From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Friday, 1 January 1999 07:04
Subject: News from Mobil
RIGHTS-INDONESIA: Oil Giant Accused of Aiding Army Atrocities
By Pratap Chatterjee
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 29 (IPS) - Mobil, the U.S. oil multinational, is
keeping a low profile as investigators probe allegations that it
helped Indonesia's armed forces in massacres near Mobil drilling sites
in the province of Aceh, northern Sumatra.
Business Week, one of the biggest magazines in the United States, last
week published a six-page feature on the company titled: 'What did
Mobil Know? Mass graves suggest a brutal war on local Indonesian
guerillas in the oil giant's backyard'.
The revelations came shortly after two other U.S. companies - Freeport
McMoRan of New Orleans and CalEnergy of Omaha - were accused of
business malpractices in Indonesia by investigative journalists at the
Wall Street Journal.
All three exposes were published in the last few months since the fall
of General Suharto's 32 year-old regime has allowed new light to be
shed on the roles of foreign multinationals in the south-east Asian
country's affairs.
Mobil owns 35 percent of P.T. Arun, a liquefied natural-gas producer
in Aceh while Pertamina, Indonesia's state-owned oil monopoly, holds
the controlling 55-percent stake. Aceh provides an estimated 30
percent of Indonesia's total oil and gas exports or 11 percent of the
country's total exports.
Mass killings and disappearances near the Mobil drilling site had been
rumoured for a decade, ever since the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh
Movement), a local separatist group, began to attack Mobil
installations in 1980.
Earlier this year the Human Rights Commission substantiated these
rumours when they began to exhume the bodies of hundreds of people,
who had been tortured and killed, from a dozen graves.
The Business Week article begins with a gruesome picture of an
Indonesian soldier examining a skull dug up from a mass grave. The
article quotes Mobil's denials but also points out that the company
admitted providing food, fuel and digging equipment for the soldiers
who guarded the region for three decades.
One former Mobil employee told Business Week rumours of massacres and
unconfirmed reports that Mobil equipment was being used to dig graves
were frequently discussed at workplaces and in a company cafeteria.
''Every time I drove out there (Bukit Sentang), the subcontractors
stopped my car. 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?'' he said.
An estimated 39,000 people have disappeared since the region was
placed under military occupation in 1980, according to local
activists. In Bukit Sentang, after an estimated 150 bodies were found
earlier this year, Baharuddin Lopa, secretary general of the
Indonesian government-backed National Commission on Human Rights,
said: ''This proves that Aceh has been a killing field''.
One male whose body was dug up had been blindfolded, dressed only in
underwear, with his arms bound behind his back by an army belt. The
area of the graves, an expanse of scrub between a forest and an oil
palm plantation, is nicknamed 'Lubang Neraka', meaning the 'Holes of
Hell' by local people.
On Oct. 10, a coalition of 17 Indonesian human rights organizations
issued a statement saying Mobil was ''responsible for human rights
abuses'' by providing crucial logistic support to the army, including
earth-moving equipment that was used to dig mass graves.
This declaration prompted Business Week to send journalists to do
detailed on-the-spot interviews with local people.
Yusuf Kasim, a local farmer who spoke to Business Week, said the army
paid him four US dollars a night to stand guard over a borrowed
excavator to prevent anyone from siphoning fuel from its tank. He said
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 a rice field from his house.
The publication of the Business Week article caused a stir: the
National Human Rights Commission announced on Christmas Eve that it
would launch an investigation. ''We have to learn whether this
information is accurate and clarify these reports,'' said Mohammed
Salim, a member of the commission.
Michael Robinson, a press spokesman for Mobil at its Virginia
headquarters, told IPS the company was not willing to discuss the
matter beyond a short official statement. ''Mobil strongly denies the
implications contained in the article, which are based largely on
unsubstantiated allegations, rumours and innuendo about allegations
that took place outside Mobil's operations and control,'' ran the
statement.
But activists like George Ajitondro, an Indonesian academic who lives
in exile, say Mobil's operations have also devastated local
communities who depend on agriculture and fish farming, through forced
relocations, numerous oil and industrial spills into the rivers, sea
and bay, erosion of their riverside gardens and extreme noise
pollution.
Indeed, gas explosions have plagued communities for more than 20
years. As recently as December 1997, some 1,600 people had to flee
from their homes after three natural gas wells erupted, spewing tonnes
of mud over their villages near Tanjungkarang and Dalam. Nine houses
collapsed and 188 were damaged as a result.
In mid-1991, it was reported that around 60 percent of fisherfolk in
traditional villages in the Lhokseumawe area were living below the
poverty line, and were even close to starvation, because of critically
low catches over the previous three years.
These environmental disasters are among the major reasons why local
people have complained about Mobil, not unlike communities elsewhere,
such as the Ijaw and Ogoni in Nigeria, who have faced similar problems
as a result of multinational oil drilling.
Like the Acehese, the Ogoni and the Ijaw have suffered greatly for
raising their voices against the oil companies. Chevron, a San
Francisco-based oil multinational, was accused of sanctioning the
killing of Ijaw protestors at a well site in Nigeria in May.
Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil multinational, has been found guilty of
providing the Nigerian military with weapons to use against the Ogoni
while British Petroleum has been accused of training Colombian
soldiers who have killed protestors.
If nothing else, the public spotlight on Mobil has emboldened some
local communities. Earlier this month four inhabitants of Desa Ampeh
in North Aceh took Mobil Indonesia to court for 10 billion rupiah
(1.33 million dollars) for forcibly taking their land and a cemetery
to use as an airfield.
But Mobil's Robinson says that he believes that the lawsuit has no
implications for the U.S. parent company. ''We couldn't have taken
anything from anyone in Indonesia, because we don't own anything in
Indonesia, no land, not even a car.'' (ENDS/IPS/PC/KB/98)
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