Articles - Inside Indonesia: The peoples and cultures of Indonesia

Putting the (Para)Military Back Into Politics

The taskforces of the political parties Phil King Megawati's Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) claims to have over thirty thousand of them. By the time of his death, West Papuan 'separatist' leader Theys Eluay had over 5,000 of them. During the 1999 election campaign one of the smaller parties in Yogyakarta only had a couple of dozen, but would borrow a few from the PDIP on occasion. They are satgas members, the ubiquitous muscle machinery of the political parties that has bloomed in the post-Suharto era. What are the satgas? Why have they emerged with such vigour? And what is the consequence of their presence in Indonesian politics? Satgas (satuan tugas) translates as 'taskforce'. While now a synonym for party security forces, the term satgas is more widely used. A taskforce may be established to lead an initiative in public health or food distribution. Recently a satgas was formed to help in the repatriation of Indonesian workers ejected in Malaysia's most recent crackdown on guest workers. But it is the type of satgas associated with militarism, violence, and characters like Eurico Guterres that has come to assert itself in the public sphere over the last five years. Led and legitimised by the big political parties and fed by various criminal syndicates and 'youth groups', satgas have expanded across the archipelago. Here, I will only focus on the para-military wings of the larger political parties. Private armies Satgas parpol, or political party militias, have existed since the early 1980s. Although there is a significant overlap between them and earlier mass organisations, satgas emerged as a specific response to the violence of the 1982 general election and the New Order's ensuing war on gangterism. Previously curtailed in size by local military commanders and Golkar-sponsored 'youth groups', these militias mushroomed after the fall of Suharto and the re-establishment of competitive party politics. Absent in the first national election in 1955, the satgas became a ubiquitous, fatigue-clad fusion of recycled pemuda (youth) rhetoric and New Order thuggery in the 1999 election. The massive expansion of party militias thrived on the recruitment of the more mercenary members of the disenfranchised urban milieu, ever deepening in the wake of the economic crisis. Essentially, reformasi was a liberalisation of both party politics and underworld criminal activities. The satgas have been the most astute beneficiaries of both processes. For the major parties, the satgas are little more than private armies. The internal structure of satgas units replicates military orders of hierarchy from the regional commander down to the platoon. Other parallels are found in the existence of logistics and intelligence wings, fatigues and jackboots, and training drills. Both Golkar and PKB have a floating pool of 'strategic reserves' in addition to 'territorial' troops. When a satgas member is accused of any violation of civil liberties, the response from commanders is always that 'he was acting as an individual at the time'. The imitation of the military is so flawless that when one regional commander interviewed during the 1999 election described the style of his troops as 'semi-military', I could only assume that this meant that they didn't carry automatic weapons. Indeed, becoming a satgas member is a little like joining the army without having to go through all the calisthenics and barkings of sergeants. The satgas themselves are diverse in character. When it comes to joining up, membership criterion is relatively open (unless you are female). Commanders are often former military men or veterans from New Order mass organisations. In Java, a fair proportion of satgas adhere to beliefs and practices which might be termed invulnerability cults. Generally affable, satgas members certainly reject the trivialisation of their character as a new breed of urban cowboys. In many ways, heavy responsibilities are placed on the shoulders of satgas. Foremost amongst them is the organisation of party campaign parades. Routes must be planned to avoid opposition neighbourhoods and bottlenecks. Troops are stationed along the trail, radio communications are utilised, blow-fly sunglasses are obligatory. Crowds are constantly scanned for signs of disturbance from agent provocateurs. Elite squads act as bodyguards for the party hierarchy while more humble footsoldiers help in the supply of cotton wool for participants and spectators. (Parades are noisy.) With their feet up and sipping cold tea in the shade, the police and marines assigned to my street for the 1999 election thought the satgas were to be congratulated for taking all the work out of their work. For all their utility as traffic wardens and deputised keepers of the peace, there are also the satgas that kidnap opposition pamphleteers, beat up journalists, and chase rivals down the main street waving machetes. During the 1999 election campaign, the satgas of PPP-Yogyakarta (United Development Party) demonstrated that thuggery is not without a sense of irony when they attacked and burnt an anti-violence protest site on Jalan Malioboro. Golkar's satgas stoned the party's Menteng headquarters in Jakarta and trashed the car of party chief Akbar Tanjung over a pay dispute. Battles Rivalries between the satgas of PDIP, PPP and PKB (National Awakening Party) were particularly violent throughout central Java. The PKB acronym was rephrased as the National Destruction Party due to the violent reputation of its militias. Satgas were lamented as the worst hangover of the Soeharto era to persist into the reformasi period. In a survey by the daily newspaper Jawa Pos in 2000, 87% of respondents said that the satgas of the reformasi era were far worse than those of the New Order. Unfortunately, things did not come to a halt with the election. Satgas have proven to have a life far beyond the campaign period. President Abdurrahman Wahid's veiled threats that Ansor and Banser (effectively components of the his party's security apparatus) would brook no interference with his presidency regularly put Jakartans on edge. Parliamentary sittings since 1999 have been accompanied by the regular occupation of Jakarta by para-military groups from the provinces. Satgas are now part of a party arms race. While the argument exists that satgas organisations offer direction and discipline to disenfranchised youths, plenty of hot-heads appear to thrive in them. Competition to control economic rents and run rackets in particular localities is the usual trigger for violence, something that can occur between rival satgas units within a single party. A further problem emerges at the point of contact between these security organisations and the civilian party structure. In some parties such as PAN, the satgas structure is subordinated to the authority of the district executive. Co-ordination is achieved via the civilian executive and satgas protocol exists in the form of a nation-wide manifesto. The opposite situation is found in PDIP, where satgas units exist independently of party structure. They are self-financed and are often split in their support of rival factions within the party. Megawati's footsoldiers In the wake of the 1999 election, various instances have emerged where the selection of candidates for regional legislatures was marred by inter-satgas conflict. The devolution of political authority to the city and district levels under local autonomy laws has exacerbated the situation. As the value of district legislature seats has sky-rocketed, the stakes have risen between rival candidates who enter into informal coalitions with satgas commanders to boost their chances of success. One of the more infamous cases was the March 2001 beating and fatal stabbing of a district PDIP satgas commander in Gunung Kidul, Yogayakarta which took place in full view of a delegation of provincial PDIP parliamentarians. The incident was linked to factional rivalries within the party branch that threatened the satgas unit's access to a key funding source. It is the para-military wing of the PDIP that raises the most concern for the future. In May 2002 they turned a Medan courtroom upside down when the judge postponed a verdict against a defendent accused of murdering a comrade. They have been implicated in various instances of violence and intimidation against journalists and NGOs. Most recently, they harassed and forcefully disbanded a People's Democracy Front (FDR) parade in Solo, Central Java, on the grounds that the placard 'Megawati Soehartoputri' was insulting. Legally they have no such power, though the partisanship of the state security forces is generally reflected by their inaction. The irony of the incident was that the parade was in remembrance of the brutal July 1996 attack on PDI headquarters by Suharto thugs. Having inherited the mantle of their former tormentors, the satgas PDIP looks set to repeat history. The satgas of the political parties are the new forces of violent conservatism in Indonesian politics. Demobilisation appears impossible. The 2004 election is guaranteed to see a further spiralling of violence between rival para-military organisations. Phil King (pk01@uow.edu.au) is a PhD candidate at University of Wollongong and is working on a project on the Thai-Malay border. He is currently lecturing in Southeast Asian Politics at University of Sydney. Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003

