000 heavily armed GAM fighters began on May 19, the Indonesian government and military has done all it can to keep foreign journalists out.
Initially, reporters were welcomed by the military, which set up a media centre in the resource-rich town of Lhok-seumahwe that also serves as the operation's command base. Foreign and local reporters were treated to daily briefings, complete with maps and details of the deployment of 50,000 soldiers and police to the province at the northern tip of Sumatra.
However, once foreign media began to report mounting civilian deaths, the relationship quickly soured and, just like in East Timor, the military wanted them out. Foreign reporters were threatened and their cars shot at. Not surprisingly, most chose to leave. The last two, Malaysians, were thrown out.
One journalist, William Nessen, an American freelancer, has been with GAM during the whole operation but generally has been unable to file. He is now trying to leave. Journalists not based in Indonesia are either not granted visas or are forbidden to visit Aceh, while resident journalists are told they need special permission – rarely granted – to go to Aceh.
The rows of shops and houses in the town of Langsa, 30km inside Aceh, look like rundown parts of old Singapore. Indonesian flags hang from every building, while banners draped across the main streets exhort citizens to be vigilant against GAM and declare goodwill to the populace. Most shops are closed and, as it gets dark, few people venture onto the street. In the market, a man who sells me food is shaking like a leaf and glances behind me. A truck full of soldiers has stopped. I quickly walk the other way, out of the light.
Acehnese men in a coffee shop tell how the road further north is blocked and there has been a lot of fighting. They talk openly about how the Indonesians here are scared of GAM and that this operation will not destroy the rebels. "We have been living like this, with the military here, for years. This is no different from DOM," said one, referring to the 1989 to 1998 period when Aceh was declared a military operation area and closed to foreigners by then president Suharto. An estimated 10,000 Acehnese died then and mass graves were exhumed shortly after Suharto fell. The men laugh about the military and remove the Indonesian flag from the front of the building but none will give their names.
Arrests and interrogations in Langsa have become commonplace. GAM attacked the Brimob (paramilitary police) office on the operation's first day and five people were arrested. Two human rights workers were arrested and beaten and an unspecified number of people have been detained at the roadblocks on both sides of the town as they try to flee the province.
Langsa is near where serious fighting is taking place. It is fortunate to still have power. All the towns to the north were without power for at least two weeks, following the toppling of four pylons by unidentified groups. The military blames GAM and GAM blames the military. However, the fact is that the military has generators and GAM does not, and the blackout has seriously affected the rebels' ability to communicate with the outside world and each other.
Nevertheless, information is coming out in bits and pieces. GAM is trying to report the fighting with the Indonesian military (TNI) as it happens. On June 16, GAM reported it was being attacked by British-made Hawk fighter aircraft and US-supplied OV-10 Bronco ground-attack aircraft. The details are specific.
Ten bombs at 2:36pm in Jambo Aye and Baktiy districts dropped by two Hawks and two Broncos. It is this area, 90km east of Lhokseumahwe, where the TNI claims the GAM leadership is based.
It wasn't the first GAM report of Indonesians bombing villages.
In addition, GAM has detailed daily incidents of civilian killings that have not been reported in the Indonesian press, which is banned from carrying its statements. Since the conflict began, GAM has been issuing field reports, listing the daily firefights between GAM and TNI: generally, there are three a day in which either TNI troops are ambushed or GAM-held villages are attacked.
The picture that emerges is of a civilian population treated as brutally as if they were combatants, with beatings and disappearances common. Until June 13, GAM had listed and named 68 civilians executed by the military and more than 32 beaten and arrested. In one incident, a 37-year-old woman was reportedly held by the military for two days and gang raped. The area covered in the reports has shrunk dramatically to cover only northern Aceh, demonstrating how GAM's communications have broken down.
On June 10, GAM reported that 40 villagers had been taken away by army trucks from the village of Gampong M4 in northern Aceh. The report stated that on June 8 four were found dead in nearby villages with their heads removed, that on June 10 six more headless corpses from the same group were found and that the other 30 were still missing. On the same day, GAM reported a further two men arrested and decapitated, with their bodies found in the same area.
