Aid, prayers better than traveling to Palestine: Hamzah
Aid, prayers better than traveling to Palestine: Hamzah
Fabiola Desi Unidjaja and Rendi A. Witular, The Jakarta Post,
Jakarta
Vice President Hamzah Haz said on Friday that the government
would neither prevent nor facilitate the deployment of Indonesian
volunteer fighters to war-ravaged Palestine.
Briefing the press after Friday prayers, Hamzah emphasized
that there was no urgent need for Indonesians to physically go to
the conflict-torn area.
"If people want to sign up as fighters for Palestine, go
ahead ... but it would be more effective if we provide
humanitarian aid and prayer," Hamzah told journalists here on
Friday.
Angered by Israel's siege of the headquarters of Palestinian
President Yasser Arafat, some radical religious groups, including
the Islam Defenders' Front (FPI), have started recruiting young
Indonesian volunteers to fight alongside Palestinians against the
invading Israeli troops.
Over 300 volunteers have reportedly registered and are
currently undergoing training at a number of undisclosed training
camps in the country.
According to Hamzah, however, the Palestinians did not need
fighters from Indonesia.
"The Palestinian representative here said they do not need us
to go there," said Hamzah, who is the chairman of the Muslim-
based United Development Party (PPP).
"Of course not," the Vice President said when asked if the
government would help deploy Indonesian volunteer fighters to
Palestine.
Hamzah said the best Indonesia could do was to provide
Palestinians with aid and to pray for them.
According to Hamzah, the most important thing for Indonesia
was for the people here to maintain peace and order in the
country.
Separately, foreign ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa said
on Friday that Indonesia, together with other members of the
Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), had called for a
United Nations special session in Geneva to discuss a resolution
on the human rights abuses that had occurred during the Israeli
military attack on the Palestinian territories.
"We want a special session to be held that will issue a
resolution mandating the UN to send a special team on human
rights to Palestine as the number of human rights abuses in the
area is growing," Marty said.
Indonesia continued to view a two-way effort through the
United Nations in New York and Geneva as being the best measures
to take for the time being in handling the fast-changing
situation in the Middle East.
"It would be wise if the support was expressed through
humanitarian aid, not by sending people to Palestine," Marty said
during a weekly press briefing.
Earlier, the government had urged the United Nations Security
Council to immediately take concrete steps to deal with the
Middle East crisis and deploy international security forces to
enforce peace and ensure the implementation of all UN resolutions
on the issue.
"We welcome the issuance of Security Council Resolution No.
1403 on the withdrawal of Israeli troops, but we still would like
to see more concrete measures to ensure the implementation of the
resolutions," he remarked.
The efforts to bring Israel and Palestine back to the
negotiating table have stalled as both sides are sticking firmly
to their respective positions.
Israel insists that Arafat has to stop all suicide bombings
against Israeli targets before negotiations can resume, while the
Palestinian leader is pushing that the issues of Palestinian land
and statehood, including the Jewish settlements on the West Bank,
be part of the negotiations before they can think of stopping the
suicide attacks.
Experts have said that the Indonesian government had done
enough and at this juncture, it would be wiser to send
humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.
"At this point we do not have any real power to provide input.
It is up to the UN and the United States. We have been extremely
strong as regards the diplomatic steps, and now it would be wiser
for us to provide humanitarian aid," political observer Juwono
Sudarsono told The Jakarta Post.
Meanwhile, some 1,000 protesters from the Indonesian Muslim
Students' Action Group (KAMMI), along with other Muslim student
groups, staged a rally in front of the United States' Embassy in
Jakarta on Friday, condemning Israel's military offensive against
Palestine.
The protest turned ugly when at 5:15 p.m., the students
clashed with police personnel as they forced their way up to the
front gate of the U.S. Embassy on Jl. Merdeka Selatan, Central
Jakarta. Police personnel were seen beating some 20 students but
no one was seriously injured.
Before the scuffles erupted, the protesters had burned a tire
on the street, and then threw eggs, rotten vegetables and dirt
into the embassy compound.
The students commenced their rally at the United Nations
office on Jl. M.H. Thamrin, Central Jakarta, at 2:30 p.m., where
they raised the Israeli flag and covered it with cow excrement
before burning it.