Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2004, pages 38-39

Islam and the Mideast in the Far East

 

After Initial Openness, Indonesia Moves to Hide Horror in Aceh

	Detained Acehnese GAM rebels, some arrested and some who have surrendered, listen to an Indonesian soldier speak at a training center in Banda Aceh Nov. 18, 2003, as the latest round of the conflict entered its seventh month with almost 1,600 people killed and no end in sight (photo credit aft photo/Hotli Simanjuntak).

 

By John Gee

PICTURES FROM war zones make a big difference: as far as most of the world is concerned, if it doesn’t see images of a conflict in the media, it might as well not be happening. Governments and their armies know this, which is why, when they go about doing something nasty to the people under their power, they do their best to exclude the media.

When the Indonesian army launched its latest bid to crush the movement for independence in the northwestern province of Aceh, it appeared to be breaking with past practices: military spokesmen were friendly to journalists and seemed eager to answer their questions (see July/August 2003 Washington Report, p. 28). Only a few weeks after the May 19 declaration of martial law, however, the army became impatient with a flow of critical reports in the foreign media describing violence against civilians, including summary executions.

At the end of June, martial law administrators announced a policy that would severely restrict the access of foreign observers and the media to Aceh. Journalists wishing to work there were required to obtain permits from at least four different government agencies. Within Aceh, foreign journalists were restricted to a few major towns and cities, unless accompanied by soldiers or police. The official reason given for the curbs on their freedom of movement was that it was necessary for their safety. This effectively denied journalists the ability to undertake first-hand reporting of the conflict, which is being fought out primarily in the countryside.

Commenting on the decree, The Jakarta Post said: “Its issuance will further heighten concern over the lack of transparency the military operation has been shrouded in since local journalists were barred from reporting GAM statements during the first weeks of the war.” GAM is the Indonesian acronym of the Free Aceh Movement, which has led the campaign for Aceh’s independence since 1976.

Tourists also were banned from going to Aceh, and a drive was launched to squeeze out other observers from abroad. All foreigners were banned from communicating with members of GAM without the approval of the military. An appeal issued by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan soon after the introduction of martial law calling upon Jakarta to ensure the safety of aid workers and their access to the people who needed their help was ignored by the Indonesian authorities. United Nations agencies had staff operating in Aceh, but Indonesia refused to renew their work permits as they expired, so, one by one, they were forced to leave. With the departure of a World Health Organization employee on Sept. 19, there were no foreign aid workers left in Aceh. Indonesian human rights groups continue to monitor what is happening, but are forced to work underground. Some Indonesian journalists have tried to report accurately on events in Aceh instead of relying on army handouts, but at least two were sacked from their jobs after arousing the ire of the military.

The official version of the war’s conduct has been consistently upbeat: rebels are being killed, “disciplinary problems” among soldiers are dealt with severely, and atrocities are committed by the enemy to intimidate the people, who support the army. A trickle of reports says otherwise, however.

During the first months of the war, over 100,000 people were displaced from their homes by military operations, though some of those were later able to return. Over 1,000 people were reported to have been killed in the first six months of the crackdown (compared to a total of around 12,000 in the previous 27 years), over 300 of whom were civilians, according to human rights groups. Thousands more were arrested in a conflict which, in theory, pits 35,000 Indonesian troops against a mere 5,000 GAM members. Clearly, the army, backed by the Indonesian government, is targeting the independence movement as a whole, which is much broader than GAM.

Lesley McCulloch of Scotland and American nurse Joy Lee Sadler were supposedly arrested for visa violations and held in prison for five months before being released in February 2003. McCulloch has since worked in Malaysia with some of the 30,000 Acehnese refugees living there. The refugees retain reliable links with their homeland, and through them, McCulloch has received horrific reports on what is happening there. Interviewed by Peter Kammerer of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (“Human rights abuse in Aceh horrendous, says researcher,” Nov. 17, 2003), she said that while life in the towns was relatively normal, conditions in rural areas were “horrendous.” Many males over the age of 14 had gone into hiding, she said, out of fear that the military or police would target them as potential GAM recruits. Women were raped and humiliated:

“Targeting the women—forcing them to strip in public and all the sexual abuse—is a way of destroying the social fabric of society,” McCulloch explained. “The trouble is it creates more anger and only strengthens support for GAM.”