As demonstrated previously in East Timor and West Papua, the dumping of its victims' mutilated bodies in public places is a common army tactic for instilling fear in populations in rebel areas. It is usually done to force them to flee to a government- controlled area and end their support for the guerillas. Thus the TNI's studiously updated GAM bodycount, which at the time of writing was 204.
The same Indonesian officers who served in East Timor are in charge of the Aceh operation and, despite statements by the commander, Brigadier-General Bambang Dumarno, regarding respect for human rights, they do not apply to anyone associated with GAM, even if they just live in the area of operations. It was the foreign-educated Dumarno who was infuriated with the reports by the foreign press in the early stages of the operation.
GAM admitted to attacking a Brimob post near the village of Alue le Mirah in northern Aceh on June 11. A road was blocked by the military, leaving the civilians with the choice of going over to the Indonesian side, to be rounded up and taken to the TNI-run refugee camp in Bireuen, or to flee to the countryside and face air attacks. It is a replication of the "strategic hamlets" tactics the US employed in the Vietnam War, then copied by the Indonesians in East Timor in 1978 and 1979, when they encircled Falintil guerillas in the mountains and drove the population to the coast using the same Hawk and Bronco aircraft. The day after, GAM reported six of its people and 10 civilians killed, then on June 13 reported that Hawk jets had flown two sorties over the area of Gandapura in northern Aceh, strafing and bombing civilians.
On June 15, residents of Juli sub-district faced air attacks after 17,000 of them fled to the Cot Gapu football field in Bireuen. Images of the refugees in tents on the open field have been widely screened in Indonesia. But they are portrayed as victims fleeing violence from GAM. The fact the camp was set up before the people became refugees and the roads were blocked, preventing their return, escapes most Indonesian reports. Also ignored is the fact that villages are, according to GAM, looted and sometimes burnt by the military.
GAM says 8000 more residents of the area are still in the hills and face air attacks that GAM says have already killed 250 people. Earlier, GAM spokesman Sofyan Daud claimed at least 400 civilians had been killed throughout Aceh since the operation began, excluding those who died in the air attacks of the past week.
The air attacks have been well covered in the Indonesian media but without mention of civilian casualties. The military claims it has so far killed 204 GAM members and lost 28 police and military, with 63 police and TNI wounded. On June 18, the Indonesian Red Cross announced it had removed 194 "bodies in civilian clothes" from the areas where there has been fighting.
Indonesia's military chief, General Endriartono Sutarto, told reporters in Jakarta last week that "the jet-fighter deployment was merely aimed to show the community that TNI is more powerful than GAM rebels", adding he had no objection to their use as long as they didn't attack civilians. The air force also admitted in The Jakarta Post it had begun using F-16s, the most sophisticated weapon it possesses.
On June 18, The Bulletin received a final message from the GAM spokesman in northern Aceh. "The escalation of violence here is getting worse by the hour," he wrote from the area where air attacks were continuing. "Many civilians killed by TNI in the last three days. TNI force civil society to become refugees." It was in the same area of northern Aceh that Indonesia's National Com-mission of Human Rights, Komnas Ham, claimed to have information about a mass grave containing "dozens" of victims of the latest offensive. It also detailed summary executions of civilians. The commission is facing threats and criticism from Indonesia's military and government regarding the revelations.
Northern Aceh always has been a GAM stronghold. It was where exiled leader Hasan Cik di Tiro secretly returned from overseas in 1976 to declare independence and reignite a sentiment that had existed since Acehnese fought a 30-year war against Dutch occupation at the turn of the previous century. Last December, when The Bulletin visited GAM camps in the area, the rebels were well armed and seemed to have the support of nearby villagers.
Many of those villagers recounted past TNI abuses, including rape, extortion, arrest and execution, and said they felt safe with GAM.
