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Indonesia: The May 3, 1999 Killings in Aceh

Section IV: Events in Lhokseumawe, August 1998-April 1999

All of these elements combined to trigger a series of violent outbreaks of which the May 3 shootings are only the latest, if most serious, example. A chronology follows:

August 31 - September 3, 1998
General Wiranto, commander of the Indonesian armed forces, approved the end of DOM status for Aceh on August 7, and troop withdrawals began later in the month. The army had planned a ceremony on August 31 marking the withdrawal of troops from Lhokseumawe. As the ceremony was ending, local people began pelting the soldiers with stones. The incident quickly turned into a full-scale riot, with two people killed and more than 300 shops and offices burned. The army blamed separatists for the violence. Local people accused an army sergeant of provoking it in the interests of maintaining an army presence in the area.


The May 3, 1999 Killings in Aceh

Section I
Section II: The Shootings on May 3
Section III: Background to the Shootings
Section IV: Events in Lhokseumawe, August 1998-April 1999

October 19, 1998
Rusly Basyah, forty-five, was lynched by a mob in Kulam Ara, Mutiara, Pidie, the first of a series of killings of cuak or suspected collaborators with the Indonesian government. It is not clear whether these killings, which increased in frequency in January and February 1999, were committed spontaneously by villagers or carried out at the instigation of Aceh Merdeka. By February, there were allegations that the "false" Aceh Merdeka, i.e. the army, was responsible, but Human Rights Watch was given no evidence to support this.

November 2, 1998
Around 12:00 noon, Aceh Merdeka had a "blessing of the arms", a kind of ritual ceremony at Malikussaleh cemetery, about fifteen kilometers from Lhokseumawe near the town of Bayu in subdistrict Syamtalira Bayu. They then had a procession that passed the main road, Buket Rata. Eyewitnesses told Human Rights Watch that as the procession passed, Aceh Merdeka supporters pulled down all the Indonesian flags from the main government offices along the road, including the tax office, the justice office, the Bayu police station, and the Polytechnic Institute.(13) One witness we interviewed saw two people on a motorcycle come by and take down the flag on the justice building. One of the two had a gun and fired into the air. A pickup truck came behind with fifteen or twenty people. They were all heading toward Lhokseumawe but stopped in Kandang where everyone got off. The Brimob (mobile police brigade, the anti-riot police) came a little later. It was after this incident that the name of Ahmad Kandang was mentioned for the first time in official police statements.

November 15, 1998
At dawn, a unit of Brimob (Mobile Police Brigade) and the police surrounded the house of suspected Aceh Merdeka leader Ahmad Kandang in Meunasah Blang village, Kandang, in Muara Dua subdistrict just outside Lhokseumawe, and reportedly exchanged fire with rebels.(14) One Brimob officer, Sgt. Horas Sialagan was killed, as was one villager named Idris Samat. As the shooting was taking place, other villagers went to the nearby station of the national radio, Radio Republik Indonesia, and burned it down. During the attack on his house, according to eyewitnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch in February 1999, Ahmad Kandang calmly walked out with some others, and the military let him go, fueling suspicions that he had some working relationship with them, although Human Rights Watch has seen no hard evidence to substantiate those suspicions. Some sixty people were arrested in the aftermath of the clash and were detained at the North Aceh police command for a week. Human Rights Watch received credible reports of the torture of one of those detained, a student, who was given electric shocks to the genitals and badly beaten. All were released a week later, after signing statements that they were not followers of Aceh Merdeka and were loyal to the state of Indonesia.

