Indonesia has had another turbulent year in 2001, marked by a power struggle in Jakarta and an escalation in regional conflicts. The war in Aceh and an outbreak of communal violence in West Kalimantan produced the most civilian casualties, but conflicts in Maluku (the Moluccas), Central Sulawesi, and Papua (Irian Jaya) continued to simmer. By September, the number of displaced persons remained well over one million, half of them from Maluku.
The government made no serious efforts to address past or current abuses, new human rights legislation notwithstanding. The number of political prisoners rose steadily during the year, with many peaceful political activists charged with "spreading hatred toward the government," an offense associated with the government of former president Soeharto. The justice system remained a shambles.
Defending human rights became a dangerous occupation, particularly in Aceh, where at least six rights workers were killed.
Indonesia's bilateral donors showed concern over the regional conflicts, but they were riveted by the long drawn-out struggle in Jakarta between the parliament and President Abdurrahman Wahid. That conflict ended peacefully in late July with Wahid's impeachment and the accession to the presidency of Megawati Sukarnoputri, but the power struggle consumed so much energy of the political elite that all of the country's major problems, including rebellion, displacement, and disruptions from a poorly thought-through decentralization program, were left to fester. A combination of relief over the transition, delight over key cabinet appointees, and strategic and economic interests led many donors to rush to support the new administration, including through military assistance.
Megawati's first cabinet is strong in the economics and foreign affairs posts, but her choice of Attorney-General is disastrous. The new minister, M.A. Rahman is a career prosecutor known for obstructing human rights cases, particularly with regard to East Timor.
The appointment continued a pattern of one step forward, two steps back that marked Indonesia's approach to accountability during the year. In November 2000, the parliament passed Law No.26 setting up new courts to try cases of serious human rights violations. For the first time, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other crimes of a "widespread or systematic" nature as defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court were incorporated into Indonesian law. The law established new courts to try such cases and provided for the establishment of "ad hoc" courts to try cases of serious human rights abuses that had occurred before the law took effect, including the 1999 East Timor cases.
But President Wahid's Attorney-General, Marzuki Darusman, dithered and by the time the Wahid government fell, had failed to set up the courts or proceed with a single prosecution. His accomplice in procrastination was his deputy, M.A. Rahman. As of September 2001, prosecutors for the new courts had been named, as had some but not all of the judges. No trials were in sight.
Other problems with accountability surfaced. The Indonesian National Human Rights Commission, known as Komnas-HAM, had been one of the most courageous defenders of human rights during the late Soeharto years. Ironically, it began to lose its critical edge under the democratically-elected Abdurrahman Wahid. Law No.26 gave Komnas-HAM, rather than the police, responsibility for initial investigations into cases of serious human rights violations, but leading obstructionists within Komnas-HAM itself increasingly blocked action on key cases. A bill in the parliament to set up a national truth and reconciliation commission along the lines of the South African model remained undiscussed as of late 2001. With no interest in prosecutions on the part of the president, the attorney-general, or the minister of justice, let alone the military, prospects for accountability looked bleaker than ever.
Aceh
The situation in Aceh deteriorated sharply during the year, and a six-hour visit in September by Megawati to the area showed no signs of improving matters. The death toll since January 2001 had topped 1,000 by September, and while most of the deaths were civilians killed in the course of military operations, the rebel Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or GAM) was also responsible for abuses.
Key incidents involving civilians include the arrest on November 20, 2000 of Muhammad Nazar, civilian head of the Information Center for a Referendum on Aceh (Sentral Informasi Referendum Aceh or SIRA); the execution by armed soldiers and civilians on December 6, 2000 of three humanitarian aid workers; the subsequent escape (almost certainly with official connivance) of several of the suspected perpetrators in the aid workers case; the murder on March 29 of human rights lawyer, Suprin Sulaiman, together with his client, Teungku Kamal, and a driver, Amiruddin, shortly after Kamal had been summoned as a suspect in criminal defamation of the police; an eruption of violence in June in Central Aceh by both GAM and military forces in which at least 150 civilians, and probably many more, died; the massacre on August 9 of thirty-one Acehnese workers at the Bumi Flora palm oil plantation in Julok, East Aceh; and a number of assassination of civilian leaders, including local political leaders and the rector of the leading university in Aceh.
On April 11, President Wahid issued President Instruction (Inpres) No.4, which effectively authorized increased police-military operations in Aceh. The instruction was issued following the closure of Exxon-Mobil gasfields in North Aceh because of security threats. The decree was roundly denounced in Aceh and the call for its revocation became a rallying cry for political activists province-wide.
Military operations were characterized, among other things, by collective punishment of villages thought to be harboring GAM members. Even before Inpres No.4 was issued, the security forces made a practice of retaliatory burnings of houses and shops to punish GAM attacks.
Efforts at dialogue proved fruitless. Negotiations between the Indonesian government and GAM, facilitated by the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, foundered on mutual lack of trust and effectively broke down in early July when. Indonesia unilaterally withdrew from a security monitoring team. Later that month, police in Banda Aceh arrested six GAM negotiators despite government guarantees of their security. Five of the negotiators were released on August 29; one continued to be held into September on the grounds that he held a false passport. Banda Aceh's main newspaper, Serambi Indonesia, was forced to close twice during the year because of GAM threats, once in June and once in August.
