Apa yang terjadi di Aceh selama ini , saya tahu - sedikit - dari
koran, dari beberapa dokumen yang kami terima, dari laporan
Amnesty International, dari penerbitan Tapol (London) atau dari
beberapa aktivis LBH.
Saya juga tak lupa akan cerita yagn disampaikan oleh Tengku Hasan
di Tiro - yang juga disampaikannya ke Sub-Komisi HAM PBB - tentang
seorang perempuan yang dituduh telah memberi makan beberapa jam
sebelumnya kepada saudaranya yang baru tertangkap dan dicurigai
serdadu Indonesia sebagai pengikut Aceh Merdeka.
Perempuan itu tidak mau buka mulut ketika ditanya.
Lalu serdadu Indonesia menoreh perut laki-laki yang dicurigai
anggota Gerakan Aceh Merdeka itu dan karena dari dalam perutnya
muncrat makanan yang sama dengan apa yang ada diperiuk yang ada
didapur perempuan itu, maka perempuan itupun langsung ditembak
oleh serdadu Indonesia.
Lalu serdadu Indonesia itu pergi meninggalkan mayat yang
bergelimpangan itu.
Tengku Hasan di Tiro mau menunjukkan foto-foto kejadian itu, tapi
saya menolak melihatnya, karena ceritanya itu - yang saya yakin
benar - telah membikin perut saya melilit.
Sekarang, berkat usaha berbagai LSM di Aceh, kita mulai tahu apa
lbih banyak tentang apa yang terjadi di Aceh selam ini.
Aceh salah satu killing fields di Indonesia, Aceh yang malang
karena punya ladang gas alam, seperti juga Papua yang malang punya
ladang emas. Dan Kalimantan yang punya kayu.
Dan kita pikir kita telah merdeka!
Jusfiq Hadjar gelar Sutan Maradjo Lelo
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date sent: Fri, 25 Dec 1998 10:49:34 -0700 (MST)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [INDONESIA-L] BUSINESS WEEK - What Did Mobil
Know?
X-URL:
http://www.businessweek.com/@@wIBlumcAPEJ1@wAA/premium/5
2/b3610161.htm
INDONESIA: WHAT DID MOBIL KNOW?
Mass graves suggest a brutal war on local Indonesian guerrillas--in
the oil giant's backyard columns
There are days when Teungku Bintara wonders how he ever survived.
For six months in 1990 and 1991 he languished in a military prison
camp in Indonesia's Aceh province. One day, Bintara, then the
headman of a nearby village, was put inside a room whose walls
were splattered with human blood and hair. During an interrogation
that left him blind in the right eye, Bintara claims an Indonesian army
officer whipped his scalp with a frayed cable, burned his pubic hair
with a match, and held live electric wires to his genitals and temples.
Another time, the officer threatened to execute Bintara if he did not
disclose the name of a Muslim separatist guerrilla leader, despite
Bintara's insistence he didn't know him.
Bintara's gruesome experience unfolded only a few hundred yards
from the chemical plants and white storage tanks of P.T. Arun, a
liquefied natural-gas (LNG) producer In which Indonesia's state-
owned oil monopoly, Pertamina, holds a controlling 55% stake and
Mobil Corp. owns 35%. At the time of Bintara's detention, the plant
employed 1,800 workers and was frequented by several Mobil
advisers. Human rights groups have documented Rancong as a
known torture site. But Mobil says it was not aware of any such
activity. Bintara claims he saw fellow inmates in the Rancong camp
being tortured and then tossed ''like dogs'' onto trucks.
TERRIBLE TALES. Today, all that remains of Rancong is a
crumbling cluster of row houses. But what happened at Rancong and
throughout Aceh eight years ago is very much a live issue in
Indonesia. Since the fall of strongman President Suharto in May, a
stream of witnesses such as Bintara have come forward with tales of
atrocities committed by Indonesia's military. The events occurred
during a three-decade campaign to suppress a guerrilla movement
that sought independence for Indonesia's westernmost province. The
survivors' tales raise questions about what Mobil knew and when. On
Oct. 10, a coalition of 17 Indonesian human rights organizations
issued a statement asserting that Mobil and P.T. Arun are
''responsible for human rights abuses'' during the military operation in
Aceh.
The groups allege Mobil Oil Indonesia, Mobil's wholly owned
subsidiary, provided crucial logistic support to the army, including
earth-moving equipment that was used to dig mass graves. One such
grave excavated in the village of Bukit Sentang contained at least a
dozen bodies. Another allegation is that security forces seized a
local Mobil employee on company property without a warrant. That
employee has not been seen since.
