Aceh
The conflict in Aceh, Indonesia does not get much coverage in the U.S, and only passing commentary in Australia, mostly by the leftist press, such as the Green Left Weekly.
I blogged on No Data Source in July last year how the situation in Aceh has progressed:
The conflict in Aceh, Indonesia does not get much coverage in the U.S, and only passing commentary in Australia, mostly by the leftist press, such as the Green Left Weekly.
I blogged on No Data Source in July last year how the situation in Aceh has progressed:
The people of the Indonesian province of Aceh have been fighting an independence struggle for 27 years against the Jakarta government. With many of their leaders in exile in Sweden, the Indonesian military has launched another brutal (on the military’s own admission!) sweep against the Free Aceh movement (GAM). The solution? Direct the war by SMS text messages on mobile phones to the independence fighters on the ground.
In December, Human Rights Watch published a damning report of the Indonesian military and government behaviour in pursuit of the GAM. This was refuted by the Indonesian government, stating that had HRW visited Aceh they would have seen that the situation was not dire. However commentators noted the convenient omission by the Indonesian government that inspections by outsiders had been banned!
Self-determination of all peoples, as in the case of East Timor, is upheld by the U.N charter. Just on February 9th, 2004, another 18 Acehnese were killed, March 25th another 10, March 31st another 12, not including other smaller groups reported killed. Such killing is fully supported by U.S. weapons shipments to Indonesia, while the U.S. state department is simultaneously criticising the Indonesian military’s human rights record.
With Aceh, Australia and the U.S. are closely matching their “softly, softly” policy towards Indonesia’s brutal repression of East Timorese in the 1975-1999 war. That policy, chiefly engineered by Kissinger, lead to 2/3s of the East Timorese population to be massacred. In the end all it achieved was the complete destruction of the country before the self-declared “policeman” and his “sheriff” of the world did anything about it.
HRW today issued a report citing the illegal nature of Malaysia’s forced return of Acehnese seeking refugee status. Malaysia, which has a functional form of apartheid – reserving favourable jobs for Bumiputra (native Malay) to the exclusion of the Chinese and Indian citizens (66% of the population) – refuses to recognise any form of refugees.
A good site for Indonesian political issues is laksamana.net.