Copyright © The American Reporter, July 19, 1999
ARMY MASSACRE SPURS INDONESIA'S LATEST INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT
by Andreas Harsono
American Reporter Correspondent
Jakarta, Indonesia
JAKARTA -- When talking about the Indonesian media's election coverage at a recent Jakarta seminar, editor A. Atmadi of the Medan-based Waspada daily took a different tack from most of the edirors present. "The election did not take the interest of our readers," Atmadi said. "Our circulation only increased if the headlines were about Aceh."
The potbellied editor was right. His home base, Medan, the provincial capital of northern Sumatra, is the Indonesian city closest to the troubled but natural-resource-rich area of Aceh, a province on the northern tip of Sumatra across the strategic Straits of Malacca from the island nation of Singapore and the neighboring Malaysian archipelago.
More than 80,000 people have fled violence between Indonesian soldiers and Acehnese guerillas of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) after the soldiers shot dead an estimated 40 civilian protesters to death on May 3 and subsequent clashes and ambushes that have left more than 100 dead and hundreds of buildings torched.
"Our position is difficult. Most of the times the soldiers intimidated our reporters. But once our delivery van was stopped by the guerillas. They burned 7,000 copies of the daily and asked us to pick up the van in the jungle," said Atmadi, adding that the guerillas finally asked only that the newspaper publish their press releases.
Atmadi's difficulties are only a small part of the many difficult questions facing today's Aceh.
The Aceh movement has been fighting for an independent Islamic state since the 1970s. The authoritarian Suharto regime answered the resentment with a harsh military response in 1989, and ever since has been linked to widespread abuses, rapes of Acehnese women and human rights violations.
Suharto's successor, President B.J. Habibie, only ended the status of Aceh as a military operational zone in mid-August of last year, just a few months after Suharto was forced to step down amid a nationwide popular protest.
Habibie pledged that past abuses would be investigated -- and the perpetrators brought to justice -- during a visit to Aceh in March. But not a single soldier -- whose names were widely distributed after Acehnese charged them with killings, beatings and rapes -- has been arrested to this day.
This apparent absence of justice has deeply angered the Acehnese. Aceh fighters fought the longest and the most brutal war against their Dutch colonial ruler in the 18th and 19th Century, and Aceh's people have always been proud of being the bravest in Indonesia.
But Acehnese find it difficult to maintain their dignity nowadays. "I am sad," said Aceh Governor Syamsuddin Mahmud, who consistently argues that Aceh needs a "humanitarian approach" rather than the the thousands of soldiers who arrived in the area soon after the May 3 massacre.
Meanwhile, human rights groups and student organizations are demanding that Habibie and Gen. Wiranto, the commander of the Indonesian armed forces, withdraw the soldiers to encourage the refugees to return to their respective villages.
Syamsuddin, a former lecturer at the Syiah Kuala University in Aceh, earned the respect of many, especially students, when he came out in support of their call for a referendum on self-determination and greater autonomy from the central government last year.
"I am so sad to see the situation," the governor said. "This is beyond human resilience. There's a disregard of the fate of the children and the elderly. Now their condition is declining fast ... some even have died," Syamsuddin told The American Reporter. But, he says, his call for change has never been taken seriously by Jakarta.
That may be because Habibie and Wiranto are absorbed with other business. The nation has just finished counting the ballots in the June parliamentarian election and is preparing to help organize a UN-sponsored referendum in East Timor, a former Portuguese colony occupied by Indonesia in 1975. That could bring the focus back to Aceh once again.
"If East Timor breaks away, it will have an impact on the situation in Aceh, unless the government starts to get its act together," said Marzuki Darusman of Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights. Indonesia is letting the internationally disputed East Timor to hold a vote on independence next month.
"We used to think that this [Aceh] was a completely separate question" from that of East Timor, Darusman said. "But we are looking at a different situation at this moment because of the slowness of the government in settling the Aceh problem," he said.
Many people would likely endorse Darusman's belief that the majority of Aceh people basically dislike the idea of separating from Indonesia. But things are getting worse because of the deployment of military forces to silence the Aceh fighters, who are also a minority in the area, he said.
"I think the supporters of Hasan Tiro [the Aceh independence movement's leader] are only a small group. But the ones who create the most uproar are those with arms... They are in guerrilla groups. A very small force, and divided as well," Syamsuddin said, referring to M. Teungku Hasan Tiro, the Sweden-based leader of the Free Aceh Movement.
In fact, a former Indonesian armed forces commander in the area once estimated the number of Aceh fighters at just 54 guerillas "equipped with 48 firearms," but other observers set the number higher. "In Libya, he trained his troops of some 500 personnel," said Aboe Mansoer, an aide to a former governor of Aceh. Tiro, a onetime teacher in the United States, travelled through Scandinavia before settling in Libya for an extended period before returning to Sweden, Mansoer said. A guerilla who led an attack on an Army outpost in May, 1990, was trained in Libya, too, ABRI officials say. Libya has historically aided Muslim insurgents throughout Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, student fact-finding groups have charged that soldiers shot unarmed villagers in the back during engagements with guerrillas in rural areas, and The Committee of Aceh Student Reform Action said it has recorded 30,000 cases of human rights violations by the military.
The question of Aceh may be raised in a more constructive atmosphere if the Habibie government, whose party lost in the June election, gives way to a new government of opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, who is a strong nationalist. But that doesn't mean Megawati, whose candidacy was intensely opposed by several large and influential Muslim groups, will find it easy to answer.
Andreas Harsono, an American Reporter Correspondent in Southeast Asia since May, 1995, has recently been named a 1999-2000 Nieman Fellow in International Journalism.
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Paul Barber
TAPOL, the Indonesia Human Rights Campaign,
25 Plovers Way, Alton Hampshire GU34 2JJ
Tel/Fax: 1420 80153
Email: plovers@gn.apc.org
Internet: www.gn.apc.org/tapol
Defending victims of oppression in Indonesia,
East Timor, West Papua and Aceh, 1973-1999
26 Years...and still going strong!
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