Self-reliant Militias

Homegrown security forces wield great power in Lombok John M. MacDougall It was mid-October, 1998, in Malang, East Java. I was sitting in a friend's house watching television coverage of Indonesian students demonstrating in the streets of Jakarta. They were protesting against the entire government: President Habibie, the military, and the parliament. After forcing Suharto from power in May 1998, they were angry that the new government seemed to be nothing but a continuation of the old. Confronting the students were thousands of civilians organised into what was called a pamswakarsa, or self-reliant security corps. General Wiranto, then head of the Indonesian military, had suggested that such a corps be formed to counter a 'revolutionary' movement planning to topple President Habibie. As press coverage later revealed, the pamswakarsa in Jakarta in October 1998 was, contrary to its name, not self-reliant - they had been paid by the government. They were largely unemployed men bussed in from small towns and villages in West Java with the lure of a good day's wage. Back to Malang. Just outside my friend's house, his neighbors had recently formed vigilante groups to protect their families from 'ninja' attacks. There had been a spate of mysterious killings of 'black magicians' (dukun santet) in East Java. These vigilante groups were not called pamswakarsa but they were, in a sense, vigilant self-reliant security groups. Like many young men throughout Indonesia in the uncertain days of 1998, when Suharto's old political system was breaking down, they organised patrols to guard their neighborhoods from the intrusion of 'dark elements' and 'criminals', who were all assumed to be from outside the community. These two cases of civilian security forces, one in Jakarta, the other in Malang, represent two different phenomena. While the former was a rent-a-mob organised by a bureaucracy for political purposes, the latter was organised by volunteers within a neighborhood for purposes of local patrolling. Interpretations of the rise of vigilante groups in Indonesia often alternate between the poles illustrated by these two groups. They have been construed as either sinister products of a military conspiracy to fracture civil society or popular efforts to uphold the community in the absence of a state. These two poles of interpretation, however, do not exhaust all the possibilities. As I will try to show through a case study of Lombok, a pamswakarsa can emerge from the society itself but do so in a way that recreates the state's militarism on a more communal level. If the society was policed during the Suharto era by a centralised military, it is being policed today in a no less brutal fashion by homegrown civilian security groups. The sad fact is that in this post-Suharto period the largest 'civilian' organisation on the island is a pamswakarsa. Vigilantes in Lombok On the island of Lombok, where I spent the better part of two years from 1998 to 2000, pamswakarsa groups first emerged to counter crime. Under the banner of the nationally validated moniker, pamswakarsa, Lombok's men, young and old, joined groups with such names as Amphibi, Ababil, Elang Merah, and Bujak. These groups vowed to protect their communities from thieves. Within a year after the fall of Suharto in 1998, Lombok was teeming with civilian security groups. The first of these groups was Bujak (Pemburu Jejak, Tracker). With a base in the district of Central Lombok, it began in 1997 when the economic crisis had just hit. There was a panic about crime. Bujak developed a bounty hunter service where they would guarantee the return of stolen goods provided they were given a payment in return. Behind the veil of Bujak's community service, it became known that many of Bujak's members were ex-criminals themselves and were suspected to be working with thieves to extort money. One of Lombok's religious clerics, disturbed at the overlap between Bujak and the criminals, organised his own group from the Islamic center of Jeroaru, in East Lombok. Named Amphibi (for unclear reasons), this pamswakarsa became extraordinarily popular. By August 1999, their numbers in East Lombok alone exceeded 100,000. The groundswell of support came from villagers who wished to resist the powerful network of thieves preying upon their property, especially their livestock. The members themselves funded the organisation. The cleric, Tuan Guru Sibaway, and his brother, a mystic named Guru Ukit, offered membership, complete with a supernaturally charged invulnerability jacket, for the relatively large sum of Rp 103,000 [US$12]. Ex-criminals, youths, and occasionally prominent political officials signed up. Amphibi's coffers swelled with their ranks, allowing them to purchase walkie-talkies and trucks. While Bujak's primary focus was upon the retrieval of stolen goods, Amphibi focused on capturing the criminal. The alleged thieves caught by Amphibi were given the opportunity to tobat (repent) and join the organization to hunt their former partners in crime. 'Those who returned to the ways of criminality were given a three strike rule. After the third violation they would be classified as escapees and an escapee is as good as dead', commented one Amphibi member of Eastern Lombok. The tension between Bujak and Amphibi turned into a bloody, full-scale battle in August 1999. Amphibi managed to defeat its rival from Central Lombok at a battle in the village of Penne, a village straddling the border between the two districts. The expansion of Amphibi With Bujak out of the way, Amphibi's scope expanded into Central and West Lombok, drawing an additional 100,000 members to its ranks. Amphibi moved into the northern regions of West Lombok after the anti-Christian riots of 17 January 2000. Its security posts could be found throughout both northern Lombok and Mataram, two areas with historical tensions with East Lombok. Lombok's northern communities had not only sided with Balinese colonial forces in the nineteenth century, they continued to practice 'animistic' traditions of the Sasak ethnic group. Such traditions had been eliminated in Muslim communities throughout East and Central Lombok. Amphibi is a distinctly Muslim organisation but does not have missionary ambitions outside of Lombok. It does not imagine itself to be part of a nationwide or global Muslim movement. Similar to the reformist Islamic effort to remove Sasak society of the residual Hindu practices of their Balinese colonial past, Amphibi endeavors to purge Sasak communities of criminal networks. If Amphibi had been widely seen as a protective ally in its home base of East Lombok, it was viewed as a fearful intruder in northern Lombok. In an interview with an Islamic leader in northern Lombok, it was evident that Amphibi's expansion was not commonly supported there: 'These Amphibi are scaring us. Our [Islamic] teachers are from the East [Lombok], true, but these Amphibi take the heads of their victims. 'They take our heads.' The rise of Amphibi also threatened the Hindu Balinese communities in Mataram. On 21 December 1999, Amphibi beheaded a Balinese noble suspected of being a middleman for crime networks. Since no Amphibi members were arrested for the decapitation, the Balinese felt it necessary to establish their own pamswakarsa, named Dharma Wicesa. Balinese aristocrats and priests were commissioned to lead Dharma Wicesa and provide local Balinese men with the same mystical invulnerability as their Amphibi rivals. The religious polarisation between Muslim Amphibi and Hindu Dharma Wicesa can be trumped by local loyalties. When Amphibi attacked the West Lombok village of Perampauan in October 2000, the villagers, Muslims included, refused to allow Amphibi to apprehend Balinese suspects living in the village. According to a legal aid lawyer present at the scene, the Amphibi members threatened, 'We will attack your village because you dare to protect infidels instead of siding with your fellow Muslims.' The Muslim villagers stood by their Balinese neighbours and defeated Amphibi's thousand-man attack. The Balinese pamswakarsa rushed to the village to defend their fellow Balinese only to be forced away as well. Amphibi lost that day in Perampauan but continued to attack smaller villages in West Lombok before local officials pressured the leadership to stop the anti-Balinese campaign. Militarisation from above and below How should we interpret the rise of Amphibi in Lombok? In some respects, it resembles the East Javanese men in Malang defending their communities. As such a large mass-based organisation, it has to be responding to a widespread felt need. In other respects, it resembles the government-backed militia in Jakarta. The members of Amphibi do not just defend their own neighborhoods; they head out into battle and expand into other districts. In Lombok, local police, military, and government officials have joined, legitimated, and encouraged the organisation for lack of any other means of controlling or guiding it. Indonesia's young men have begun to play a crucial role in politics as Suharto's authoritarianism has been transformed into multi-party parliamentary politics. Yet these young men are, for the first time in their lives, politically useful without a clear definition of what 'political' is. In the words of an East Lombok lawyer, 'Most of Amphibi's members consist of men who didn't exist in the eyes of the state during the New Order. Now, with their new orange jackets, the police, their communities, and religious leaders treat them with respect and caution. During Suharto's era, if the military slapped them they would break into tears. Now, it is their turn to do the slapping.' John M. MacDougall (jomon@indo.net.id) is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Princeton University. Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003