Mobil and Pertamina flatly deny allegations that they knew of any
human rights abuses in the Aceh area in the early 1990s. ''I can
frankly say that we have no knowledge of that happening,'' says Neil
Duffin, executive vice-president for production and exploration of
Mobil Oil Indonesia (MOI). Pertamina Public Relations General
Manager A. Sidick Nitikusuma says that ''incidents connected to
human rights violations were beyond Pertamina and MOI's authority
and knowledge.'' The Indonesian army, which is helping excavate the
graves, officially says it regrets any suffering. But it has not said the
bodies uncovered were its victims.
News of these incidents is breaking into the wider world. U.S.
Ambassador to Indonesia Stapleton Roy discussed the allegations
on Nov. 3 in Jakarta with visiting Mobil Chairman Lucio A. Noto, who
denied knowledge of any misuse of Mobil equipment or facilities. A
State Dept. official told BUSINESS WEEK that the U.S. government
has ''expressed concern'' about the allegations and is calling for
Indonesian authorities to conduct a ''full investigation.'' ''The U.S.
continues to monitor the situation,'' the official said. ''Allegations of
abuses should be investigated by the country concerned.''
The controversy is likely to grow as more graves are opened and
bodies found. Indonesian human rights organizations and government
officials, who now are receiving some help from the military, say they
so far have identified 12 mass graves. One grave is on Pertamina-
owned land that is less than three miles from a Mobil gas-drilling
site. Whether this site contains human remains will be known when
the government exhumes it next year. So far, officials have unearthed
remains in 6 of the 12 sites. Other suspected graves in close
proximity to Mobil operations, such as at Rancong, have not been
investigated. Indonesian human rights commission member B.N.
Marbun estimates that at least 2,000 Acehnese torture victims--most
of them civilians--are buried around the Aceh area.
TURMOIL. The discoveries typify the ethical issues that a growing
number of multinationals must confront after years of doing business
in Third World dictatorships. While there is no legal precedent for
holding companies legally accountable in troubled circumstances,
there is debate on what moral responsibilities multinationals have
overseas.
To find out what happened, BUSINESS WEEK conducted a five-
week-investigation of the allegations against Mobil. The probe
included three trips to the Aceh area and dozens of interviews with
torture victims, government officials, residents of villages near the
mass graves, and local and foreign contractors who worked for Mobil
and P.T. Arun. BUSINESS WEEK also spoke with several
Indonesians who worked on Mobil facilities in Aceh. Mobil answered
written questions and allowed a tour of the Aceh facilities. Mobil
representatives accompanied a BUSINESS WEEK reporter to
alleged grave sites. Finally, Mobil's headquarters in Fairfax, Va.
provided detailed responses to questions from BUSINESS WEEK's
reporters and editors.
This probe uncovered more than a dozen sources who either
witnessed atrocities or came upon their aftermath. Two contractors
say they told local Mobil managers that they had found human body
parts close to Mobil sites, for example. And a former Mobil employee
says rumors of massacres and of reports that Mobil equipment was
being used to dig graves were frequently discussed at workplaces
and in a company cafeteria. Yet there is no clear evidence that
Mobil's top management had direct knowledge of such reports.
PEACEFUL PURPOSES. Mobil does say that it loaned the army
excavators and supplied troops with food and fuel on occasion for
three decades. But it insists Mobil managers had no record that the
army was using this help for anything but peaceful purposes. Mobil
also says it has no record of the army using its maintenance
facilities or other buildings, as human rights groups allege. Instead,
Duffin says, Mobil was told that any equipment used was ''for
projects beneficial to the community,'' such as building roads. If
facilities and equipment were used for other reasons, he adds, ''I
don't believe we can be held responsible.'' On Nov. 5, Noto said at a
press conference in Jakarta: ''If anything happened because
somebody used the equipment in a wrong way, I'm sorry about that.''
Noto added that Mobil had ''no control over that.''
In a letter to BUSINESS WEEK, the company describes the
ambiguities of its situation. ''Did we know we were operating in the
middle of a conflict? Of course we did, and so did the world. ...[But]
based on our inquiries and search of records, no reports from Mobil's
national employees on the alleged mass graves and other military
human rights abuses in the area were brought forward to Mobil's
management in Indonesia.'' Mobil says if it had known of abuses
associated with its operations, it would have protested aggressively.
Mobil also points out that it does not own any of the facilities in its
own oil-and-gas operations in Aceh. All real estate and buildings
where Mobil and P.T. Arun operate are owned by Pertamina. Also,
most of the equipment used by Mobil in Indonesia is either leased
from outside contractors or owned by Pertamina. At its $3 billion
LNG venture, meanwhile, Arun's Pertamina-appointed management
had control of the property.
Those interviewed in Aceh argue that the military operation was too
big and talk of killings too widespread for the company not to know.