On the Indonesian government's figures, some 358 of 390 villages in northern Aceh have had no functioning government. Even with the highest concentration of troops of any region in Aceh, the government can not claim control. It is no coincidence that the oil- and gas-rich regions adjacent to the Exxon Mobil gas fields in Lhokseumahwe and Bireuen contained nearly 40% of all TNI and police forces in Aceh's 16 regencies. Exxon Mobil is the second- highest foreign source of tax revenue for the Indonesian government. They are the areas under intense attack by the TNI and where the reports of civilian deaths are mostly coming from.
These are also the areas that it is impossible to enter without authorisation.
All previous ways of getting information out of Aceh are being shut down. The situation for NGO workers, who would normally investigate abuses, is precarious. On June 9, six people from the Centre for Human Rights and the Indonesian Red Cross were arrested in the capital for alleged links with GAM. Another six were arrested in Langsa.
"My office was raided by the police on May 27," says Feisal Hadi, co-ordinator of the Aceh NGO coalition for human rights. "They suspect GAM members are hiding here so they came three times in one day and took away three staff and the office boy and interrogated them for 12 hours. I cannot send my people out; it is too dangerous for them." He says that of the six regional offices in his organisation, most are out of contact due to the power cuts. "I haven't heard from them for almost two weeks." All he can do is help those who provide details of relatives' arrests or disappearances and try to make inquiries with the authorities.
"So far in Banda Aceh we have received information of 29 civilians killed, seven arrested and 24 missing," he says.
Abdi Dalem, director of the Indonesian legal aid service LBH in Banda Aceh, says: "Before we used to work in the whole of Aceh but [under martial law] we cannot travel outside of the capital.
It is not safe. I am a lawyer who used to defend GAM clients. Now they are arresting everybody with connections to GAM." There are 108 GAM detainees in Banda Aceh, including the five members of the GAM negotiating team who were trying to extend the cease-fire when the operation began. Only 12 foreign NGO workers remain in Banda Aceh, defying Indonesian government calls to leave the province. None has travelled outside of the capital since the operation began. The brokers of the failed peace accord, the Swiss-based Henry Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, have all left.
The military has strict regulations for Indonesian journalists covering the war. They are not permitted to publish GAM statements. Some 54 reporters who are "embedded" with TNI troops are ordered to report "patriotically". Some networks have enthusiastically embraced the war; national broadcaster SCTV sacked one of its producers last week after he conducted an interview with a prominent Acehnese poet who promoted peace. The interview was not broadcast.
In Langsa, I sat in a cockroach-filled upstairs room watching the street through broken louvres. At 10pm, the power went and the heat became oppressive. An insistent knocking at the door at 11pm revealed the police had found me. They told me they would be back in the morning after I pretended not to understand them. I left before they came.
A few kilometres out of town military vehicles clogged the road.
The soldiers were putting on body armour and pulling down the metal shutters welded over the windows of their trucks. Civilians waited patiently in a long line of buses and trucks as each vehicle was searched and identities checked. Locals told me they would be going through four other checks like this before Lhokseumahwe, then the road to Banda Aceh was more or less permanently closed to traffic.
Without the right papers, I didn't think I'd make it to Medan, and with the soldiers so jumpy I thought I might have an "accident" like the one that killed a German tourist with six shots to his head and chest two weeks before. Conveniently for the military, his death provided a pretence to ban foreigners from the province.
There were no more roadblocks until the border, where all passengers had to get out. My passport was checked and handed back. The soldier said: "As long as you are not American. We are looking for an American. If you are American, I kill you." A bad joke, he was referring to William Nessen.
Relieved, I wound down the window to get some air. Travelling back into northern Sumatra, I saw groups of armed men in civilian clothes checking houses. Military and police trucks were everywhere and troops were searching through the scrub and in the trees for the next 2km. The operation against GAM doesn't stop at the border. According to Indonesian reports, at least eight GAM members have been caught in the north Sumatran capital Medan in the past four weeks. GAM suspects also have been arrested as far away as Jakarta, Riau, and West Java.
In Jakarta, residents have been asked to watch the activities of Acehnese neighbours. The Indonesian state is doing everything it can internationally and domestically to wipe out GAM, seal off the province and cover up the operation's details. If the Indonesian military learnt one thing from East Timor, it is that information is dangerous.