The Model Militia

A new security force in Bali is cloaked in tradition Degung Santikarma Two months ago, I received an e-mail from a Western friend living in Bali. He thought that I, as a Balinese and an anthropologist, might be able explain a disturbing incident in his neighborhood. Dear Degung, A few days ago I was a witness to an episode which I have enormous difficulties understanding and I wish you to help me in finding an anthropological frame to rationalise it. I was at home at 9 p.m. and watching TV with my kids when the kul-kul alarm bells started sounding all around my house and people started screaming: 'Maling!' Thieves had broken into a neighbour's house. The burglars ran away without taking anything from the house. In a very short time many youngsters from my village and the villages nearby began the hunt, screaming in the meantime: 'Matiang!' 'Bunuh!' etc. We were terrified. After a short time the thieves were found: three young boys, 12 to 13 years old, from Lombok. One of them managed to escape. The other two were killed on the spot. Since then I have had terrible feelings of guilt and find myself totally unable to accept what had happened. I would very much appreciate your reading of this barbaric episode as a Balinese and an anthropologist. How and why can things like this happen and how can the people involved survive with the feeling of guilt and how do the villages and banjars come to terms with it? I will value and appreciate very much your opinion. Thanks, your very shocked friend. On reading this letter, I was saddened, disgusted and angered - emotions that only grew stronger after my friend called to say that his own 12-year-old son, who had witnessed the killing of these boys his own age, had been so traumatised that he was nearly catatonic. I could not, any more than my friend, rationalise or explain this killing of children. It was hard to consider why I should want to, as my friend asked, 'rationalize' this event, to the extent that giving it an explanatory framework could make men who were, after all, killers of children seem 'rational'. I did not know how to respond. This was not the usual kind of question I receive from foreigners puzzled by, say, a Balinese tooth-filing ceremony or a trance dance in which people stab themselves. As I thought about the incident, I realised was that I was not shocked by it in the same way my friend was. Anyone who has spent much time in Bali recently knows that such events are occurring with increasing frequency. I began to wonder what kind of social and cultural conditions are making violence in Bali not only possible but increasingly likely to the extent that few Balinese find it shocking or problematic. Invisibility of Violence in Bali This issue of violence in Bali is difficult to raise for several reasons. The first is that while Bali is no stranger to violence, discussions of it rarely take place in public. During the thirty-two years of Suharto dictatorship, the state was a clear force restraining such discourse. It was considered dangerous to discuss the violence in 1965-66, when up to 100,000 Balinese or 5-8% of the island's population were killed. There was an official narrative of the events but no public space available for alternative interpretations. Raising the perspective of the victims or questioning the narrative that portrayed the deaths as morally justified, was to risk becoming labeled 'communist' oneself. Even with the fall of Suharto, the trauma of the victims of the 1965-66 violence and their families continues to shade Balinese life and ways of speaking, making people reluctant to bring up incidents of continuing violence in their communities. Tourism has also acted as a restraint on discussions of violence. The prerequisite for tourism is a sense of safety, order and stability. Tourists are reluctant to travel to places that they believe to be violent. For many Balinese, 'safety' has real economic consequences, as has become obvious in the wake of the October 2002 bombing. It is no wonder that the murders that occurred in front of my friend's house - like dozens of other such incidents that occur every year - did not make it into the pages of the Bali Post. And it was no wonder that I, living six villages away, did not hear about the event, and probably never would have heard about the event, had it not been for an e-mail from a Western friend. The third reason why public discussions of violence are rare is that the Balinese cannot imagine themselves as 'violent'. The Indonesian words like kekerasan or kerusuhan seem alien to their self-image. Such words seem applicable only to areas like Ambon or Aceh. When incidents of violence are publicised, especially conflicts between members of different villages, the media does not usually use the term 'violence'. Instead, it uses the euphemism 'kasus adat',or customary law dispute, as if the incidents represented traditional tribal rivalries rather than modern conflicts. Violence in Balinese society is usually tucked away as an unexamined aspect of discourses of 'tradition' and 'culture'. Inventing Tradition To explain what I mean by this last statement, I need to turn to the issue of who actually carried out the killing of the children in front of my friend's house. That night, a man spotted three boys on his property and began calling out 'Thief! Thief!' Immediately, a neighbour ran and began pounding on the kul-kul, the wooden drum hanging in the neighborhood meeting hall. He beat out a rhythm signaling that the neighborhood, the banjar, was in a state of emergency. The banjar's drum was then answered by drums in the other banjars of the village. By sounding the kul-kul, this case of transgression against one man's private property immediately became a communal matter requiring the attention of the entire village. It also positioned the incident as a matter of culture, tradition and adat, insofar as the kulkul is a primary symbol of these concepts. Nobody considered calling the police, not simply because the police are often seen as corrupt or incompetent, but because if this was a matter of culture, tradition and adat, it could not simultaneously be seen as a matter for the state. Since the New Order's fall in 1998, the state has been viewed as the force against which culture, tradition and adat need to be empowered. Dozens of men answered the call of the kul-kul. Included among them were the village's pecalangan or security force. They came dressed in their trademark uniforms of sarongs, black and white checkered poleng cloth waistcloths, carrying keris daggers. Together these men hunted down the boys and murdered two of them. While the pecalangan were not the only ones to participate in the killings, their presence added a certain legitimacy to the actions. The pecalangan were also able to smooth things out with the authorities so that none of the villagers responsible for the murders were arrested. Pecalangan groups such as this one have become common in Bali since the New Order ended in 1998. Today virtually every Balinese village has its own pecalangan. Indeed, one of the ironic results of Balinese resentment toward the repressive power exerted by Suharto's New Order state has been Balinese claiming the right to exert that same control over their own communities. In other words, reformasi has not brought a demilitarisation of Balinese life. What has occurred instead has been a remilitarisation. There has been, in the name of culture and tradition, an even deeper penetration of militarisation into the everyday fabric of community. Few people that I spoke with in my own village to the east of Denpasar could explain where the term pecalangan came from or could relate with confidence the history of these groups. Some said that the pecalangan's predecessor was the 'taskforce' of security guards for the 1998 conference of Megawati's party (the PDIP) in Bali. Others said that the pecalangan got their start in the late 1970s when the Bali Arts Festival, the island's major annual cultural event, began using security guards dressed in traditional ceremonial outfits to direct traffic and guard the parking lots. Still others believed that the pecalangan were a modern incarnation of the old palace guards. And those who can still remember the violence of 1965 ventured that the pecalangan were a revival of the gangs responsible for carrying out executions of alleged communists. Despite this lack of consensus about the origins of the pecalangan, most people agreed with the notion, regularly expressed in the mass media, that the pecalangan are 'traditional'. Even those who acknowledged that there had never been anything called a pecalangan in their village before seemed convinced that such groups were part of a Balinese heritage that was being recovered. By drawing upon a notion of 'Balinese tradition', the pecalangan seem to have succeeded in erasing their own modern origins. Guarding Culture The regional government of Bali passed a law in 2002 that formally legitimised the pecalangan: -1) Safety and order in the area of the desa pakraman (village) is carried out by pecalang. 2) Pecalang carry out duties of safeguarding the area of the desa pakraman relating to adat and religion. 3) Pecalang are selected and relieved of their duties by the desa pakraman based upon a village forum. Desa pakraman is a term that has recently become popular among bureaucrats as a replacement for the term desa adat (customary village). This is part of a project to 'Balinise' the language - the word adat comes from Arabic. Pecalangan groups are, in keeping with this regulation, given ritual duties. These may include acting as traffic guards at ceremonies, making sure that sloppily-dressed or badly-behaved tourists are not allowed to enter temple ceremonies, and guarding the cockfights held as part of ceremonies. They also act as enforcers of silence on the day of Nyepi. They patrol the streets to make sure that everyone, Hindu or not, keeps their lights turned off and does not venture out into the streets. For many pecalang, Nyepi becomes an occasion to assert a sense of ethnic identity and even superiority. As one of them said to me, 'On Nyepi we don't just stop people from outside our village or outside Bali. Even the military has to stop if they're on the road and we see them.' Smiling broadly, he said, 'It's too bad Nyepi is just one day.' Depending upon the particular village, however, pecalangan often carry out other duties that have little to do with ritual. In Denpasar, Kuta or Legian, where there are large numbers of non-Balinese inhabitants, the pecalangan have worked together with the police to carry out identity-card raids, traveling from house to house at night to ask the inhabitants to demonstrate that they have registered their current addresses with the government. Typically pecalangan members who assist with such raids are paid a fee for their night's services (according to those I questioned, approximately Rp25,000). In Kesiman, many pecalangan members act as guards for the places of prostitution to be found in the Padanggalak Beach area. In South Bali, they may also provide 'protection' for bar and nightclub owners, receiving monetary subsidies in exchange for ensuring that local residents look kindly upon what goes on in those places. In Nusa Dua, pecalangan receive financing from hotels in exchange for similar protection against local protests concerning land or labour issues. In the Padanggalak Beach area, pecalangan act as guards for brothels. And wherever there is a cockfight, it is virtually certain that the pecalangan will participate, taking a cut of the profits as their fee. Motivations for joining the pecalangan vary. In my village, each banjar is required to send at least two adult male members to join. Most of the men who sign up are those without steady employment. Anyone who works cannot stay up all night patrolling the streets. Becoming part of the pecalangan offers them a bit of money, a sense of pride, and an ability to exert power over those even more marginalised. But what about other Balinese? Why do they feel that the pecalangan are necessary or, at the very least, unobjectionable and tolerable? Traditionally, Balinese ritual is thought to evoke the potential for danger from the unseen world. Those holding rituals would often call upon people with special supernatural abilities, those who could ward off attacks of black magic by those who might be jealous toward those sponsoring the ritual. But it is only recently that people have felt the need to have pecalangan participate in rituals as security guards. Most people I asked about the pecalangan spoke not about their ritual duties but about how they kept things 'safer' in general. A typical comment was that of one man who said, 'We always used to have our motorbikes stolen, but now nobody dares.' Many people, especially in multicultural Denpasar and Kuta, said that because there were now many non-Balinese living in Bali, the pecalangan are necessary to deter theft and violence. Some people saw the police as being too corrupt to fulfill their proper role. While the presence of pecalangan in Bali parallels in many ways the rise of militia groups in other areas of Indonesia, the Bali case presents some important differences. Rather than being demonised in the national and international press, as have so many other militant 'security' groups, especially those who draw upon religion to legitimise themselves, they have been lauded. They have become a kind of model militia. Most recently, pecalangan from villages across South Bali were assigned by the police department to assist with security for a United Nations conference. A police delegation from Japan visited Bali to learn about its 'traditional security system'. Even when the pecalangan become involved in killing, 'culture' is drawn upon to explain their actions. Today 'Balinese culture' is often viewed as a kind of precious object that can be marked with a price tag and sold to tourists through 'cultural tourism'. With culture being reduced to an object, an anxiety has arisen among Balinese who fear that this valuable possession could be lost or stolen. Now that culture has become like an expensive antique preserved in a museum, the pecalangan have become the museum guards. Those who might try to damage or destroy or steal this culture are 'outsiders'. This sense of being under siege translates into a resentment against ethnic others and a belief that all thieves must be non-Balinese. Killing a thief becomes sensible, even honorable, as a defence of culture. Thus nobody who participated in the killing that night in front of my friend's house thought to raise the question: were these boys really thieves even though they were empty-handed? It was enough, in the end, that they were outsiders, for there was far more than private property at stake. What was at stake that night was culture. The killers of those two boys in front of my friend's house that night have not been perceived in Bali as killers for they acted in defence of culture - the culture sounded by the kul-kul drum. Degung Santikarma (cultural@dps.centrin.net.id) is the editor in chief of the monthly magazine Latitudes, published in Denpasar, Bali (http://www.latitudesmagazine.com). Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003

