Bringing an end to Aceh's saga of sadness

Bringing an end to Aceh's saga of sadness

This is the first of a two-part article based on a year-end
evaluation of conditions in Aceh by Saifuddin Bantasyam,
executive director of the Care for Human Rights Forum (FPHAM),
one of several private groups monitoring human rights in the
province.

BANDA ACEH (JP): People say the year 2,000 will be decisive
for us as a nation and state. Acehnese in particular waited
fervently for the New Year, hoping things would be better. When
we enter a new year, we do not necessarily make a clean break
with the past. Wise men say that experience is the best teacher.

Part of this experience were the human rights conditions in
Aceh. At the end of the year, the Care for Human Rights Forum
(FPHAM) evaluated these conditions, mainly with regard to 1999.

Set up on July 17, 1998, the forum collected data from field
investigations and first hand accounts, including from
individuals reporting to the forum's office and media reports.

The data, much of which has been published, comprised victims
of military operations and victims after the operations were
formally ended, up to December 22.

The military operation (DOM) status for Aceh, which began in
1989, was officially lifted by the government when then minister
of defense and security/Indonesian Military chief Gen. Wiranto,
came to Lhokseumawe, North Aceh, on Aug. 7 1998. Then and now,
Acehnese, and even the world community, demanded that the
responsible parties be tried; what happened during the military
era was inconceivable, both in quantity and the nature of rights
violations.

From late July to mid November 1998, FPHAM volunteers
conducted investigations in Pidie, North and East Aceh regencies,
the areas within the DOM status.

The data revealed 1,321 killed, 1,985 missing, 3,439 tortured,
128 raped, 81 sexually assaulted, 597 houses burned, 938 cases of
looted gold and 16,375 children who were orphaned.

The independent inquiry team on Aceh, formed under B.J.
Habibie's government, has revealed that at least five cases could
immediately go to trial, including the tortures at the "slaughter
house" in Pidie between 1997 and 1998 and the fatal shooting of
Islamic boarding school leader Tengku Bantaqiah and members of
his community in Beutong Ateuh, West Aceh in July 1999.

But none of the cases revealed have ever been brought to court
-- despite the government's pledge to set up a court with a joint
panel of civil and military judges.

During 1999, the Indonesian Military (TNI) assumed a
nonchalant attitude toward any allegation and probe into rights
violations involving their personnel. Gen. Wiranto, for instance,
disregarded the substance of investigations by the National
Commission on Human Rights in Pidie and North Aceh last year.

The recent hearing at the House of Representatives with a
number of army generals and the former Aceh governor about the
military operations there degenerated into an anticlimax of
attempts to hold TNI accountable for the tragedies.

TNI's nonchalant attitude was also reflected in the wake of
investigations by KPP HAM, the government-sponsored independent
inquiry into the violence in East Timor. The efforts have been
taken by TNI as an attempt to corner them, while members of the
National Commission on Human Rights have been suspected of
lacking nationalism.

Later it was asserted that efforts to take army generals to
court would fuel soldiers' anger. And so, our dream of seeing a
demonstration of the military's gallantry and responsibility to
the state, and equality before the law, has become even more
distant. The government still tends to apply repressive and
discriminative laws, forgetting laws imbued with a sense of
justice.

One implication of all this is that the institutionalization
of impunity in human rights violation cases in Aceh has become
all the more obvious.

Every effort to enforce human rights and or investigations
into human rights violations has been met with the simplifying of
problems, or the shifting of public attention for political
purposes.

Amid demands voiced by the Acehnese for a referendum of self-
determination, which expresses democracy and demands of human
rights, the government must stick to pursuing a legal process
against rights violators. Otherwise the state will continue to
become a party to human rights violation with impunity.