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Sinister figures have set up shop in indonesia Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Mission Creep
INDONESIA: Well-meaning relief crews are landing in the middle of a low-grade civil war. Their intervention will have broad, unpredictable consequences.By George Wehrfritz and Joe Cochrane
Newsweek International
Jan. 17 issue - Another kind of wave is sweeping the shores of the Indian Ocean. All along the 33,000 kilometers of coastline ravaged by killer tsunamis on Dec. 26, a flood of boats and bullock carts, helicopters and trucks is delivering relief supplies to the hundreds of thousands of Asians injured and left homeless by the disaster. Again and again last week, U.S. Navy Seahawk choppers thundered down to decimated Sumatran villages unreachable by road, to be greeted by outstretched arms and distraught, desperate faces. Near the village of Lam No, seamen like 22-year-old Nathan Minear toss out as many protein biscuits, bags of rice and cartons of strawberry yogurt as they can to the waiting crowd before their craft lifts off into the damp, humid air. "They're all so hungry," Minear says over the din of rotor blades.
That's an understatement. The official death toll from the disaster has risen over 150,000, and for millions—homeless, their fields and fishing boats destroyed, vulnerable to disease—the situation remains dire. But the international community has—at last rallied to their cause: by the end of last week, more than $5 billion had been pledged to the relief effort by governments and individuals around the world. The United Nations has assumed primary responsibility for directing the aid to where it's needed most, and health officials are quietly thankful that diseases like cholera have yet to flare up.
That doesn't mean, however, that the task at hand is a fly-by—swooping in to deliver much-needed supplies, then zooming off to the next destroyed hamlet, or crisis. The scale of the physical destruction is horrifyingly evident from the air, shocking even United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, both of whom visited the region last week. Less obvious is the fact that the tsunami has shaken up political landscapes as well.
Particularly in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the two countries worst hit by the disaster, relief workers now confront a combustible mix of need, mistrust and neglect. Both have been racked by long-running separatist insurgencies; Aceh, the Indonesian province closest to the epicenter of the quake that set off the killer waves, was until then effectively under military rule. "There are many, many different issues involved: separatism, religion, a new government in Jakarta," Satish Mishra, head of the U.N. Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery, says of the situation in Aceh. "Once you are into a humanitarian crisis you suddenly have 200 things on the agenda." Those helpful seamen like Nathan Minear? "I think they're walking into a political minefield," says Sidney Jones, Southeast Asia project director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
Whether those bringing aid to the region yet realize it or not, peacemaking is now part of the challenge of recovery. Nowhere is that more evident than in Indonesia. U.S. politicians like Powell and former president George H.W. Bush are hoping the rescue missions will showcase American compassion and improve Washington's image in the Islamic world. But the intervention could cut both ways: pushing Jakarta to make humanitarian concessions on Aceh could aggravate a key ally in the fight against Al Qaeda and other jihadists, who see Indonesia as a good recruiting ground and target for anti-Western attacks. Aceh itself rests along the Strait of Malacca, a vital shipping lane that Washington fears is vulnerable to terrorism. Indonesian Army officers could resent the presence of American soldiers, and balk at any Western-imposed negotiation.
For the United Nations, Aceh offers an opportunity to rebuild bridges burned when the world body helped East Timor break away from Indonesia in 1999, a vote that many within the Indonesian military thought was rigged. For aid organizations large and small, the challenge is to keep their personnel on the ground safe in a deteriorating security environment that now includes looters, corpse scavengers, child kidnappers, radical Islamic groups and paramilitary youth gangs—not to mention rebels from the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM, who began hijacking food convoys last week. The man with the most at stake is newly elected Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. "It's his defining moment, and he needs to deliver," says Sandra Hamid of the Asia Foundation in Jakarta. "People are [watching] how much time, energy, vision and compassion he is going to put into this disaster."
The backdrop in Aceh is sobering. GAM's armed struggle has dragged on since 1976, driven by a widespread sense of injustice. The province contributes more than $1.2 billion a year from its oil and gas reserves to Jakarta, but has gotten little in return. The central government declared emergency rule and launched a new military offensive in May 2003 after a promising peace initiative foundered. The result: "unlawful killings, beatings and torture by soldiers, police and rebels," concluded the U.S. State Department's most recent human-rights assessment of Indonesia. The reported noted that among more than 1,000 people who had died in the renewed fighting were 342 civilians "summarily killed or executed" by the military.
