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Indonesia: The May 3, 1999 Killings in Aceh

Section III: Background to the Shootings

Violence in the Special Region of Aceh, and in the area around Lhokseumawe in particular, has escalated dramatically since the fall of Soeharto in May 1998 because of three factors: anger at the government's failure to address past abuses; stepped-up political activity, violent and nonviolent, much of it pro-independence in sentiment; and excessive use of force by the military.


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

Failure to Address Past Abuses
For the last eight years of the Soeharto government, Aceh had been a "military operations area": daerah operasi militer or DOM, to use the Indonesian acronym. This designation, which was also applied to parts of Irian Jaya, entailed an unusually heavy concentration of combat troops for use in counterinsurgency operations against suspected Aceh Merdeka guerrillas, who in 1989 and 1990 had staged a series of raids on transmigrant sites and army bases. Particularly during the first four years of the DOM period, military abuses were massive, with well over 1,000 people killed, tortured, or "disappeared." Thousands of Acehnese were detained without charge, often for years at a time, in military camps; many never returned home.

Of the eight districts that make up Aceh, the worst affected were Pidie, East Aceh, Aceh Besar, and North Aceh. Lhokseumawe is the capital of North Aceh.(10)

The level of abuse declined in the later years of DOM, but the army still maintained a combat presence and was more dominant than usual in local administration. Law and order functions were under army control, and the police were completely marginalized. One result of this, which had implications for some of the violence later on, was a legacy of bad blood between the police and army.

When Soeharto resigned in May 1998, there was hope among many Acehnese that the systematic violations of human rights by the Indonesian army between 1990 and 1998 would be finally investigated and prosecuted and the victims compensated. In the months that followed the Soeharto resignation, virtually every day saw new revelations emerge in the national media about the horrors the Acehnese had endured, some of them investigated and confirmed by the Jakarta-based National Commission on Human Rights. Parliamentary fact-finding teams were formed, mass grave sites were discovered, and the idea of a regional truth and reconciliation commission was widely discussed. But the Habibie government made no progress toward identifying perpetrators or initiating prosecutions.

The combination of daily bombardment of news on past abuses and government failure to take action angered many groups of Acehnese: relatives of victims; university students, already mobilized for political action after their involvement with the national student movement in bringing down Soeharto; and many members of the local political elite, all of whom demanded that Aceh's status as a military operations area be ended.

Armed and Unarmed Activity in Support of Independence
Local anger was only one part of the explosive mix. Stepped-up Aceh Merdeka activity was another. This was due in part to the deportation of 545 Acehnese from Malaysia on March 26, 1998. Ostensibly part of the Malaysian government's efforts to rid the country of undocumented foreign workers, the deportation of ethnic Acehnese, as opposed to other Indonesian migrants, seemed to be aimed at getting rid of known Aceh Merdeka activists, although it is not clear whether the initiative came from Indonesia or Malaysia. Many of the Acehnese had fled across the Straits of Malacca to safety in Malaysia during the 1990-93 counterinsurgency operations; most were frightened civilians. But it is also true that at least since the late 1980s, Aceh Merdeka had its operational headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, and guerrillas did travel back and forth between Aceh and Kuala Lumpur.

The deportees in March included more than a dozen people who had been formally recognized as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and therefore had been determined to have a valid fear of persecution if returned to Aceh, as well as many more who had a potential claim to such status but had never been interviewed by UNHCR. They also included a handful of Aceh Merdeka activists. All were sent back to Aceh on an Indonesian warship that came to collect them, and all were initially held for several weeks at a military base for questioning and "guidance." One of the deportees was arrested and put on trial for murder of a soldier in an attack on a military base in May 1990. Most of the others were eventually allowed to go home, and about seven Aceh Merdeka activists from this group, according to one of our sources, returned to the Lhokseumawe area.

Quietly at first, then more openly after Soeharto's resignation, they began holding political lectures in neighborhood mosques and displaying pro-independence banners and the Aceh Merdeka flag in public places. The attention to past abuses and the lifting of political controls gave them a broader audience than they might otherwise have had.

Military authorities in Aceh began to blame the increased visibility of Aceh Merdeka on a deportee from Malaysia named Ahmad Kandang, a resident of the area just outside Lhokseumawe called Kandang, consisting of seven villages. In fact, both residents of Kandang and Aceh Merdeka sources said that Ahmad Kandang, while an Aceh Merdeka supporter, was not a particularly influential figure within the organization, and that others among the deportees had better claims to leadership.

By January 1999, a strong, student-led movement for a referendum on Aceh's political status had emerged that was rapidly gaining public support, just as the campaign for national parliamentary elections, scheduled for June 7, 1999, was becoming the center of political attention nationwide. In Aceh, violence and intimidation, as well as disgust with Jakarta, were leading to a campaign to boycott these elections, and Aceh by early May had one of the lowest voter registration rates in the nation.(11)

Military Actions
In addition to the growing anger of Acehnese over failure to address past abuses and the return of the Aceh Merdeka activists from Malaysia, actions of the military from August 1998 on added to the tension, with new and well-founded reports of arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial executions. Even when the army responded to a clear security threat and the use of violence by suspected Aceh Merdeka activists, their use of force appears in many cases to have been excessive.

Added to this is the widespread belief, although there is little hard evidence, that the military in Aceh were determined to resist calls for an end to DOM status and a consequent reduction in troop strength, because opportunities for personal enrichment in Aceh were so great, particularly through illegal logging. It was therefore in the military's interest, the argument went, to raise the level of unrest so as to justify a heavy security presence. By April 1998, a new explanation was being offered for possible provocation: deliberate disruption of the national elections. According to this argument, those with the most to lose by a free and fair election in June were the representatives of the status quo, i.e. the military and the ruling party, Golkar. They had an interest , the argument goes, in provoking violence and intimidating voters into not registering. This view, it should be noted, was articulated by people associated with some of the newer political parties contending the elections.(12)

But whatever the alleged motivation and whatever the evidence to the contrary, every time an incident of violence broke out in Aceh from August 1998 onwards, the military blamed it on Aceh Merdeka, and Acehnese students, activists, or politicians blamed it on military instigation, falsely attributed to Aceh Merdeka.

Notes
10. North Aceh also has most of Aceh's heavy industries, from oil and natural gas to fertilizer plants. Some guerrilla raids took place in the vicinity of these plants in the early years of the DOM period, leading to systematic military reprisals against the civilian population in the area. See "What Did Mobil Know? Mass graves suggest a brutal war on local Indonesian guerrillas -- in the oil giant's backyard," Business Week, December 28, 1998.

11. "Menjegal Pemilu di Serambi Mekah," Forum Keadilan, Vol.8, No.5, May 9, 1999.

12. Ibid.

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