November 30, 1998
A molotov cocktail was thrown into the Lhokseumawe courthouse as the trial of Ishak Daud, an Aceh Merdeka activist deported from Malaysia earlier in the year, was moved to Sabang, some 300 kilometers away. Ishak Daud was accused of killing three soldiers in a guerrilla attack on an army post in May 1990, after which he fled to Malaysia. He was later convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

December 20-21, 1998
A riot broke out in Lhokseumawe after a woman from the village of Daya Tuha, on the city's outskirts, accused an army sergeant from the Bayu subdistrict military command of having taken off her prayer shawl and head scarf (meukena). Thousands of people, many of them from dozens of kilometers away, gathered to march on the Bayu police station that night (December 20). The crowd included people from Pusong, a village inside the Lhokseumawe city limits, and one center of Aceh Merdeka support. The mob proceeded to block the main road, burning tires and setting fire to government buildings. Seven buildings were badly damaged including the subdistrict military command, the police station, the office of the subdistrict head (camat), the religious affairs office, and the district court of Lhokseumawe. All traffic between Medan and Banda Aceh was blocked for more than fourteen hours. A senior army officer and his wife, returning from a trip to Medan, were dragged out of their car and beaten by a mob; both required hospitalization. Three other soldiers and two civilians were badly injured in the rioting.

December 29, 1998
Early on December 29, a mob in Lhok Nibong, a town on the main road between Medan and Lhokseumawe, began a "sweeping" or identity check of passengers on every public and private vehicle passing through the town. (Lhok Nibong is in East Aceh district just on the border with North Aceh.) The crowd of an estimated 200 people stopped a public bus coming from Medan with sixteen soldiers from Infantry Battalion 113 aboard, all of whom were returning from Christmas leave. They dragged seven soldiers off the bus and killed them. The army said there were indications that Aceh Merdeka was behind the killings, and although dozens of locals were arrested for questioning, all were released for lack of evidence.(15) To this day, it is not clear who the killers were.

December 30, 1998
A Marine officer, Maj. Edyanto Abbas and Army Sgt. Syaefuddin were kidnapped near the Mobil Oil pipeline area outside Lhokseumawe; Major Edyanto's body was found on March 22, 1999.

December 31, 1998
Col. Johnny Wahab, the regional military commander, said army helicopters had dropped leaflets in Kandang, urging that the two hostages be freed. The apparent assumption was that if the two officers were not actually being held in Kandang, the villagers and Ahmad Kandang personally knew where they were. Wahab told the press that in response to direct appeals from the military to Ahmad Kandang, the latter called up and left a message on Wahab's answering machine saying he did not want to negotiate, calling Wahab "sick."(16)

January 2-3, 1999
The military launched a major military operation to search for the kidnapped soldiers and to hunt for Ahmad Kandang. Several villages thought to be Aceh Merdeka strongholds, including the Kandang area, Paloh, and Pusong, were particular targets. On January 2, the military also initiated a new, intensive counterinsurgency operation called Wibawa 99, that local people said effectively reimposed DOM status on Aceh in everything but name. One Pusong resident told Human Rights Watch that the word "wibawa," which in Indonesian means "authority," was being defined by locals as an acronym that stood for Wiranto (the Indonesian armed forces commander) Exterminates the Acehnese People.(17)

As a result of these operations, the village of Pusong was surrounded by soldiers, and no one could enter or leave, one resident told Human Rights Watch.(18) During the fasting month which began on December 18, when Muslims consider it particularly important to have communal prayers, the people of Pusong could not even go to the main mosque in Lhokseumawe. The village leaders had a meeting and decided to go to the district head to complain. After prayers on the evening of January 2, an Aceh Merdeka member gave a lecture at the Pusong mosque and told people to gather together the next morning to walk the short distance, less than half a kilometer from Pusong to the pendopo or ceremonial hall of the North Aceh district head.

At about 6:30 a.m. on January 3, virtually all of Pusong turned up for the march. The organizers were going up and down the streets, saying, "Come out, come out, if you're an Acehnese, come out." The women were in front, one carrying a six-month old baby. About halfway down the street, the marchers were stopped by two armed personnel carriers, and three or four army trucks. The army fired some warning shots in the air, but no one retreated. The army then fired into the crowd, and some people fell. An army spokesperson later said that two people among the Pusong villagers were armed with rifles. Then the military vehicles started deliberately driving into the crowd, forcing people to run to the edges of the street to avoid being hit. At that point, around 10:00 a.m., the military opened fire on the crowd a second time.