Before the tsunami hit, Aceh had become, in essence, a fiefdom of the Indonesian Army. Commanders ran business empires and oversaw smuggling, illegal logging, protection rackets and extortion. GAM exported drugs, kidnapped for ransom and taxed villages under its control. Each side benefited from the status quo. "Both the [military] and GAM are happy to keep the war going because they're making money," says one senior religious leader in Aceh. Both sides accused the other of provoking skirmishes late last week.
By many accounts the military was slow to respond to the tragedy. Three days after the tidal wave struck, groups of soldiers in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, reclined in the shade smoking cigarettes as loaded relief planes stacked up on the tarmac at the capital's small airstrip. Rotting bodies littered the streets, yet the most pressing concern for the brass was protocol. Local commanders refused to coordinate relief efforts with the first official sent by the Welfare Ministry in Jakarta, deeming him too junior. Minister Alwi Shihab himself flew north to do the job, but not before a critical day was lost. He called it "a poor performance because of lack of communication."
Outside Banda Aceh, the military's initial response was to brace for combat. Commanders reportedly assigned just 10 percent of their 40,000 troops in the province to relief work; the rest stayed on full alert. In Sibolga, a port town 150 kilometers south of the tsunami zone, a naval officer serving on a destroyer bound for the ravaged town of Meulaboh said that, in addition to food and medicine, the warship would deliver some 150 volunteer police officers. "The city is OK at the moment," he said. "But 20 kilometers outside, there is no security." Given the military's leeriness of any grassroots collective action, the province had no established civilian government capable of handling a crisis when the waves hit. People didn't organize to perform even the basics, like gathering and burying corpses. Most tasks fell to the Army, which, until international aid agencies and the U.S. military arrived, performed them poorly.
Looting has become common sport for uniformed personnel in Aceh. One witness in the capital, who asked not to be identified, says he watched soldiers in flattened neighborhoods "removing undamaged motorcycles and cars for their own use," then overheard them discuss other loot they had pilfered. "There's clear evidence that the Army and police are stealing food aid and selling it in the market," says outraged religious leader Muslim Ibrahim, chairman of an association of Islamic clerics called the Aceh Ulama Assembly. One Western journalist also witnessed civilian scavengers opening body bags to steal jewelry off bloated corpses. Gen. Bambang Darmono, head of the Army's relief efforts in Aceh, calls looting "normal" in crisis situations but says "we have had no cases" involving soldiers.
Profiteering is rampant. On a New Zealand military cargo flight from Aceh to Jakarta last week, about half of the "refugees" being carried out were well-dressed people who paid up to $80 to Indonesian military screeners to be allowed onto the plane. Gas prices, rental-car fees, even rents have spiked. When a NEWSWEEK reporter passed through Medan (the main hub into Aceh) last week and found all flights to Jakarta fully booked, a scalper appeared and asked, "Do you mind buying someone else's ticket?" The correspondent paid a 30 percent premium and caught the flight—traveling as John Lennon.
Other black-market traders are more predatory. At least two people have been arrested and another is being questioned for allegedly stealing children out of Aceh, according to the United Nations children's agency, UNICEF. The problem is so serious that President Yudhoyono issued a decree last week banning refugees under the age of 16 from leaving the province.
At the same time, the chaos has opened up the space for change in Aceh, for good and ill. On one end of the spectrum, women's groups, human-rights organizations and Indonesian journalists previously bullied out of the province are back to stake claims on Aceh's future. Take Radio 68H. The public-service broadcasting network had its top journalist in Aceh threatened at gunpoint and brutalized by soldiers in 2003. But in the days since the tsunami it has helped rebuild four radio stations in the province.
