Torture of Aceh prisoners continues

Tiarma Siboro, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A leading rights watchdog has called on the next Indonesian president to reopen cases of alleged abuse and torture against Acehnese prisoners, saying the military and police were using violence to extract baseless confessions from those accused of having links to the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) rebel group.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) also urged the Indonesian Military (TNI) leadership to take all necessary measures to immediately end the torture and mistreatment of detainees and conduct thorough investigations into alleged rights abuses committed by its personnel.

The watchdog makes the calls in its latest 50-page report titled Aceh at War: Torture, Ill-treatment and Unfair Trials, which documents how the military, police and judicial authorities perpetrate horrific persecution, arbitrary arrests and unfair trials against Acehnese prisoners, and how the military authorities have maintained impunity for the security services.

"The war in Aceh is an internal conflict and not an international war so that people captured will not be named as prisoners of war. But, laws of war do apply generally in an internal conflict," HRW deputy director for the Asia division Saman Zia-Zarifi said on Monday.

Article 3 of the Geneva Convention says that people who are no longer fighting must not be mistreated, and this includes prisoners.

"And of course, Indonesia has signed the convention against torture," he said.

Electric shocks, cigarette burns, beatings, skinning and other forms of torture are routinely used by Indonesian security forces on detainees suspected of supporting the secessionist movement in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, says the report, which is based on interviews with 35 adult and child prisoners from Aceh currently being held in five prisons in Central Java.

The watchdog was not allowed to visit Aceh, making it difficult for its investigators to directly interview hundreds of other prisoners currently being held in various places across the province.

"They took me to the Polres (district level police) and before I had got out of the car one of the soldiers straight away hit me. For one week I was beaten and ordered to admit that I was GAM but I did not confess it ... I was accused of a murder, but it was not me ... They were wrong in who they arrested ... I was burnt on my chest and my shirt was taken off and poked with cigarettes. My body was burnt with matches. They also skinned me with a knife. I was also kicked, hit with a gun butt until I was bruised and vomited blood," an Acehnese prisoner is quoted by the report as saying.

The military has denied the allegations.

The security forces claim they have killed more than 2,200 GAM members since the military launched an all-out offensive against the rebels in May 2003. Rights groups, however, say many of the dead are civilians.

Hundreds have been tried in martial law courts and convicted mostly on treason charges. According to the 35 prisoners interviewed for the report, none of them was ever shown an arrest warrant or informed in writing of the charges against him/her at the time of arrest.

The watchdog says the scale of the torture and failure of due process makes it clear that these are systematic failures, not the actions of rogue security force members or untrained judicial officials.

It suggests that the government invite both the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers to investigate and report on the alleged abuses in the hope that these could provide recommendations to the newly elected government on how to stop them.

"We are expecting the next president, be it the incumbent, Megawati Soekarnoputri or Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to speak about Aceh and how to move forward on the Aceh issue because it is now the real problem. The number of deaths is still very high, the military operation is not producing clear results and it is a black mark on Indonesia's record in the eyes of the international community," Zarifi said.