By then, moke was visible, as crowds had set fire to the government statistics office and the local sanitation office. Many of the soldiers ran over in that direction, apparently thinking the fires had been set by Aceh Merdeka supporters. Because the troops were suddenly much fewer, it was only then that the people were able to take the bodies in the street to the Pusong mosque. An eighteen-year-old woman was one of the dead; the marchers wrapped her body in the Aceh Merdeka flag like a heroine.

The official death toll was five, but villagers believe about nine people were killed. Over a month later, when we interviewed residents, they did not know for sure how many had died because they said some badly wounded people were afraid to go to the hospital for treatment, and may have later died.

Later that afternoon, following the Pusong shootings, Lhokseumawe erupted. Five people were killed in a clash at Simpang Kramat village, ten kilometers south of Lhokseumawe. According to one press report, villagers gathered in front of the local mosque, awaiting the arrival of troops, but when the troops came, they simply opened fire on the crowd.(19) (Human Rights Watch had no opportunity to verify that account.)

Government buildings in Simpan Mulieng, another village some twenty-eight kilometers to the east of Lhokseumawe, became the target of attacks that evening. A police dormitory, next to the subdistrict military command, was burned to the ground, as was the police station itself, but the subdistrict command was unscathed. In nearby Bayu town, the office of the subdistrict head was stoned and a truck weighing station, the police station, and the immigration office were all wrecked while the subdistrict military command was untouched. The army opened fire on the rioters, and six of the latter were reported killed. The government blamed the attacks on Aceh Merdeka, and indeed, someone scrawled "Aku Cinta Aceh Merdeka" (I Love Aceh Merdeka) on the gate of the subdistrict head's office, where it was still visible a month later.

Local people, however, interpreted the pattern of burnings as the result of poor relations between the police and army. Since the DOM period, they said, relations between the police and the military were very bad. The police did not like being dictated to by the army, and in fact, had had their jobs completely usurped by the army: it was the army that conducted arrests and investigations in Aceh, for example, not the police.. The police may have thought that the lifting of the DOM was an opportunity to get some of their own back, one resident told us, and maybe the army retaliated.

January 4, 1999
The army surrounded and searched the At-Taqwa mosque in Pusong, saying that it had become a headquarters for Aceh Merdeka. Fifteen youths were detained, and an Aceh Merdeka flag confiscated.(20)

January 5, 1999
A joint military operation took place in Kandang. At about 6:30 a.m., according to one resident, a group of Marines, army airborne division (Linud 100) troops, Brimob, and police arrived in four or five trucks with one armored personnel carrier. At the time they arrived, a huge Aceh Merdeka flag was hanging on the wall of the local mosque, facing the main road. Soldiers pulled it down as they entered the village. They ordered everyone out of their houses, instructing the men to take off their shirts and lie face down on the ground. Then they systematically searched the houses, taking money and valuables in the process.(21)

Some of the men lying down were selected for interrogation and asked where Ahmad Kandang was. When they did not answer, they were beaten. L, a resident we interviewed, was apparently suspected of taking part in earlier violence, had his hands tied behind his back and was put on a truck, together with about seven others. He was taken to the Indonesian National Youth Association (KNPI) building in Lhokseumawe at about 8:00 a.m., where he spent the next four days and three nights. About an hour after he arrived, a group of suspects from the town of Buloh Blang Ara was brought in, and a little later, a group from Pusong. All told, the building had 137 detainees while L was there.