The network now broadcasts health alerts and advice on topics like posttraumatic stress. It plans to begin radio classrooms to educate thousands of children whose schools were destroyed. "It is my hope that Aceh changes to a more open society, and that the military realizes that controlling Aceh is not benefiting the people," says Santoso, the network's chief editor. "The disaster sets a very clear example that they can't handle everything themselves." Amazingly, the military phoned the Coalition for Human Rights, an NGO it had previously suppressed, to ask if the group would organize volunteers to clear bodies. Wardah Hafidz, a prominent activist for Jakarta's poor, says progressive groups are eager to re-enter Aceh under the banner of humanitarian relief, while downplaying their agenda to end military rule there. "We don't want to wake the sleeping lion," she says.
Sinister figures have also set up shop. Pemuda Panca Marga, a Jakarta-based youth group known to be thugs for hire, put on a show of force in Banda Aceh last week. The group, which is linked to the Indonesian Army, gained notoriety in 2003 after it ransacked the offices of a prominent human-rights group. The Islamic Defenders Front, famous for smashing up nightclubs in Jakarta as affronts to Islam, rushed in hundreds of volunteers to "guard Muslim society because there are so many infidels here" for the international relief effort, one member told reporters. A third incoming extremist group is Hizbut Tahrir, which supports establishing a global Islamic state and is allegedly linked to terrorists. And U.S. forces involved in relief operations are reportedly keeping an eye on dozens of members of Laskar Muhajidin, a radical Islamic group that has set up a relief camp in the province.
These extremist carpetbaggers might sound scary, but the most ominous force in Aceh remains the Indonesian military. It's unclear whether it will surrender its lucrative fiefdom without a fight. Suspicious generals believe that their GAM adversaries support peace initiatives only to buy time to regroup; they think the arrival of foreigners, naive to the intricacies of Acehnese politics, could bolster the rebels. There are rabid nationalists within the ranks who suspect the West harbors a secret agenda to break up Indonesia. Retired Gen. Agus Widjojo, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, warns that even well-intentioned foreign assistance could rankle "conflicted" midcareer officers indoctrinated to view themselves as the ultimate guarantors of Indonesian sovereignty. "They see foreigners doing things that they want to do but are not capable of doing," he says.
Some in Jakarta would actually like to see the international community get more involved in solving the political as well as humanitarian problems in Aceh. Welfare Minister Shihab says "international pressure" is needed to bring GAM rebels to the negotiating table, and that a peace deal should be a high priority for foreigners who want "Aceh rebuilt in a prosperous way." But U.S. officials insist they're focused on relief, and only relief, for now. "If things fall into place, there may be some way to solve political crises," says a senior State Department official, "but there is no reason to assume they will."
Optimists hope that Indonesia's move toward democracy, symbolized by the country's first-ever direct presidential election last fall, will ensure a peaceful outcome even without outside assistance. President Yudhoyono, a retired four-star general, spearheaded peace talks as Security minister in late 2002 that brought a brief respite before the process collapsed. He campaigned on a pledge to achieve a lasting peace in the province during his first term, mentioned it as a top goal in his Inaugural Address and raised the issue again as head of Indonesia's delegation to the funeral of Yasir Arafat in Egypt last November.
Yudhoyono's moment of opportunity, though, is slipping away fast. Defenders of the military argue that those in uniform are handling the crisis better as time passes—perhaps learning from cooperation with scores of foreign relief organizations; they say the real issue is poor civilian leadership. Some voices in Jakarta's NGO community echo that view. "The government is busy having meetings and visiting Aceh for one or two hours at a time," says Rusdi Marpaung, head of the Aceh task force at the human-rights group Imparsial. "There's been no quick response to the problem."
Unless that changes, Aceh's woes could spread much wider. A discredited central authority in Jakarta would have less control over the military, a prospect with dark implications for other trouble spots from Ambon to Sulawesi to West Papua. Turmoil in a country as disparate as Indonesia—where disintegration on the Yugoslavian blueprint was feared after strongman Suharto was ousted in 1998—invariably triggers refugee flows, ignites sectarian violence between rival communities or faiths and, in a post-9/11 world, heightens the risk of terror cells' multiplying. "Everything here begins with peace," says Rufriadi, a prominent Acehnese human-rights attorney whose home was ruined in the disaster. And that needs to begin soon.
With Paul Dillon and Eric Unmacht in Banda Aceh and Eve Conant in Washington
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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