Doing Daily Battle

Street children face police and security guards Rikah and Dede Rikah Suryanto They wear neat uniforms, sport sunglasses, never forget to carry clubs and whistles, always stand erect, and guide traffic in a busy intersection. Perhaps that is the usual image of policemen. Each person probably has a different image. It depends on the context in which they come to know policemen. Street children know policemen very well even though they aren't on good terms with them. In the eyes of street children, the police appear to be people whose only job is to scare them. With their menacing looks, big boots, and long clubs, they are always ready to chase and beat up street children. The typical policeman is like a wild cat that tirelessly chases after a rat. You've probably seen from behind your car windows when stopped at a red light, the sight of a policeman, perhaps just to fill up his time, running after a child begging or selling newspapers. And you've seen barefoot children being shooed out of a shopping mall by security guards. We don't see much of the army but we see a lot of the police and security guards. Being punched or kicked by the police and security guards has become as routine as waking up in the morning for street children. With the chasing and the fighting, the story might appear as if it is like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. But there is another side to that story that is terrible and tragic - a side that isn't some drama on TV or something happening in a foreign country. Sometimes the violence is so extreme that the child is seriously wounded or killed. Just last month in the next neighborhood down the road, two street children died after being chased out of an area by security guards. They tried to save themselves from the guards by jumping into a canal. They couldn't swim and wound up drowning. I can imagine why they wanted so desperately to avoid getting caught. Street children not only get beaten, sometimes they are taken to what is called 'rehabilitation,' which is a like a prison for children. I read in a book compiled by a non-governmental organisation in Jakarta about one street kid who survived being shot by the police. He said, 'The thing I wanted to steal was owned by the police. I didn't know that. This policeman immediately came out of his car and pulled out a gun. He shot me in the chest and the bullet went right through me. I was bleeding all over but he still came over and kicked me until I was unconscious.' Children are still children, whoever and wherever they are, whether they are living on the street or in a big fancy house. All children have a right to go to school, play with their friends, and obtain enough food to live. In Indonesia, the government doesn't respect those rights. Indeed, the security forces themselves, in the name of security, make life more difficult for street children. But we have rights too. Dede Puji What I see in my neighborhood is that the ones who are supposed to uphold law and order and make the community feel safe are precisely the ones that make us feel unsafe. Let me give you a small example. There is a low level officer of the navy who lives in my neighborhood. He uses his position in the military to shield himself from the law. One day, a factory nearby was closing down and moving to a different location. It opened up its gates for local people to come in and take things that the company was going to leave behind. We were all quite happy to get some materials for free. The first day that people were allowed inside everything went smoothly. But on the second day this military officer and his colleagues began taking away some of the large valuable equipment that the company was going to move and keep using. Seeing that, some of the local people started grabbing some of that equipment too. After a few days, the owners discovered that their property was being looted. The military officer accused the local people of having stolen the goods even though he was the one who had been primarily responsible. The company believed him and put him in charge of guarding the factory yard. He used his new position to then steal more things. He arranged for some of his friends and some neighborhood kids to come in, take things away, and then give him part of the profit from selling the things. He eventually got into a fight with some of the kids because he thought they were not giving him enough money. One kid ran away from home and still hasn't returned for fear of that guy. I don't see how this guy is protecting the community. I'll give you another example that involves the same guy. He sells liquor illegally from a house in the neighborhood. Everyone, including the police, knows where the house is and what goes on there. But it still operates without any problem. I've heard that his salary from the navy is actually pretty high but he still wants to earn more by running an illegal business. Every so often, to earn some money, I help a friend who drives a small truck. I help load and unload things. The main job of the traffic police in Jakarta seems to be to stop trucks, especially at night, to demand money. The police plant themselves at a corner or along the side of the road and then stop every truck that comes by. Even if all the papers are in order and you haven't committed any traffic violation, you still have to pay something. It is like an unofficial toll. I guess they figure that because the truck is involved in commercial activity, it has money. Drivers have to set aside money to pay off these police. Our truck is quite small but still we get stopped too. Such is the state of the security system in Indonesia. The ones that are supposed to protect the people use their position to make money off the people. We wind up being scared of the people that call themselves our protectors. Rikah Suryanto (18 years old) and Dede Puji (19) are former street children who now work with a home for street children, Sanggar Akar, in Jakarta.