L and the others were ordered to lie face down on the floor when they arrived, their hands still tied behind their backs. There were about fifteen tables around the perimeter of the room with the interrogators sitting behind the tables. When they were called for questioning, they went up to the tables and sat down before the interrogators. For the first two days, they were neither untied nor allowed to go out of the room, so they had to urinate and defecate where they were. On the first evening they were given army ration packets for dinner (as they were all fasting, they were not given lunch). And around midnight on the first day, about a dozen soldiers from the resort military command (KOREM) and district command (KODIM) across the street came in and started beating up the detainees. L was singled out for special treatment because he taunted them, calling them members of the Indonesian Communist Party. They burned him with lighted cigarettes; the scars were still visible on his chest and arms when Human Rights Watch interviewed him a month later.

Also on January 5, after the operation in Kandang, a crowd of people smashed nearly every window in the Lhokseumawe court office. It was seen as a symbol of the Indonesian government.

January 9, 1999
Around 6:30 a.m., another joint military assault on Kandang took place, involving hundreds of troops. Two villagers were shot in the process and brought to the Lhokseumawe general hospital. About forty people were detained and brought to the above-mentioned National Youth Association Building where they were interrogated by the North Aceh police. Soldiers from the military commands across the street came in and beat up some of the detainees. At about 11:30 a.m., Major Bayu Nadjib, the commander of Battalion 113, whose men had been killed in the "sweeping" on December 29, entered the building and started beating the detainees with a length of cable. The provost of the police reportedly asked him to desist, and the interrogations continued. At 5:45 p.m., ten detainees, against whom the police thought they had enough to initiate prosecutions, were moved to the North Aceh police command elsewhere in the city. At about 7:45, without warning, about fifty soldiers entered the building. They were from Battalion 113 and several other units, including the Air Defense Guided Missile unit Rudal 001. They began to kick and beat the detainees, four of whom later died of their injuries.(22)

January 28, 1999
An All-Aceh Student Congress (Kongres Pelajar, Santri, dan Mahasiswa Aceh Serantau) took place in Banda Aceh and agreed to seek a referendum on Aceh's political status. That decision quickly moved from being a student demand to a political goal much more broadly discussed among the Acehnese political elite, inside and outside Aceh.

January 30, 1999
Major Bayu Nadjib was sentenced by a military court in Banda Aceh to six years in prison for the January 9 beatings of the detainees in the National Youth Association building, and he was dismissed from the army. The court said he acted out of revenge for the deaths of seven of his men in Lhok Nibong. Twenty-seven other soldiers were put on trial for the incident.(23)

February 2-3, 1999
An army shooting at an Aceh Merdeka lecture in Idi Cut, East Aceh, on February 3 further threw the region into an uproar. A dakwah GAM, or religious rally involving Aceh Merdeka speakers, had been widely publicized in the area. Around 4:00 p.m., according to a local human rights organization's investigation of the incident, villagers were in the process of building a stage for the speakers in a field directly across the street from the subdistrict military command when some soldiers came and began trying to knock down the stage and beat up some of the youths standing around. People dispersed, only to gather again a short while later and continue their work. Thousands of people began flooding into the area to hear the lecture from villages dozens of kilometers away. There were about seven speakers on the program which concluded about 12:30 a.m. on February 3. As people began leaving to go home, they crowded onto the main road, which was blocked by all the vehicles wanting to get out at the same time. About 12:45, as people were already beginning to get impatient with the lack of movement, someone began throwing stones from the direction of the military command toward the crowd. The stones hit pedestrians as well as people on motorcycles and on pickup trucks. About fifteen minutes later shooting broke out, first from the direction of the military command, then from three or four military trucks that had emerged from behind the crowd. An investigation team from an Acehnese NGO coalition said it interviewed one witness who recognized one of the shooters as being from the army airborne division, Linud 100.(24) (Human Rights Watch had no opportunity to assess the reliability of the witness, but the NGO report in question is one of the most detailed accounts available.) The army also shot out the tires of vehicles brought to transport some of the participants. About fifty-eight youths who had tried to hide were then pulled onto the trucks and ordered by the soldiers to say the shooting had been carried out by Brimob (a police unit), according to two of the witnesses interviewed by the NGO.(25) The group was then brought to the district police command in the town of Langsa for interrogation.

