No sign of peace in Aceh amid bombings and hostage drama
[Crescent International, June 16-30, 2000.]
As religious tensions and killings continue in the islands of Maluku, a wave of mysterious violence has hit several towns in Sumatra. In Medan city three bombs were found in churches, with 23 people injured when one of them exploded on May 28. Ten more explosions rocked Banda Aceh, capital of Aceh, on June 1.
Although the bombings are said to be linked with the spate of mob killings in Maluku, the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), which signed a truce with Jakarta calling for a humanitarian pause in Geneva last month, warned that the bombings could be yet another attempt by the Indonesian military to lay blame on Muslims, especially Aceh freedom-fighters, and could be used as a pretext to suspend any impending peace talks for the future of Aceh.
Provocations of racial and religious tensions are a favourite tactic of the Javanese-dominated military. The military, which has more say in policy than the ‘civilian’ president, Abdurrahman Wahid, has always exploited ethnic strife. Hasballah Saad, Indonesian minister for human rights, has said that there is no guarantee the truce will be fully respected, saying that there are "components which have so far been hard to control". He was careful not to accuse anyone of responsibility for the violence, to avoid annoying either the military ranks or the Aceh fighters.
Even before the truce was signed on May 12, the Jakarta regime had made clear that it would not "compromise" with the Acehnese. If the truce (which supposedly came into effect on June 2) really ends the fighting, the next step will be for Jakarta to engage in dialogue with the Acehnese, a move it sees as humiliating.
The spate of bombings also comes in the wake of a hostage drama involving workers at the Exxon-Mobil gas exploration facilities in east Aceh. On May 27, several armed men occupied its gas field, threatening to blow it up unless given a ransom. The drama ended when GAM fighters launched an operation to free the workers, and warned that the incident could be an attempt to ruin the ceasefire agreement with Jakarta as a pretext to deploy more troops in the province. Taking of hostages has never been used by GAM as a strategy, and so the incident suggests that the hostage-takers were not Aceh fighters, who have been waging a jihad to free this North Sumatran Muslim stronghold from Jakarta’s control.
Nevertheless, the locals’ resentment against the American oil companies does exist. Indeed oil-rich Aceh, which provides one third of Indonesia’s total oil and gas exports, has long been exploited by Jakarta through American multinationals. Mobil, for example, owns 35 percent of P. T. Arun, a natural-gas producer in Aceh; Pertamina, Indonesia’s state-owned oil monopoly, holds the controlling 55-percent stake.
American oil companies have even been caught working with the Suharto regime in its atrocities against the Acehnese. Two years ago, in an exclusive report following the downfall of Suharto, Business Week revealed that mass graves had been found near Mobil’s drilling site. Hundreds of bodies of people who had been tortured and killed by the military were exhumed from a dozen graves, confirming a decade of rumours about the disappearance of Acehnese dissidents near the site.
In October 1998, a coalition of 17 Indonesian human rights organisations accused Mobil of human rights abuses by providing logistic support to the Indonesian army, including earth-moving equipment that was used to dig mass graves. One local farmer, Yusuf Kasim, interviewed by Business Week, said that the army paid him US$4 a night to stand guard over a borrowed excavator and prevent anyone from siphoning fuel from its tank. He reported that he watched soldiers execute between 60 and 70 blindfolded men at a time with M-16 rifles, shooting them in the back so that they tumbled into a mass grave across a paddy field from his house.
In addition, Mobil has been accused of providing facilities for the military’s "Post 13", notorious for its use of torture in the interrogation of Acehnese dissidents. Mobil has also been accused of causing ecological damage to the region. Forced relocations, oil extraction and industrial spills into rivers and sea, as well as extreme noise pollution have devastated local communities who depend on agriculture and fish farming. Several gas explosions have also added to their sufferings: in December 1997, some 1,600 people were displaced after three natural gas wells erupted, spewing tonnes of mud over their villages in Tanjungkarang.
GAM has recently asked the multinationals exploring Aceh’s rich oil reserves to be more responsible, noting that local residents have been denied employment. Aceh has hardly benefited from exploitation of its huge oil reserves by Jakarta: in Lhokseumawe, it is reported that 60 percent of fishermen were living below the poverty line because of environmental damage caused by indiscriminate oil exploration in their area.
More recently, since the fall of Suharto, Mobil and other multinationals, driven by their greed for Aceh’s natural resources, have attempted a "balancing act" between working for the government and appearing to be sympathetic to the Aceh fighters. This they see as important in case Aceh succeeds in gaining independence. This is why GAM appears to be the least likely culprit in the recent hostage-taking. By blaming such an incident on the "rebels", Jakarta hopes to reinforce the view that the company’s best interests lie with the government.
While the truce signed by GAM and Jakarta will benefit the people of Aceh, at least by minimising the violence in their daily lives, Jakarta has every reason to be worried that the truce might work in the end.