Brawling, Bombing, and 'Backing'

The Security Forces as a Source of Insecurity John Roosa Imagine the following scenario: three truckloads of men armed with submachine guns and grenade launchers surround a police station late one night. They shoot their way inside and then torch it. In the chaos, sixty-one prisoners escape and over one ton of marijuana being held as evidence disappears. Some of the men then drive to the electricity relay station and force the workers at gunpoint to blackout the city. In total darkness, they head off to attack another police force in the same area. When they withdraw in the morning, after nine hours of unloading their firepower into two police facilities, they have killed seven policemen, three civilians, and suffered one casualty. This is what transpired in the town of Binjai, near Medan, on 29-30 September 2002. Now imagine who the attackers were. Members of a powerful crime syndicate? Terrorists? Invading soldiers from a different country? Guess again. The attackers were Indonesian army soldiers stationed just down the road. They belonged to an airborne unit (Linud 100) of the army's Strategic Reserves (Kostrad). Journalists quickly learned that the Kostrad soldiers had attacked the police station because the police were refusing to release a drug dealer who had been paying the soldiers protection money. In the parlance of today's Indonesia, the drug dealer had beking (backing). A group of soldiers had already descended upon the police station the day before the assault and aggressively demanded his release. Determined to show who controlled the drug trade in Binjai, the soldiers decided bring out their heavy weaponry and raze the police station. The Binjai incident illustrates many of the systemic problems of today's Indonesian military. Under the 'dual-function' doctrine, the military has expansive, undefined, and unchecked powers within Indonesia. Add to this unaccountable power an insatiable drive to find off-budget sources of funding and one has a combustible combination. The late Maj. Gen. Agus Wirahadikusumah, one of the very few officers to whom the label 'reformist' could be accurately used, noted in late 1999 that soldiers had become 'backers of prostitution, gambling, and narcotics and this has become fairly widespread.' The fact that many troops have experience in brutal counterinsurgency warfare in such areas as West Papua, East Timor, and Aceh certainly does not help them behave well once back in civil society. The Linud 100 unit that carried out the Binjai attack had served in neighboring Aceh. It was one of the units involved in the July 1999 Bantaqiah massacre in Aceh. Police and soldiers The hiving off of the police from the military in late 1998 has created a new difficulty for the military's lawlessness. The police have become more assertive - sometimes for the sake of their own illegal rackets, sometimes for the sake of law enforcement. After the Binjai incident, the army officers assigned to damage control wrote op-eds blaming the separation of the police from the military as the root cause of the problem. In a perverse way, they are correct. Before, the military could order the police to not interfere with its corrupt practices. Under the former chain of command, the police chief would have received an order to release the drug dealer. Now, the police, developing their own institutional autonomy, cannot be so easily ordered around. The solution to conflicts such as Binjai is obviously not to put the police back under the military s thumb. In response to the Binjai incident, vice-president Hamzah Haz surprised many journalists with an uncharacteristically insightful comment: 'The main problem is not that the police and military have been separated. It is that there is beking of criminals and this has involved troop units. So the military leaders first have to attend to this.' Over the past several years, there have been many similar, though less spectacular, incidents as Binjai. Let me pull out my clippings file. On 26 December 1999, about 50 members of an army airborne battalion in East Kalimantan attacked and destroyed a police post in the village of Nipah-Nipah. They shot and killed a police corporal and seriously wounded two other policemen. The attack came hours after the policemen had stopped two soldiers riding a motorbike for a traffic violation. On 28 April 2000, 30 soldiers of an army subdistrict command (Koramil) attacked a police station in Karawang, a town 45 km east of Jakarta. They beat five police officers and stole a gun. One of their men, a sergeant, had been arrested by the police the night before for being involved in an automobile theft. On 19 June 2000, about 50 marines attacked a police station in the middle of Jakarta (the Mampang headquarters). They stabbed three policemen and wrecked the building. Several nights earlier policemen had brawled with a marine corporal who was a working as a security guard in a caf�. On 15 September 2001, Kostrad troops attacked a police station in the center of the city of Madiun in East Java. This army riot was triggered by a brawl between soldiers and policemen at a gasoline station pump. A group of policemen objected when a carload of Kostrad soldiers jumped ahead in the queue. The soldiers returned to their barracks and mobilised a large crowd of their brothers-in-arms for the assault on the police station. Three civilian bystanders were killed in the shooting. This list represents just a sample of the incidents reported in newspapers. In some cases, the soldiers attack policemen to avenge a perceived insult. In other cases, they attack when their economic activities are disturbed. Bombing The military has a serious problem not only with the discipline of its personnel but with the management of its equipment. Most worrisome, especially in the wake of the October 2002 bombing in Bali, is the military's lack of control over its explosives. On 4 May 2000, a bomb made of TNT manufactured by Indonesian weapons company Pindad was found in the Attorney General's office in Jakarta. The serial number was traced back to the East Java army command but at that point the trail ended. The army never revealed how the explosives went missing or who was responsible. The bomb was thought to have been planted by men working for Tommy Suharto who was being questioned by the Attorney General around that time. The worst bombing in Indonesia prior to the one in Bali was that of the Jakarta Stock Exchange on 13 September 2000. Ten people were killed and the building was badly damaged. Among those charged with the bombing were two military personnel. It is likely the five kilograms of TNT used in the blast came from the military. The official line from the military was that the bombers had deserted their units and acted on behalf of the Free Aceh Movement. However, there are other possibilities. Suspiciously, the two soldiers were able to escape from prison. Hand grenades have been denotated or left in public places numerous times in Jakarta. In July 2001, one person was killed and 24 injured in two separate explosions of hand grenades. Another 12 people were injured in February 2000 when a hand grenade was thrown into a brothel in a southern part of the city. Ammunition and guns have disappeared from storehouses. A recent case was in October 2002 when 65,000 bullets were reported missing from a Special Forces warehouse in West Java. In April 2000, the police in West Java discovered that two army sergeants and a lieutenant colonel were involved in a weapons selling syndicate. In Aceh, the independence forces have been able to purchase weapons from the military. Fighting for Income When it comes to defending its sources of revenue, the military can be ruthless. It is highly probable that the killing of three schoolteachers working for the mining company Freeport in West Papua on 31 August 2002 was the army's handiwork. The human rights organisation Elsham was the first to allege that the army was responsible. Elsham's claim was corroborated by the province's former police chief, I Made Pastika, who privately told journalists that the police believe the army carried out the murders. The claim has been confirmed by officials in the U.S. embassy in Jakarta who have had access to intercepts of the army's radio communications. According to Hamish McDonald's report in the Sydney Morning Herald (2 November 2002), the army wanted to pressure Freeport into paying US$10 million as protection money. The military's involvement in the underground economy and its own protection rackets have created serious problems of discipline. Although the rhetoric of the military is all about discipline, the daily practice of the troops is a cut-throat entrepreneurialism. The recent incidents in Binjai and Timika indicate that the military is largely superfluous and counterproductive as a domestic security force. Even in conflict regions where it faces an armed insurrection (as in Aceh and Papua), it devotes much of its time to fighting civilians and policemen to secure its own revenue. The solution is simple enough: end the military's dual-function, territorial structure, and business activity and make it entirely dependent on funds allocated by the state. Implementing this solution, however, appears nearly impossible. The military is committed to the status quo and the civilian politicians are not committed to military reform. John Roosa (jproosa@indo.net.id), a historian of South and Southeast Asia, is guest editor of this issue. Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003

What's Wrong With Freeport's Security Policy?