President Megawati signed a law giving autonomy to Aceh on August 11 and made that implementation of that law the centerpiece of her Aceh policy. But the law, changing the name of the province to Nanggroe Aceh Daroessalam (NAD), did not appear to have widespread support, especially there was little consultation in Aceh before it was passed.
Irian Jaya (Papua)
Conditions in Papua also continued to worsen. From 1998 through the first half of 2000, Papua had witnessed the emergence of a popular pro-independence movement which culminated with an all-Papua congress in June 2000. Although the Indonesian government made important political overtures to Papuan leaders in response, including the promise of legislation guaranteeing substantial autonomy for the province (not yet delivered at this writing), it also returned to a hardline approach.
In late 2000 and throughout 2001, military and police have intimidated and at times attacked civilians in areas where rebels were believed to be active; moved aggressively against independence demonstrators, in a number of cases killing or seriously injuring them; increased surveillance and harassment of prominent civil society leaders, including human rights activists; and banned even peaceful expression of support for Papuan independence, putting civilian independence leaders on trial in Wamena and Jayapura and trying and convicting Papuan student demonstrators in Jakarta, many of them under the same Soeharto-era "spreading hatred" laws mentioned above.
Central Kalimantan
An eruption of violence in Central Kalimantan in February 2001 around the logging port of Sampit, Kotawaringin Timur district, led to indigenous Dayaks killing some 500 immigrants from the island of Madura, off the coast of East Java, and displacing more than 150,000. Many of the killings involved decapitation, and little distinction was made between men, women, and children. The outbreak had complex roots but appeared to be linked to longstanding economic and social grievances of the Dayaks, competition over local resources, and new opportunities for political mobilization along ethnic lines. Muhamad Usop, a Dayak leader who sought the Central Kalimantan governorship, was arrested on May 4 and held briefly on incitement charges.
As elsewhere in Indonesia, police proved incapable of halting the violence, and the army was sent in, further poisoning relations between the two institutions.
Maluku
Christian-Muslim violence continued to erupt sporadically in Maluku. The government made no effort to remove Laskar Jihad, the Java-based Muslim militia that arrived in the province by the thousands in 2000. Its members continued to be responsible for human rights violations. In early 2001, evidence emerged of Laskar Jihad forcing several hundred to convert to Islam and circumcising men and women alike. On May 4, the Wahid government finally took action against the head of Laskar Jihad, Jafar Umar Thalib, but not for any of his actions as commander of a private army. Instead, he was charged with murder for sentencing one of his followers to execution by stoning and having a crowd proceed to killed the confessed adulterer. The arrest appeared to prompt a new wave of violence that killed eighteen Christians by the end of May. On June 14, a botched raid by an army battalion on a Laskar Jihad post left twenty-two Muslims dead.On August 8, Megawati's vice-president, Hamzah Haz, made a point of meeting with Jafar Umar Thalib and Laskar Jihad members. While he urged them to abide by the constitution, the meeting gave the group new legitimacy.
East and West Timor
Little progress was made toward addressing the 1999 violence in East Timor. As of September, some 50,000 East Timorese remained in West Timor. A June 6, 2001 registration conducted by the Indonesian government of that population showed that 98.2 percent elected to stay in Indonesia, but there were serious concerns about whether the refugees had access to full information and whether they were in a position to answer freely. Only "heads of households" (usually taken to mean male) were questioned. Many refugees were expected to return in the aftermath of the peaceful election in East Timor on August 30.
No one was brought to justice during the year for crimes committed in East Timor. Half-hearted efforts by the Attorney-General's office during the year to set up an ad hoc tribunal to try people originally named in September 2000 as suspected perpetrators of serious crimes came to nothing. The tribunal needed a recommendation from the parliament to the president and then a presidential instruction. When President Wahid finally issued the instruction in April, it only allowed for prosecution of crimes occurring after the August 30, 1999 referendum. After protests, the instruction was returned to the Ministry of Justice for rewriting. The reworded decree was issued in August by President Megawati in one of her first acts after taking office, but it remained flawed, as it only allowed for prosecution before August 30, 1999 of the few cases that the Attorney General's office had deemed a priority. The ability to look at the whole pattern of state policy, critical to establishing a crimes against humanity case, was thus weakened. Moreover, by the time the new decree came out, the statute of limitations on the East Timor cases had expired, according to the new human rights legislation. While officials in the Megawati government continued to pay lip service to the idea of moving forward with prosecutions, few Indonesian rights activists believed that any of the suspects would ever face trial.
In the meantime, the six alleged killers of the three U.N.H.C.R. workers, murdered in Atambua, West Timor, on September 6, 2000 were brought to trial in January 2001. On May 4, they were sentenced to prison terms ranging from ten to twenty months, after having only been accused of assault - although even that charge could have resulted in a twelve-year sentence. The leniency of the charges against them was reportedly the work of the man who became Megawati's Attorney-General, M.A. Rahman, and the leniency of the sentencing caused international outrage.
Eurico Gutteres, the East Timorese militia leader responsible for much of the 1999 violence in the city of Dili, was charged in relation to another incident in Atambua that took place on September 24, 2000 shortly after the UNHCR killings. Accused of incitement for resisting efforts of authorities to disarm the militias, he was sentenced to six months in prison by the North Jakarta district court on April 30, 2001 and served only twenty-three days before being released.
