Military reports more deaths of civilian in NAD province
Military reports more deaths of civilian in NAD province
Agence-France Presse, Banda Aceh/Jakarta
The Indonesian military (TNI) reported on Thursday that 14 people died in the war-torn Aceh province this week, seven of them were villagers massacred by separatist rebels.
More than 20 members of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) shot dead the seven residents of Gunung Semelit village in Central Aceh on Tuesday, said spokesman of the Aceh military operation, Lt. Col. Ahmad Yani Basuki.
He said the rebels seized the villagers' ID cards and fled to a nearby mountainous area. GAM denied the report.
"It is impossible that the shooting was carried out by us, because none of our troops were operating in the village on that day and we have no reason to shoot innocent villagers," spokesman Sofyan Daud told AFP in Jakarta by phone.
Yani also said residents found the bodies of a husband and wife bearing gunshot and knife wounds at Peureulak in East Aceh on Wednesday.
A male corpse bearing severe torture marks was found floating on a river in Bireuen district the same day.
Troops on Wednesday shot dead a rebel at Lhoksukon in North Aceh and gunned down another one in the Paya Udang area of Aceh Tamiang district, Yani said.
Also on Wednesday, soldiers shot dead a rebel and confiscated an automatic rifle during a gunfight in the Kluet Utara area of South Aceh. And soldiers also found the body of a rebel, believed to have died of malaria in the Samahani area of Aceh Besar district on the same day.
The spokesman said soldiers also captured seven suspected rebels during three separate operations on Wednesday.
On May 19, the government launched a massive military operation to crush the guerrillas, who have been fighting since 1976 for independence for the energy-rich province.
The military said Tuesday that at least 752 rebels had been killed and more than 1,700 had been arrested or had surrendered since the start of the operation. Thirteen police and 46 soldiers have died.
In a related development, GAM has urged the Malaysian government to release more than 200 Acehnese asylum-seekers.
Ishak Daud said Malaysia should not repatriate them like the group of Acehnese repatriated there in 1998. "The Malaysian government must protect the Acehnese who fled the war caused by the Indonesian military and police operations," he said.
Daud said he was one of the asylum-seekers forcibly repatriated in 1998.
"If such an incident happens again, the Acehnese people will some day take revenge," he warned.
A total of 232 Acehnese, including women and children, were detained last week as they tried to seek asylum at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Kuala Lumpur.
Separately, the Indonesian Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) said on Thursday it has given the Indonesian Military (TNI) recommendations on ways to fight a "clean war" in Aceh province from now on.
Komnas HAM hoped that the martial law administration in the province would seriously consider its input, chairman of the commission's ad hoc team for Aceh M.M. Billah said.
"We hope to receive a positive reaction in the sense that the administrator of the military emergency in Aceh can accept our inputs and discuss them in a serious manner," he told reporters here.
Billah said the commission has sent several recommendation letters to the authorities but gave no details. He said he hoped authorities would follow the recommendations.
"Or at least that they can improve their surveillance of the implementation and operations of the state of military emergency in a more effective and efficient way," he said.