A report by a human rights organisation in West Papua Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy (Elsham) The shooting by unidentified gunmen on 31 August 2002 on the road from Timika to the Freeport mining enclave of Tembagapura in which two American citizens and one Indonesian citizen were killed and twelve others were injured is a demonstration of the strength of militarism and impunity in Indonesia. It calls into question relations between Freeport McMoRan, PT Freeport Indonesia (Freeport's Indonesian subsidiary), and the military. At noon on the afternoon of Saturday 31 August, a convoy of trucks carrying teachers and children from Timika's International School was seen by two Freeport employees stopping at mile 62-63 on its way back to Tembagapura. Minutes later a Freeport employee and his wife arrived at the scene and, seeing the convoy under attack, quickly returned to the mile 64 security checkpoint to call for help. Immediately after the shooting, the military blocked off the road between mile 50 and 64. Decky Murib was an eyewitness to the attack and is currently under police protection. He was a former member of an indigenous Papuan civilian group recruited by the Indonesian Special Forces (Kopassus) to assist with covert operations. He has told Elsham investigators that Kopassus members were involved in the shooting. Eyewitnesses have confirmed that a Freeport company vehicle from its Grasberg mining site arrived at the scene just prior to the attack. The vehicle was driven by a Freeport employee and was transporting members of the armed forces. According to standard Freeport policy, all company vehicles from the Grasberg site must be checked out in writing. Review of vehicle documents from the morning of 31 August should provide important information about the perpetrators of the attack. The military's accusations On the night of 31 August there was an agreement between the military and the police to patrol the area of the shooting. The next day, 1 September at 8:00am, the police were fired on while conducting a search of the area. They took cover. Later, personnel from the army unit Kostrad 515 approached claiming that they were guarding the ambush site and had just shot one of the alleged 31 August gunmen. The military brought the body of the victim, Elias Kwalik, to the side of the road, where police investigators took over the case. The results of a medical examination on Kwalik revealed that he had been dead for approximately 12 hours prior to the 1 September shooting. A Freeport employee informed Elsham investigators that he had seen Kwalik at Mile 38 at 3:00pm on August 31, waiting for a ride, and had recommended to Kwalik that he return to Timika because of the military operations farther up the road. Despite a lack of evidence, Indonesian military and governmental officials - as well as senior Freeport management - publicly attributed responsibility for the 31 August attack to the TPN/OPM (National Liberation Army/Free Papua Organisation). In response to such accusations, the head of the the TPN/OPM, Kelly Kwalik, issued a statement on 17 September stating that he and his group were not responsible for the shooting. He reiterated his earlier statements that he had cancelled any plans to attack Freeport and reaffirmed his commitment to establishing Papua as a Zone of Peace. Since March 2002, indigenous Papuans' concerns about the escalating threat of an Indonesian military and police crackdown led civil society groups including Elsham to urgently pursue an initiative on conflict resolution. The groups set up a Peace Task Force in July 2002, inviting Indonesian civil and military authorities as well as TPN/OPM leaders to enter into a dialogue to establish Papua as a Zone of Peace. The culmination of the first stage of the Zone of Peace process was a conference co-sponsored by the governor, police chief, and the provincial parliament together with Elsham and other civil society groups. It was held in Jayapura on 15-16 October 2002. Major General Mahidin Simbolon, regional commander of the Indonesian military in Papua, was the only official who refused to participate in the initiative. As part of the Zone of Peace initiative, the Task Force separately met with Papua's police chief, chairman of the provincial parliament, and governor as well as all TPN/OPM leaders, including Kelly Kwalik, with very successful responses. Immediate background Regardless of the peace initiative or its results, there had been an increase in military activity. The day before the shooting, on 30 August, there had been a joint armed forces operation including the army, special forces, marines, and mobile brigade police (Brimob) in the area of the shooting. Attacks on Freeport personnel and local indigenous Papuans had been escalating since December 2001. In December 2001, two Freeport environmental unit employees were shot at the Grasberg mine site. No investigation into the attack was conducted. The shootings were reportedly carried out by unidentified gunmen wearing military uniforms. In April 2002, Kopassus attacked indigenous Papuan civilians in the lowland hamlet of Kali Kopi in which one civilian was killed and seven others were arrested and tortured. On 25 May 2002, five to seven Papuans holding axes and one revolver attacked Freeport security guards at the main office building in the company's Western-style suburb town of Kuala Kencana. They then fled the scene. Despite the fact that all of these cases had been reported to Freeport security, company management took no action to investigate and apprehend the groups perpetrating these crimes. It was in this atmosphere of total impunity that the 31 August attack took place. It should be noted that the Indonesian military has a long history of destabilising violence in the area of Freeport's mining operations. For example, in 1994, armed forces battalions 752 and 733, posing as a TPN/OPM unit, shot and killed a Freeport employee on the road near Mile 62. An Australian employee was shot and wounded in the same incident. In March 1996, the military orchestrated a 'riot' that caused the closure of the mining operation for three days. This led to an exponential increase in the number of troops based in the area. Freeport's security policy The 31 August attack is reminiscent of previous military assaults on Freeport employees and the military's other destructive acts directed at the company. Not only have elements of the military attacked Freeport employees and the local community, they have also stolen Freeport property. Soldiers of the army unit Kostrad 515 while on duty at Freeport in March-June 2002 stole six tons of wire from a factory at mile 74 and later sold it for Rp 8,000 [US$.90] per kilogram. They also stole Caterpillar trucks with an estimated value of US$150,000 from a warehouse at mile 39 in mid-June 2002. From a business standpoint, these criminal activities by the company's security forces are extremely disadvantageous to Freeport shareholders' interests. Although Freeport management is aware of these cases, the corporation has taken no legal action against the perpetrators. Freeport's lack of responsiveness is further demonstrated by its policy after the human rights violations in 1994-5. The Indonesian armed forces killed or disappeared 16 civilians, raped five local women, and tortured and arbitrarily detained dozens of other community members. While corporate management publicly stated its concern about the abuses on several occasions, Freeport continued to augment its relationship with the Indonesian military. Since 1995, Freeport officials have claimed that Freeport's Contract of Work (COW) with the Indonesian government actually requires the company to provide logistical support to the Indonesian military and police. However, none of the company's COWs includes any such explicit stipulation. Freeport's continual failure to act in response to human rights violations and other violent attacks in the lead up to the 31 August shootings, and even more interestingly, its failure to respond to criminal activities of the security forces against its own business interests, calls into question its security policy and its commitment to the protection of its employees and human rights more generally. Elsham is concerned that this case will be dealt with in the same manner as the November 2001 assassination of Papuan leader Theys Eluay, which has resulted in the trial of Kopassus soldiers as individuals before a military tribunal, with no investigation into the decision-makers who ordered the killing or the state policies of which the killing was a result. Unless the policies of the Indonesian central government and Freeport security are investigated, human rights violations and attacks of this nature will continue with impunity. Elsham (ElshamNewsService@jayapura.wasantara.net.id), founded in 1998, is based in Jayapura, West Papua. This article is extracted from a longer report issued on October 21, 2002. The full report can be obtained at Elsham's website www.geocities.com/elshamnewsservice. The army has threatened to sue Elsham for alleging army responsibility for the killings. Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003