Meanwhile, about 3:00 a.m., one of the trucks carrying victims of the shooting arrived at the bridge over the Arakundo river, more than twenty kilometers north of Idi Cut. A empty truck from the subdistrict military command was waiting near the bridge. Several fishermen, interviewed both by NGO investigators as well as local journalists, reported witnessing bodies being dumped in the river. They also reported that one victim, still alive at the time, was thrown into the empty truck where he was tied up, put in a sack with some stones and thrown in the river. A body tied in this fashion was fished out of the river on February 4.One truck went back and forth three times from the Arakunda river, according to a witness.(26) Human Rights Watch did not independently investigate the Idi Cut shootings but spoke with investigators of several groups that had, at different times and independently of each other, and their findings were very similar.

By February 5, six bodies had been pulled from the river; one other shooting victim died in his car in Idi Cut, for a total death toll of seven. The local government said seventy-four were wounded, and NGOs reported that more than twenty people were unaccounted for by early March. At least fifty-six people were initially detained, of whom three were held for further prosecution. The three were said to be on the organizing committee of the program.(27)

March 26, 1999
As the student-led referendum movement gathered pace, President Habibie decided to visit Aceh to try and head it off by apologizing for past abuses. Student protestors clashed with troops in front of the main mosque in Banda Aceh during the visit, and after firing warning shots, the troops used tear gas and rubber bullets on the students. Some 130 had to be hospitalized for treatment. Two soldiers were hit with rocks.

April 5, 1999
Dozens of armed soldiers beat up and pistol-whipped a group of students and youths painting the streets with pro-referendum slogans in the village of Alur Nireh, Peureulak, East Aceh.(28)

April 29, 1999
The thirtieth "mysterious killing" victim since late 1998 is found in North Aceh. These killings that began in October were originally thought to have been the work of Aceh Merdeka supporters executing cuak or suspected informers, but the number and method of execution of the later killings was far more reminiscent of the wave of "mysterious killings" (pembunuhan misterius or petrus) carried out by security forces in Java and Sumatra between 1983 and 1985.(29)

May 3, 1999
The army opens fire on protestors in Kreung Geukueh, North Aceh, killing at least forty-five.

Notes
13. Interview with eyewitnesses from Lhokseumawe in Medan, February 8, 1999.

14. "Baku Tembak Petugas vs. GAM, Dua Tewas Dan Empat Luka, Waspada, November 11, 1999.

15. "ABRI Balik Menyapu," Waspada, December 31, 1999. Information on the releases comes from Human Rights Watch interviews in Lhokseumawe, February 13, 1999.

16. Kolonel Johny Wahab: 'Saya Omong Sudah Tidak Didengar,'" Forum Keadilan, January 11, 1999.

17. Wiranto Basymi Warga Aceh

18. Interview, Lhokseumawe, February 13, 1999.

19. "DOM Dicabut, Tapi Rakyat Masih Mengamuk," Forum Keadilan (Jakarta), January 11, 1999

20. Ibid.

21. Kandang resident interviewed in Medan, February 8, 1999.

22. "Nyawa Dibaya Nyawa?" Tempo, January 20, 1999.

23. "Mayor Bayu Nadjib Divonis 6 Tahun Penjara Dan Dipecat," Waspada, January 31, 1999.

24. Divisi Data & Informasi Koalisi NGO HAM Aceh, "Laporan Investigasi Lanjutan Oleh Koalisi NGO HAM Aceh Tentang Kekerasan Militer Terhadap Sipil dalam Tragedi Idi Cut, (no date).

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. "Tiga orang hilang sudah kembali," Serambi Indonesia, February 12, 1999. The figure of seventy-four wounded appears in "Kontradiksi Data Korban Tragedi Idi Cut," Waspada, March 26, 1999.

28. "Oknun tentara aniaya dan ancam tembak mahasiswa dan masyarakat," Waspada, April 7, 1999.

29. See Amnesty International Report 1984 and 1985 for details.

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