''There wasn't a single person in Aceh who didn't know that
massacres were taking place,'' says H. Sayed Mudhahar, a former
top government official in Aceh. ''From children to the elderly to the
mentally ill, everybody was afraid.'' In the early 1980s, before the
killings, Sayed had been a public relations manager for P.T. Arun.
Faisal Putra, an attorney in Lhokseumawe who intends to file a suit
against Mobil on behalf of victims, agrees: ''The crimes occurred over
a long period of time. Mobil Oil cannot utter the words, 'We didn't
know.'''
Yet many ambiguities remain. Several Acehnese victims and
witnesses identified by human rights activists as Mobil employees
later turned out to be contractors. Almost everyone interviewed in
Aceh declined to speak on the record. Their explanation was that,
because Mobil and P.T. Arun so dominate the economy in Aceh,
they feared they would not be able to find good jobs or win more
contracts if their names were used. Others feared military reprisals.
Whatever actually occurred, the Indonesian government's campaign
to quell separatist unrest dragged Mobil into a morass. The
separatist rebellion traces its origins to four centuries of fierce
Acehnese resistance against Dutch colonial rule. After Indonesia
declared independence in 1945, Aceh's fight for autonomy was
crushed by then-President Sukarno. Aceh plunged into wrenching
poverty.
COMBAT TROOPS. Then came Mobil Oil's accidental discovery in
1971 of one of the world's richest onshore reserves of natural gas,
estimated at 14 trillion cubic feet. The oil-and-gas industry quickly
became the most important source of revenue for the central
government in Jakarta, much to the resentment of Acehnese. Most of
the top jobs and contracts went to ethnic Javanese. Despite dire
local poverty, less than 10% of Aceh's wealth is invested back into
the province, says Adinan Hashim, head of Aceh's Economic
Planning Agency.
Following the opening of Mobil's P.T. Arun LNG joint venture in 1976,
a guerrilla movement declared independence. Suharto sent troops
into Aceh when villagers rioted and clashed with hundreds of settlers
from Indonesia's main island of Java and started to block roads.
As violent clashes increased, troops started pouring in from Jakarta
in May, 1990. Over the next few months, the force had reached
thousands of soldiers and included the feared Army Special Forces
with their signature red berets. ''All of these new people coming in
needed logistical support, so they went to all of the companies and
began commandeering facilities,'' says former Aceh official Sayed.
One such facility was Rancong, a vacated housing development for
construction workers and Mobil employees at P.T. Arun.
The forces set up a base camp at an army facility known as Post A-
13 in Landing, the site of Mobil's Arun gas field and a few minutes'
drive from a Mobil airstrip and a housing compound known as
Bachelor Camp.
Soon afterward, witnesses say, evidence of the military's gruesome
handiwork was strewn everywhere. While traveling in late 1990 along
a road leading to a Mobil oil well known as D2--19 miles southeast of
Landing, a damage-claims inspector employed by a Mobil contractor
came upon a vacant sugar plantation. Pigs were feeding on
something in what appeared to be a bulldozed pit with dirt pushed
over it. ''They were obviously human bones,'' says the inspector, who
spoke on condition his name not be used. ''The pigs were rooting
down there on a hip bone, around the white knobbly part.'' Javanese
settlers in the area told him the army had rounded up and executed
Acehnese villagers in retaliation for an attack on the settlement. The
inspector says he informed a Mobil manager, who did not make a
record of the incident. ''The army is not somebody you argue with,''
explains the inspector. Mobil says it has no knowledge of the
incident.
DUMP TRUCK. Along the same road a few months later, another
Mobil contractor was part of a team testing soil samples outside of
Dusun Cermai, a village of 600 people living in wood shacks with dirt
floors, and about 2 1/2 miles from D2. As an excavator shoveled a
mound of earth into a dump truck to be transported to a nearby Mobil
construction site, the truck driver noticed a shoe lying on the ground.
He jumped out of the cab, picked up the shoe, and collapsed in
shock. It was attached to a severed human leg. The inspector
reported the incident to a Mobil heavy-equipment supervisor at the
construction office. ''He had no reaction,'' says the contractor. ''At
that time, it was normal not to say anything, just keep quiet.'' Mobil
says it has no records or knowledge of such a report.
This discovery was made near an area that was notable for its deep,
wide crevices created by seismic activity. The locals have since
named it ''Skull Hill.'' The reason, they say, was hard to miss. The
stench of rotting human flesh on Skull Hill could be smelled half a
mile away. When Bil Maruf, headman of Dusun Cermai, went bird-
hunting in the area one day, he found three corpses next to bulldozer
tracks. Skull Hill is on a large expanse of land that Pertamina had
acquired for Mobil to develop, although Mobil was not using the
property at the time, says Jon W. Loader, Mobil's Asia public-
relations manager. Still, a former Mobil employee and two current
Mobil contractors say that company employees traveled that road
every day in 1990 and 1991.
