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.