Security Disorders

Sending Troops is not Going to Solve Regional Conflicts Douglas Kammen Indonesia is presently faced with large-scale conflicts in the regions of Aceh, West Papua, Ambon, and Central Sulawesi. The basic remedy of successive governments in the post-Suharto period has been to send more troops to these regions. There has been a steady and dramatic rise in the number of troops deployed since 1998. These additional troops have not ended the conflicts. In fact, they have set in motion a dangerous dynamic in which the military finds itself incapable of doing anything but sending more and more troops. The Indonesian army is organised on the basis of a territorial structure. Paralleling the civilian bureaucracy, this structure extends from the twelve regional military commands down to the village-level babinsa. It serves as the army's instrument for policing society. Troops within the structure are intended to be strongly rooted to their area and are thus referred to as 'organic' troops. If a violent conflict within a region becomes too large for them to handle, the military high command in Jakarta dispatches what are called 'non-organic' troops from other territorial commands or combat troops from the army's Strategic Reserves (Kostrad) and Special Forces (Kopassus) In responding to the armed movements for independence in Aceh and West Papua and the Christian-Muslim violence in Ambon, Central Kalimantan, and Central Sulawesi, the military has relied on the deployment of 'non-organic' and Kostrad troops. Indeed, the military seems to have no other strategy. Deployments Since the fall of President Suharto in 1998 the military has sharply increased the number of troops deployed from all service branches (the army, air force, navy, and police). I will consider only army deployments in this essay since they constitute the vast bulk of the troops. In 1998, in addition to the territorial units already in conflict zones, the army deployed at least 28 additional battalions to East Timor, Aceh and Papua. Non-organic troops were predominant in East Timor and Aceh while Kostrad troops were predominant in Papua. In 1999, deployment increased to at least 29 battalions. While the number of troops in East Timor remained roughly the same as the previous year, it dropped in both Aceh and Papua and increased in Ambon in response to the outbreak of communal violence there. In 2000, troop deployment further increased to at least 40 battalions. That increase took place despite the commitment of President Wahid, who took office in October 1999, to find negotiated solutions to separatism and ethnic-religious conflict. Those 40 battalions represented nearly one third of total Army troop strength. Remarkably, the Moluccan islands received the greatest number (15 non-organic and 4 Kostrad battalions), followed by Aceh (7 non-organic battalions), Papua (7 Kostrad battalions), West Timor (2 non-organic and 4 Kostrad battalions), and Poso (3 non-organic battalions). The following year, 2001, at least 57 battalions were deployed to handle regional violence. This included a sharp increase in Aceh (8 non-organic and 6 Kostrad battalions), a modest increase in West Timor (5 non-organic and 3 Kostrad battalions), a significant decrease in Papua (2 non-organic and 3 Kostrad battalions), a larger increase in Ambon (21 non-organic battalions but only 1 Kostrad battalion), as well as stable numbers in Poso (3 non-organic battalions) and new deployments to Central Kalimantan (3 non-organic and 2 Kostrad battalions). With improvements in Poso, Central Kalimantan, and Papua, the total number of battalions deployed in 2002 has dropped to 44. This includes 14 non-organic and 3 Kostrad battalions in Ambon and 13 non-organic and 8 Kostrad battalions in Aceh, and lower levels in West Timor and Papua. In viewing the army's deployments, it is clear that the military's strategy to handle regional conflicts has been to throw more and more troops at them. In the four years from 1998 to 2001, the number of non-territorial battalions sent to conflict areas jumped from 28 to 57. Counting territorial troops as well as non-organic and Kostrad battalions, more than half of the Army's battalions are now bogged down in Aceh, Papua, Ambon, and along the border with East Timor. Still other units are on alert for the return of the Islamic organisation Laskar Jihad from Ambon to East Java and the safeguarding of Bali in the wake of the 12 October bombing. Other battalions have been confined to barracks because of disciplinary infractions. Escalation is reaching its limits. A vicious cycle The experience of the past four years suggests that the military now finds itself caught in a vicious cycle of escalation and deescalation. The logic works something like this. When regional violence increases, the military responds by sending more external troops to the region. But given the competing chains of command, the poor training of troops, the military's own deeply entrenched business interests, and the ambiguous mission assigned to the troops ('restore order'), escalation invariably leads to atrocities. When atrocities occur, civilian and military elites frequently respond by reducing the number of external troops. But this reduction creates a situation conducive to new atrocities either by the military or the local combatants. Then the cycle begins again. Let us look more closely at this cycle of escalation-atrocity-deescalation-atrocity-reescalation. In Aceh, there was a deescalation in August 1998 when President Habibie ordered the withdrawal of external troops. In the months that followed, the remaining troops committed a series of massacres, perhaps to impress upon the Acehnese that the withdrawal did not signal a weakening of the military's resolve. The Bantaqiah massacre of July 1999, in which soldiers shot and killed 71 civilians, was the most brazen atrocity during this wave of repression. The reescalation was not immediate. President Wahid attempted to prevent the military from reescalating but he was finally forced to back down. The reescalation in Aceh began with the creation of a new Operations Implementation Command (Komando Pelaksanaan Operasi, abbreviated Kolakops) in early 2001. Deployments of external troops began soaring. The military elite viewed the creation of Kolakops as a necessary means of ensuring that there was a single chain of command to oversee both the territorial military apparatus and external troops. A year later Kolakops was replaced by the Iskandar Muda Regional Military Command. The same cycle can be seen in Ambon. After the first outbreak of violence in early 1999, the government began sending large numbers of external troops there. To deal with the incoming troops, the military reestablished the Pattimura Regional Military Command in May 1999. Its task was to coordinate the activities of the territorial military units and the increasing number of external troops. After a number of atrocities, the army in 2001 reduced the number of battalions from Kostrad and East Java which were seen to be siding with the Muslim population. But this change in troop deployments did not reduce the conflict. The separatist organisation, the Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS), issued a militant declaration in early 2002 which led to a new massacre of civilians. And so, as was the case in Aceh, the military responded by sending more troops and establishing yet another command, the Restoration of Security Operation Command (Komando Operasi Pemulihan Keamanan). Strangely, the majority of battalions deployed to Ambon over the past two years have been artillery, engineering, and cavalry battalions, rather than regular infantry battalions. According to sources in Ambon, these battalions have been utilised because the army is short-handed. These units resent being posted as peace-keepers, something for which they were not trained. But that does not mean that they have neglected their own specialisations: sources report that both the Christian and Muslim communities have gained much of their expertise in assembling bombs and weapons from the artillery units on duty in Ambon. As for Papua, the cycle has not yet run its full course there. While the first several stages have been evident in Papua, the military has thus far not sought to reescalate. Perhaps the generals in Jakarta fear that any attempt to assert centralised military control over Papua would result in increased tensions between the well-entrenched Special Forces and non-organic or Kostrad units. This trajectory of escalation-atrocity-deescalation-atrocity-reescalation in Aceh, Ambon, and Papua is all too reminiscent of the last decade of Indonesian rule in East Timor. Lacking alternative means for resolving the root causes of conflict, military deescalation invariably leads to new atrocities by either the military or the local insurgents. The subsequent renewal of violence only seems to confirm the view - one held not only by the military but also by many civilian elites - that the military is the only institution capable of containing violence, and hence of preserving Indonesian unity. And thus escalation begins once again. Civil-military relations The steady rise in military deployments within Indonesia since May 1998 has led many observers to conclude that the military has new designs on political power. It is undoubtedly true that the military is in a stronger political position today than at any time over the past two decades (including the late Suharto era!), but this does not necessarily mean that the military is scheming to seize state power. Rather, the dramatic increase in troop deployments reflects the failure of civilian elites to assert their supremacy over the military and to offer non-military solutions to the country's pressing regional problems. The civilian elites have been relying on the military to find solutions to the conflicts in Aceh, Papua, Ambon, and Poso. But passing the buck will not end the violence. Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003