Around the same time, rumors spread of massacres in Bukit
Sentang, a village about 15 miles away from Skull Hill. In 1991, Mobil
used heavy equipment to widen a road that passed through the
village, according to a former employee of Mobil's planning
department who used the road to reach a Mobil-operated gas field
farther south. ''Every time I drove out there, the subcontractors
stopped my car,'' says the source. ''They said, 'No, don't go out
there. Don't you know the army is killing people and burying them in
mass graves with Mobil equipment?''' This became a topic of
lunchtime conversation at Mobil's Bachelor Camp mess hall, but it
never went into an official report, he says. Mobil says it does not
know of its equipment being used in that area.
Yusuf Kasim, a local farmer, knew the grounds well. He says the
army paid him $4 a night to stand guard over a borrowed excavator to
prevent anyone from siphoning fuel from its tank. He says he
watched soldiers execute 60 to 70 blindfolded Acehnese men at a
time with M-16 rifles, shooting them in the back so they tumbled face-
first into a mass grave across the rice field from his house. He claims
he recognized one victim, Sulaiman, as a Mobil contractor. Sulaiman
had been held at the army barracks at Post A-13, which is across
the street from a Mobil well. ''The bullets didn't kill Sulaiman, so the
soldiers ordered the backhoe operator to cut him in half with the
shovel,'' Kasim recalls. Mobil says it has no knowledge of the man or
the incident. In late August, the National Commission on Human
Rights disinterred human remains at Bukit Sentang in a somber
ceremony. An Aceh-based human rights group photographed
villagers removing an intact pair of blue jeans from a skeleton.
VANISHED. Sulaiman was hardly the only Acehnese who
disappeared. On July 10, 1990, an army officer walked into the office
of Mobil's production department and walked out with T. Abdullah
Baharuddin, a nine-year Mobil employee. A colleague later told his
widow, Hasnidar, then nursing their one-month-old son, that the
officer had first asked permission from Baharuddin's superiors but
had no arrest warrant. So she complained to Baharuddin's boss and
to a Mobil public-relations manager. More than a year later, on Aug.
21, 1991, Hasnidar finally received a letter from Mobil a year later. It
said that Baharuddin's employment had been terminated and that he
was to receive $3,500 in severance pay ''in line with existing
company policy.'' Detainees released from Rancong later told her
they had seen Baharuddin there. Explains Loader: ''Mobil did inquire
through appropriate government channels of Baharuddin's status and
learned that he had been detained by the authorities for security
reasons.'' And Mobil points out that no company can stop lawful
arrests on its premises.
P.T. Arun also says it had little control over Rancong once the
military commandeered the facility in 1990. ''They said they need to
use our facilities for 'security purposes.' We could say nothing,''
recalls a Pertamina official familiar with the plant. ''They were the
army.'' The army even asked P.T. Arun to donate sarongs--local
garments--so that prisoners could wear them while praying at a
company mosque. On Fridays, P.T. Arun employees prayed
alongside pale, gaunt prisoners, he adds.
Given how tense the situation was, it is fair to ask what a company
in Mobil's predicament should have done. If Mobil had witnessed
human rights abuses in Aceh, the company says it would have
protested such abuse to Pertamina and to Jakarta. It also says it
would have referred issues involving potential criminal conduct to
appropriate authorities. This is in line with what ethics experts
suggest. ''Any time a corporation is in the middle of human rights
violations, it needs to say something,'' says Human Rights Watch
Executive Director for Asia Sidney Jones. ''They don't have to be
public about it.''
But say the worst is true--that Mobil knew of the killings and did
nothing. In terms of a company's legal responsibility, U.S. law is
murky because there is no precedent. The Alien Tort Claims Act
allows U.S. companies to be sued for wrongful actions committed
overseas. In the last few years, human rights organizations and
foreign victims have filed suits in U.S. courts seeking damages for
activities by Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria, Unocal in Burma, and
Texaco in Ecuador. The cases remain in the courts.
Meanwhile, Mobil's operations are going strong in the Aceh area, and
its business there remains a lifeline for the struggling Indonesian
economy. And as the country painfully examines its past, all those
in Aceh--villagers, soldiers, and corporations--must come to grips
with a terrible legacy.
By Michael Shari in Lhokseumawe, Indonesia, with Pete Engardio
and Sheri Prasso in New York
___________________________________
RELATED ITEMS
MAP: The Killing Fields of Aceh
___________________________________
Jusfiq Hadjar gelar Sutan Maradjo Lelo =
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