From: John Clancy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 07:17:40 -0800
Jakarta's appalling jail violence by US Security in Irian Jaya
Appalling violence with no mercy
in jail cells of Irian Jaya
Arrested by Indonesian police in Irian Jaya for
reporting while on a tourist visa, Swiss journalist
Oswald Iten spent 11 days in jail before being
deported. This is what he saw from his cell.
When the door to the cell slammed shut behind me, the first thing I
noticed was the stench of urine and other human excreta. Then I saw,
through the dim, humidly hot air, bodies lying packed on the filthy
concrete floor. It was one o'clock in the morning.
Someone in the lineup of bodies handed me a cardboard box, so that
I'd at least have something clean to lay my head on.
The police had taken me into custody the previous day and grilled me
for nine hours, because on December 1 I had taken "political photos"
of pro-independence ceremonies, ostensibly not permitted by my
tourist visa.
So there I was, in a cell with about 40 other prisoners. Among them
were 26 members of the Satgas Papua, a militia of the independence
movement which had established posts throughout Irian Jaya, also
known as West Papua, and was responsible for guarding the Morning
Star freedom flag.
Among the prisoners was the militia chief Boy Eluay, son of Theys
Eluay, the head of the Papuan presidium (a body of selected leaders
advocating independence), and Alex Baransano, the city commander of
the Satgas in Port Numbay, as the West Papuans now call Jayapura.
The members of the Satgas Papua were unharmed. But at 4.30am on
Thursday, December 7, noise from the guardroom penetrated the
stuffing I'd put in my ears to help me sleep. At first I thought the
guards were doing some rhythmic gymnastics, but it also sounded
like blows landing on a body. My fellow prisoners were wide awake,
and they tried to hold me back when I went to the entrance of our
cell block. The upper part of the door was merely barred, so I had a
view of the guardroom.
And what I saw there was unspeakably shocking. About half a dozen
policemen were swinging their clubs at bodies that were lying on the
floor and, oddly enough, did not cry out; at most, only soft groans
issued from them. After a few long seconds, a guard saw me
looking and struck his club against the bars of the cellblock door.
I quickly went back to my usual spot, from where I could still see
the clubs, staffs and split bamboo whips at their work. Their ends
were smeared with blood, and blood sprayed the walls all the way up
to the ceiling.
Sometimes I saw the policemen hopping up on benches, continuing to
strike blows from there or jumping back down onto the bodies below
(which I could not see from my cell).
By about 5.15am, things quietened down and I heard the sound of water
from a hose. But then the orgy of torture resumed, apparently with a
new load of prisoners. My fellow inmates told me that a police post
had been attacked during the night.
At one point, a guard came into our cell and indicated to me that
what was going on outside was to be understood as the normal
retribution for the death of policemen. The attack had taken place at
1.30am in the suburb of Abepura, and two policemen and a private
guard had been killed.
At 7.30am the torturers went outside for morning muster, things
quietened down and I looked over into the guardroom: the floor was
covered with blood, as in a slaughterhouse. Some of my fellow
prisoners were ordered out to clean the place up. Shortly before
10 o'clock, noise broke out again.
The cell block door was opened, and with the ends of their staffs the
guards drove about three dozen new prisoners in, whose hair had been
marked with white from a spray can, like sheep earmarked for
shearing. The newcomers were jammed into a single cell. Then the
cell block door was opened again and one body after another was
tossed into our already crowded cell, some of them more dead than
alive.
Most of them remained motionless where they fell, either unconscious
or utterly exhausted. One of the tortured men was virtually blind and
had to be led in by the hand by another prisoner; I couldn't tell
whether his eyes had been totally destroyed or were merely swollen
shut.
The last one to enter was a large man, who fell over the bodies on
the floor and lay there groaning horribly. He tried repeatedly to
straighten himself up, only to fall back down again.
Now and again the faces of guards appeared at the barred window,
looking down impassively at the tangle of maltreated bodies. In the
back of the big man's head, there appeared to be a coin-sized hole
through which I believed to spot some brain tissue. After nearly an
hour and a half of groaning and spasmodic movement, his metres from
me, his powerful body raised itself again and his head struck the
wall.
A final laboured breath issued from him, then his head dropped down
onto the cement floor. At last his agony was over. After a while,
three lackeys came and dragged the body out.
Later I learned that the man who had been tortured to death was named
Ori Dronggi. I saw a picture of his corpse in the newspaper
Cenderawasih Pos. The dispatch said three dead Papuans had been
brought to the morgue, and the police stated they had "died in
the fighting".
I don't know how the other two men died; one of them may have been
the second man I had seen with a hole in his head, who had wiped his
blood away with the same rag my cellmates generally used in their
attempts to keep the toilet clean. I had no longer seen him among the
prisoners the following day.
(All the men who had been arrested after the attack on the police
outpost were released after 36 hours.)
Ori Dronggi was one of 18 men from the highland town of Wamena, all
of whom had been arrested in a dormitory near the university in
Abepura immediately after the attack on the police post. The chances
are he had had nothing to do with the attack; the same was true
of the 35 other men who had been tortured (I had counted them the
following day).
