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II. INTRODUCTION

The government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri has failed dismally to make progress on prosecuting grave human rights violations in Aceh for which government security forces are believed responsible. That failure stands in sharp contrast to the zeal with which Indonesian military forces and police take punitive action against suspected rebels of the rebel Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or GAM) and people suspected of supporting or sympathizing with them. While the government is fully within its rights in taking measures to quell armed rebellion, the methods used by its forces have all too often violated international humanitarian law.1 Local and international nongovernmental organizations working in Banda Aceh told Human Rights Watch in January 2002 that suspected rebels were routinely found shot after having been taken into custody, in violation of international prohibitions against extrajudicial executions.2 Only in rare cases are suspected rebels prosecuted through the courts.3

The utter indifference to establishing accountability on the government side is evident in the top ranks of the Megawati government; among senior officials of the Aceh provincial government; and most distressingly, in the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights, better known by its Indonesian acronym of Komnas HAM. There appears to be no recognition that without a serious effort to punish members of the police and military responsible for human rights violations, local resentment against Jakarta may well increase, and that failure to provide justice to victims of rights abuses can undermine whatever other steps - political, economic, or military - are taken to resolve the decades-long conflict.

As of late January 2002, two cases in particular stood out as evidence of the lack of political will to address human rights violations in Aceh. The so-called Bumi Flora massacre of August 9, 2001, in which thirty-one people were killed, was not only not prosecuted -- it has remained largely uninvestigated. In the December 2000 killing of three humanitarian workers for RATA, a nongovernmental organization working with torture victims, all suspects had either escaped or been released by the end of 2001. One of the escapees, Ampon Thaib, was again actively participating in joint operations with the district military command in North Aceh in January 2002.

Several factors contributed to government inertia on accountability for abuses in Aceh. First, the Megawati government appeared to believe that the combination of a new autonomy law for Aceh that took effect in December 2001 and a strongly increased military presence would together resolve the Aceh conflict. Officials in Jakarta seemed oblivious to the political ramifications of the lack of justice.

A second factor was the obstacle to prosecutions of grave human rights abuses posed by Law No. 26/2000 on human rights courts. The law, well-intentioned but deeply flawed, incorporates the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court into Indonesian domestic law. For crimes to be considered "serious human rights violations" and thus prosecutable in the new human rights courts, they would have to be tantamount to crimes of universal jurisdiction, such as crimes against humanity. This meant that if individual human rights violations, such as a single massacre, did not rise to the threshold of the definitions of the Rome Statute, they would have to be tried in military courts, (with military judges, if the suspects were members of the armed forces), or in so-called koneksitas courts, (with both military and civilian judges, if the perpetrators included both civilians as well as members of the security forces). Either way, Indonesia's abysmally corrupt legal system offered little hope that justice would be done. Neither the Megawati government nor its predecessor, however, gave setting up the human rights courts a high priority, and by early 2002, none were functioning.4

Finally, there was Komnas HAM itself. Since the Indonesian army or police, the Attorney General's office, and the Justice Ministry all showed little interest in seeing serious human rights violators brought to justice, the only hope for prodding the government into action seemed to lie with Komnas HAM. But beginning in 1999, Komnas HAM had steadily deteriorated from an institution once rated the most credible institution in the country, during the late Soeharto days, to a body of conservative obstructionists whose main interest appeared to be in defending the government against allegations of human rights violations rather than investigating them. By early 2002, much of Komnas HAM's international funding had been withdrawn in recognition of its poor performance, and the few good commissioners left were planning to resign. In Aceh, in particular, a combination of inaction, empty promises, and failed initiatives by Komnas HAM had left it without any credibility as an independent human rights body.

1 See for example, Human Rights Watch, "The War in Aceh," A Human Rights Watch Report, vol. 13, no. 4 (C), August 2001.

2 Human Rights Watch interviews, Banda Aceh, January 2002.

3 In one such case, Ahmad Rizal, aged fifteen, was sentenced on January 26, 2002 by the Banda Aceh district court to three and a half months on charges of illegal possession of weapons. He had been detained in Banda Aceh prison since November 2001 together with adults.

4 The Megawati government's lack of interest in accountability has been particularly evident in the way it has handled domestic and international demands to bring those responsible for the 1999 violence in East Timor to justice. To prosecute these cases, the government had to establish an ad hoc tribunal, under the terms of Law No.26. President Abdurrahman Wahid, who preceded Megawati as president, delayed in issuing the presidential decision that would allow the tribunal to be established. When he finally did, the decision restricted the tribunal to addressing cases that occurred after the referendum on August 30, 1999, whereas in fact, serious human rights crimes had taken place earlier. President Megawati, in one of her first acts as president, issued a new presidential decision to broaden the mandate of the court, but the revised decision was equally flawed and sloppily drafted, in a way that will facilitate legal challenges. The man President Megawati chose as her attorney general, M.A. Rahman, was responsible for failing to move forward with preparing indictments against a list of suspects established by a Commission of Inquiry; at the time, he was the prosecutor responsible for human rights crimes under President Wahid's attorney general, Marzuki Darusman. Judges to serve on the ad hoc tribunal were only appointed in late January 2002 and were by and large unqualified or in some cases, inappropriate for a human rights court because of past links to military officers. Trials were expected to begin in March 2002.

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