Skeletons excavated from North Aceh grave

Skeletons excavated from North Aceh grave

By Pandaya

LHOKSEUMAWE, Aceh (JP): The skeletal remains of 12 bodies were
dug up yesterday from a single grave at Bukit Sentang, North
Aceh, lending further credence to local people's claims that the
site had been used for burial of victims of military atrocities.

The grave is only one of at least three pits on the remote
small hill that locals said was used by the military to dump the
bodies of suspected supporters of the Free Aceh movement in 1991.

The remains were unearthed by villagers for a team from the
National Commission on Human Rights officials, to disprove the
government's claim that reports on military atrocities in Aceh
were made-up to discredit the government.

About 1,000 people flocked to the hill for a close look at the
graves. As the diggers collected the remains, shouts of
condemnation against former president Soeharto were heard and
demands made that he be prosecuted for the atrocities.

"Soeharto is more ruthless than the communists he crushed in
1965," one of crowd said. "He must be tried for his crime against
humanity."

Yusuf Kasim, a former village chief in charge of guarding the
heavy equipment used to dig the graves for Rp 8,000 a day in
1991, said he had lost count of the bodies the military dumped
into the mass graves.

"The soldiers allowed me to see corpses thrown into the graves
but they prohibited me from counting the bodies," said the man,
who is in his 50s. "Many more bodies were buried elsewhere on
this hill."

Discovery of the 12 bodies encouraged citizens to excavate
other graves believed to contain about the same number of bodies.

Baharuddin Lopa, leader of the commission's fact-finding team,
said the discovery was more proof that atrocities during the 1989
to 1998 military operations were an undisputed fact.

"I don't want to hear any government official pretend that the
widespread killing of civilians during the (military) operations
in Aceh never happened," the emotional Lopa said.

On Friday, the team found three mass graves in three villages
in Pidie district, where nine bodies were unearthed.

At each site, which residents claimed to be a mass grave, the
commission had dug one grave just to prove their report.

Estimates on the death toll during the nine-year military
operations range from 2,000 to 30,000. Most killings were
reported to have occurred between 1991 and 1992, when thousands
of combat troops, spearheaded by the Army's Special Force
(Kopassus), were called in to quell separatist uprisings.

Lopa, a one-time chief of the Aceh High Prosecutors' Office,
said he personally believed the number of bodies on Bukit Sentang
could reach more than 100.

In the Bukit Sentang grave, diggers found 24 femurs, six
blindfolds, eight arm bones with plastic strings attached, five
skulls, four pairs of trousers, four underpants and two Djarum
cigarette packs.

Kasim said he saw a hostage crushed with a forklift, which
soldiers had borrowed from a contractor who had built an
irrigation canal at the foot of the hill.

Many of the detainees were brought to the hill alive, he said.
Blindfolded, they were ordered to line up at the edge of the pit
to be shot dead from close range.

"Others were shoved into the grave and asked to lay side by
side, like salted fish you see in the market, before their bodies
were riddled with bullets," he said.

Just before sunset, the commission officials on their way to
the eastern district of Langsa were "ambushed" by residents and
local activists to witness the excavation of another mass grave
at an abandoned military complex in Alu Bukit.

Local citizens described the property, comprising sprawling
offices on a one-hectare plot of land, as North Aceh's second
biggest combat troops' command post.