By James Balowski
Although military suppression of national liberation struggles in East Timor and West Papua are well known, equally violent incidents have occurred in the Indonesian province of Aceh, North Sumatra.
With the military coming under increasing domestic and international pressure over its involvement in the "disappearance" of democracy activists, and the riots and mass rapes of Chinese women in Jakarta in May, demands for an investigation into military abuses in Aceh, and troop withdrawals, are gaining momentum.
Designated as a "semi-autonomous zone" (a status the B.J. Habibie regime is trying to persuade the United Nations to accept for East Timor), Aceh is devoutly Muslim, rich in oil, minerals and timber, and has a long history of economic exploitation by Jakarta.
Support among Aceh's people for secession is widespread and in recent years this has led to a number of armed clashes between Indonesian troops and the "Free Aceh" separatist movement, GAM.
In 1980, Aceh was officially declared a military operational region (DOM), which gives the military almost unlimited powers to conduct house-to-house searches, roadblocks, ID checks and body searches.
A 1992 report by the US-based human rights organisation Asia Watch stated, "as many as 1000 may have died since mid-1989 in a combination of separatist guerrilla attacks and army reprisals, disappearances remain unresolved, suspected guerrillas continue to be shot on the spot rather than taken into custody, large numbers of people are believed to remain in unacknowledged detention and trials which violate international norms of fairness continued to take place".
Other sources have put the number of deaths at more than 2000, with hundreds tried and jailed for being alleged members of GAM. Thousands of others have been forced to flee to nearby Malaysia.
Since open conflict broke out in the late 1980s, Indonesia has consistently refused to allow international human rights organisations, including Red Cross International, into the region.
Testimony
Hundreds of people are now coming forward to testify. On July 29, for example, the Acehnese daily Serambi Indonesia said that a joint report by NGOs, the administration and the military found that the number of missing persons, victims of violence and discovery of corpses has now reached 1679. The newspaper said that on one day that week 359 cases were reported.
In response to the increasing number of reports of human rights abuses appearing in the mass media, fact-finding teams have been set up.
According to a July 28 report by the newspaper Waspada, Maimun Fidar from the Aceh NGO Forum said that an estimated 39,000 or more people had disappeared since 1989.
Fidar said his NGO had identified nine mass graves. The number of bodies in each ranged from 30 to 300. He said that most of the disappearances occurred in 1991 and 1992.
A member of a recently formed parliamentary fact-finding team was quoted in the newspaper Suara Karya as saying the team had seen thousands of skeletons in mass graves throughout Aceh and suspected that more than 5000 people were missing.
On July 28, the parliamentary team went to Aceh to hear the testimony of victims at the offices of the NGO WALHI. Around 1000 people, mostly widows and orphans of disappeared people attended the sessions.
Seventy-year-old Tengku Abdurrachman Ali described being tortured for three days and nights in early 1989 at the Kopassus command post in Gedong Aron after being arrested on charges of concealing arms.
Kopassus, the elite military command, receives training in Australia and is at the forefront of the occupation of East Timor. Kopassus troops have also been accused of killings in West Papua and implicated in the kidnapping and murder of democracy activists prior to President Suharto's resignation.
Ali said he was stripped naked, given electric shocks and then buried alive. When his captors pulled him out and realised he was still alive, he was shut up in a toilet for two hours with his hands and feet bound and was again given electric shocks.
He also told the team he had seen women being tortured and given electric shocks on their genitals, and that he had seen seven corpses being loaded on to a vehicle from the Kopassus command post, but did not know where they had been taken.
Rape
On July 29, the Straits Times said that NGOs had told the parliamentary team that hundreds of women had been raped over the past seven years.
Abdurrahman Yakub from the Aceh Legal Aid Foundation said 625 were women raped and tortured between 1990 and last year, and that many cases involved military personnel. One victim told the team, "I was stripped naked and given the electric shock treatment by Kopassus members".
A women identified only as CS told the team she had been detained in 1992, together with her husband. She said she was raped by three soldiers, after which she fainted. The next morning, she was kicked, then taken to a nearby river and told to wash herself.
Since her release she has not seen her husband and had been told that he was shot dead in public with his hands tied.
Another woman said she was arrested when troops came to her home looking for her husband and four children. She was stripped naked, tortured, bitten and burnt, and one of her hands was broken and permanently misshapen. When her family was later found by the military she was released but they were killed and buried in a mass grave.
A women named Khatijah told the mission that she was detained in February. She was beaten, tortured, stripped naked and subjected to other atrocities for 15 days.
In April she was again arrested after troops came to her house looking for weapons. Although none were found, she was not released until June. On one occasion she was held in Rancong, a notorious interrogation centre run by Kopassus.
Troop withdrawals
Calls for troop withdrawals and a lifting of the DOM status have intensified.
On July 30, students from Student Solidarity for Aceh visited the UN office in Jakarta to urge it to take up the Aceh case and press the government to take act. In a statement, they said the violence and arrests began in 1989, when DOM was introduced, all in the name of crushing GAM.
The group urged the UN to send a fact-finding mission to Aceh and to help secure the release of political prisoners, and called for Habibie to withdraw all troops from the region.
An August 1 report by the news agency Agence France Presse said that the governor of Aceh, Syamsuddin Mahmud, has officially requested the withdrawal of troops and a lifting of the DOM status.
The request was made in a July 29 letter to Habibie and other government officials. In the letter Mahmud said the DOM status had been abused by the military to commit "excesses" and that "if this situation continues, the Acehnese people will always be haunted by fear and insecurity".
On August 5, Reuters reported that a number of Indonesian legislators have called for the withdrawal of troops and for an end to military operations in Aceh. The paper quoted the head of a parliamentary fact-finding team on Aceh, Teuku Syahrul, as saying, "Military operations in Aceh should be terminated because there have been a number of cases of cruel treatment, looting and killing".