Before her arrest, McCulloch said, she saw army-backed militias being recruited and deployed: “Everything that happened in East Timor is happening in Aceh.”

Because the army failed to meet its target of crushing the independence movement within the six months of the martial law decree, it was extended for a further six months in November. Looking for international support, Indonesia had planned to ask the United Nations to declare GAM a terrorist organization, which would have made it liable to the same sort of sanctions applied post-9/11 to suspected al-Qaeda affiliates, but it backed down. According to Security Minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, “We do not want to internationalize the Aceh issue.” It appears his government feared that the U.N. would wish to verify what was happening on the ground in Aceh before considering branding GAM with the terrorist label, and it feared what it would uncover.

 

From Palestine to Malaya

My Side of History, the autobiography of the former Secretary General of the Communist Party of Malaya, was recently published in Singapore and Malaysia. Chin Peng had the distinction of being awarded the Order of the British Empire for his role in fighting the Japanese during the Second World War, only to become the empire’s “most wanted” for his part in seeking to dismantle it a few years later. He remains a controversial figure: after he told interviewers that he would like to return from exile in Thailand to visit the graves of his parents, the “let bygones be bygones” responses of some were countered by angry letters of protest from Malaysians who had suffered at the hands of the Communist forces in the 1950s and later.

Chin Peng claims that the conflict commonly known as the “Emergency” was an anti-colonial war initiated by the communists and, he argues, it probably was used quite skillfully by Malayan leader Tunku Abdul Rahman to push for early independence under an anti-communist government.

It is usually forgotten today that a chance of timing linked the unfolding of the conflict in Malaya to that which had gone before in Palestine. The British Mandate over Palestine came to an end on May 14, 1948. Weeks later, on June 16, the first shots of the conflict in Malaya were fired. A state of emergency was declared by the British authorities.

Wanting to strengthen its position in Malaya, Britain brought in a number of Palestine veterans. The police were reinforced by a contingent of officers from the Palestine Police, who had amassed considerable counter-insurgency expertise against both Palestinian Arab and Jewish militants. The record of the early years of the Emergency has a sprinkling of names associated with the final years of British rule in Palestine.

Malcolm MacDonald, commissioner-general for South East Asia when the Emergency began, had been appointed colonial secretary in May 1938, at the height of the great Palestinian Arab revolt. He had been a member of a lobbying group called the Palestine Mandate Committee, which worked to influence British public opinion in favor of a “Jewish National Home” as endorsed by the Balfour Declaration. He visited Palestine as colonial secretary and made favorable statements about the establishment there of the “Jewish National Home” on his return.

Colonel W. N. Gray, who had been inspector-general of the Palestine Police as the Mandate drew to a close, visited Malaya in an advisory role and compiled a report of observations based on his experience of “counter-terrorist operations” (by that stage, mainly attacks by Zionist armed groups). He returned to Malaya as commissioner of police in August 1948.

Sir Henry Gurney was Britain’s last chief secretary of Palestine. He was installed as high commissioner of Malaya in October 1948 and shot dead three years later in a communist ambush near Kuala Lumpur—the highest ranking British official to be killed during the Emergency.

The British experience of its recent warfare in Palestine colored the perceptions of these men and others when they came to consider what to do in countering the insurgency in Malaya. When Major General Sir Charles Boucher, who took over as general officer commanding in Malaya at the beginning of the Emergency, was on the point of leaving in February 1950, he wrote a report in which he compared the strength of British forces in Malaya at the time to that they had possessed in facing the Palestinian Arab revolt in 1936-39. Their task in Malaya would be harder, he concluded: the communist forces were better armed and more numerous than the Palestinian Arab rebels, and Palestine had been a significantly smaller territory, with an open landscape over which air power could be used very effectively. Intended to make the case for more troops in Malaya, in a backhanded way, Boucher’s arguments underline just what the Palestinians had been up against.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: Israel and the Palestinians, available from the AET Book Club.

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