A rumour went around that the police post had been attacked because
one of the men on duty there was the one who had torn the Morning
Star flag down on October 6. About half a dozen Papuans had been
killed back then and in the days after it - and several times
that many Indonesians, who fell victim to the Papuans'
blind vengeance.
As a result of that chain of events, thousands of Indonesian settlers
had fled from Wamena and the Baliem Valley.
The "negative" balance of casualties was seen as a disgrace for the
police; their rage at the people of Wamena had already become
legendary, so it was no surprise when, following the attack at
Abepura, they took prisoners from that group.
Not a hair on my head was touched. In fact, the otherwise sadistic
guards went out of their way to be nice to me. But the mistreatment
of other prisoners continued.
On December 11 I again witnessed a horrible scene. About 2.45am,
three new prisoners were brought in. Two of them were badly beaten
outside my field of vision. The third Papuan fell right in front of
my cell.
A booted guard kicked the man in the head; the prisoner's head banged
loudly against my cell door, blood spurting from it onto my leg. The
guard was apparently fascinated by the head going back and forth
between his boot and the bars of my cell door, like some outsized
ping-pong ball, so he kicked it a few more times. A second
guard joined in with a swift kick to the middle of the
prisoner's face, knocking him unconscious. But that still
wasn't enough.
A third guard, who had been watching the scene with rifle in hand,
now struck the butt of his weapon about five times into the senseless
man's skull, which made a horrible sound. I could hardly believe it,
but the victim was still alive the next day. He was taken away
for interrogation.
After 12 days, Jakarta issued an order for my deportation. The fact
that I was not harmed in the prison at Jayapura was due, among other
things, to the swift arrival of a Swiss embassy official from
Jakarta.
But several dozen less privileged prisoners remained back in the
cell, with the Satgas militiamen still among them. Their life in
prison will doubtless continue to be as I experienced it, marked by
violence.
Each morning, while the police hold their muster, a loudspeaker
broadcasts the Indonesian national anthem through the prison bars. At
that point, the Papuans in their cells join in singing their
independence anthem.
Neue Zurcher Zeitung
**********
from: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
subject: PapuaNew Guinea turmoil
Rascal gangs and mismanagement
By Kevin Ricketts in Port Moresby
Expatriate jokesters are wont to distort pidgin English and refer to
Papua New Guinea as "Papa u give mi", relentless in its pursuit of
handouts from the "father", Australia.
But with an even hand, they disparage the Australian High Commission
residential compound here as "Fort S--- Scared". And as with all
aphorisms, there is an element of truth in both.
Twenty-five years after independence, PNG is almost a basket case in
terms of government services, or lack thereof.
Greed, mismanagement or lack of funding has gutted supposedly self-
sufficient or profitable enterprises such Superannuation Fund,
police, the corrective (prisons) service, the army - the list goes
on.
And when PNG is in trouble, PNG turns to Australia, whose taxpayers
already fund 25 per cent of the national budget with annual
injections of more than half a billion dollars.
PNG also gratefully takes more multi-millions from the European
Union, Japan- (for its timber JC), the Asian Development Bank, the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In short, PNG is the
Third World, and it knows it.
Ausaid, Australia's official overseas development agency, has grown
into a corporate empire here, assessing, approving and doling out
development contracts to private enterprise suppliers (most
Australian-based companies, but some local) in the areas of health,
education, corrective services, justice, the police and the army.
With rapes, robberies and bashings of Australians here getting more
publicity in Australia than the same crimes in Sydney, some
expatriates are paranoid about their safety.
In 15 years, the capital Port Moresby has changed from a post-
colonial garden city of leafy bungalow suburbs to an Asian or Africa-
like place of walled, razor-wired, burglar-alarmed, guarded
"compounds" - blocks of flats where the last thing the "madam" does
at night is secure the "rape gate" lock on the bedroom door.
The Australian High Commission's residential compound is one such
block of flats, a mini-suburb complete with swimming pools, tennis
courts and a pub-sized bar within a huge zig-zagging enclosure of
cement and razor-wire.
PNG began its year in a similar fashion to which it ended it - rapes
of expatriate women by "raskol" (rascal) gangs at the start of the
Kokoda Track, just 40 kilometres from central Port Moresby.
In between January and November, an expatriate man had his arm hacked
off and one eye almost gouged out in an assault in his own bedroom
and an Australian woman was stabbed and shot to death in a daylight
robbery in the northern city of Lae.
But then a couple of indigenous judges and doctors were also bashed
and assaulted, and the police commissioner had his car stolen. No-one
is safe from raskols if they are in the wrong place at the wrong
time.
With 50,000 grade 10 drop-outs from high schools flooding a market
without jobs every year and squatters setting up homes just behind
the compounds, only wealth and employment will end PNG's law and
order problem.
The Defence Force is a basket case. The 5,000-man army began the year
with a pay and conditions protest in which they chased off their
commanding officer.
By September they were stoning police in Port Moresby and burning
down their Australian colonial-era built headquarters at Moem
Barracks, Wewak.
But not all has gone wrong. The Prime Minister, Sir Mekere Morautu,
has enacted or enforced laws on transparency in government and
reconstructed the battered economy.
PNG also made progress towards a more stable political climate with
the July announcement of laws to enforce loyalty to parties by MPs.
The unexpected is always expected in PNG politics. AAP
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