Editorial

Peace building in the wake of terror Emma Baulch This issue of Inside Indonesia is devoted to the political and social aftermath of the Bali bombing. In the mainstream press, the event was largely reported as a series of images depicting flames against a night sky, rows of body bags, charred survivors, and whole buildings laid to waste. The contributions to this edition provide a welcome contrast to this mainstream coverage by highlighting Indonesian people's efforts to resist terror, by pro-actively securing peace. This hopeful message emerges in the lead article by Mayra Walsh in which she describes how staff and students at Darur Ridwan embraced cross cultural and inter-religious solidarity in their efforts to console each other following the bombing. Ngurah Karyadi's, Christine Foster's and Sherry Kasman Entus' contributions, which focus on Balinese people's recovery efforts, are similarly optimistic. All three stories stress Balinese people's heightened commitment to sustainable tourism development in the context of post-bomb development planning. Other articles in this edition do not directly relate to the theme of the Bali bombing, yet echo other stories of people's attempts to secure and maintain peace in the wake of the bomb. Kautsar details Acehnese civilians' efforts to play a decisive part in the implementation of the territory's new peace accord. Jake Lynch describes Indonesian journalists' and editors' involvement in a peace journalism training workshop in Manado where they exhibited their eagerness to learn how to constructively report on conflict. On a more somber note, Greg Fealy's and Jessica Champagne's contributions point to widespread distrust of law enforcement agencies as the root cause of popular conspiracy theories regarding the perpetrators of the bombing. Tim Behrend argues that Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, the Muslim cleric accused of masterminding a series of bombings in Indonesia that preceded the attacks on Bali, does not advocate political violence nor contain terrorist elements. Behrend nonetheless describes Ba'asyir as troublesome, for his naive politics and strongly anti-Semitic views. These inclusions provide important counterweights to this edition's more upbeat contributions. Yet they do not overshadow them, and most of this edition's stories add considerable grit and flavour to Ed Aspinall's assessment of national politics in the wake of the bombing. He argues that, contrary to expectations, the bombing has not strengthened the hand of the military. Rather, the post-bomb national political scene now accommodates a hybrid, albeit shaky, democratic order. Emma Baulch is a guest editor of Inside Indonesia Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003

Stand your ground

A radio series gives voice to East Timorese stories of resistance to Indonesian occupation Matt Abud Lelo, a farmer in the eastern district of Los Palos, told of how he once carried an injured resistance leader Xanana Gusmao in a basket on his back, covered only by leaves. On New Year's Day 2001, I watched the first sunrise together with some colleagues from the top of Mount Ramelau, the highest peak in East Timor. The mountain cast an arrow-like shadow to the west, and the whole country was laid out below us: northern and southern coasts, deep valleys rumpled together, dramatic mountain ridges criss-crossing each other all the way from the eastern coastal tip to the western border with Indonesia. It was a stunning view of a tiny country, where East Timor's Falintil guerrillas had fought a continuous war for independence ever since Indonesia's 1975 invasion. The view made me wonder how, with so little room to move, and pitted against an enormous military force, the guerrillas had kept their hopes alive for twenty-four years. A year later, a bright young Timorese school student also confessed bewilderment. 'What did Falintil do, anyway?' she asked me 'They couldn't fight, they could only hide all the time.' It was January 2002, and six East Timorese colleagues and I were convening a discussion group at the student's school in Dili. We'd brought the discussion group together to clarify our own ideas, before starting on an ambitious story-telling project. In a few months, on 20 May 2002, East Timor was to gain full national independence. There was a great need for recognition and commemoration of the struggle and suffering that had led to the achievement of independence. Our seven-person team had been given the chance to produce a 12-part oral history radio documentary series, which would tell some of these stories. But what were the stories that people needed to hear? Time to reflect Our discussion group revealed that the students knew bits and pieces of their history - about the invasion, resistance, and massacres that took place in the 1970s - because their teacher had given them a project to talk to the older members of their families, and write up the stories. But they were largely unaware of events that had taken place throughout the 1980s, up until the Pope's 1989 visit and the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991. As we traveled around the country in the course of our work, people would tell us in great detail what had happened in their local area. But they didn't always know what was happening in other places, even though they commonly resisted the Indonesian occupation. Certainly, information had been tightly controlled during the occupation. Within certain family and community networks, some stories were very well known. For example, primary-school students in the mountains were often aware of the Falintil guerrillas' activities in their area. But outside of those networks and areas, even with Timor's small, tight-knit population, oppression and suspicion kept many stories underground. After the Indonesian military's departure in 1999 these stories could now be shared with a wider, even national audience. Yet from 1999 onwards, the urgency of addressing material needs often meant there was no time for processes like storytelling, reflection, and other ways of dealing with a traumatic past. When we talked to former resistance fighters, some were philosophical about East Timor's new reality, but many were disappointed or even bitter. Several of those who had fought as Falintil guerrillas, as well as those who had been part of civilian clandestine movement, had become marginalised in the economic difficulties and rapid changes that followed 1999's independence vote. Among a number of them, the absence of formal recognition has fuelled volatile frustrations and resentment. For the East Timorese government, according such formal recognition presents something of a hot potato. Across the country a number of so-called 'security groups' have become established, and several observers say they could affect the country's stability. Many such groups claim strong resistance pedigree as the basis for their prestige; others dispute the veracity of those claims. For many reasons, social, political, and simply emotional, there has been a great need for Timor's memory and history to be gathered together and shared. When East Timor's independence began to draw close in 2002, non-government organisations, multinational funding agencies, resistance veterans and the UN administration, showed strong interest in making a start on this process. Beneath the aegis of a committee overseeing the demobilisation and reintegration of ex-Falintil guerrillas who hadn't been recruited into the defense force, they proposed an oral history radio documentary series that would begin broadcasting on Radio Untaet (which became Radio Timor Leste after 20 May 2002) in the lead up to independence. We decided to call the program 'Tuba Rai Metin', which means Stand Your Ground. We put it together in Tetum, East Timor's national indigenous language (although with many other regional languages, it is not universally spoken). Radio, as an aural medium, also enhanced the material's reach. Tuba Rai Metin is therefore the first broadly accessible history of East Timor. As initially conceived, the series was to focus on the experience of the Falintil guerrillas, but this was quickly changed after many, including members of Falintil themselves, insisted on]the importance of telling how they worked together with the civilian clandestine movement. Stories People related stories of tragedy and strength, courage and comedy, and almost unvaryingly showed a great humility as they spoke about what they had seen and done. Lelo, a farmer in the eastern district of Los Palos, told of how he once carried an injured resistance leader Xanana Gusmao in a basket on his back, covered only by leaves. When Indonesian soldiers asked what the basket held he answered, 'Food for the pigs'. It was the same answer he gave his wife at home. She scolded him for putting the basket on the floor, only to be mortified with embarrassment when Xanana revealed himself. Peregrinha, a young woman in the clandestine movement, recalled how she had intimidated East Timorese working for Indonesia's military by brandishing a pistol at them - a dangerous game of grass-roots brinkmanship which relied on nobody guessing the pistol was in reality a cigarette-lighter. Luis Katana recounted how he, together with colleagues, had jumped the US Embassy fence in Jakarta during the 1994 Apec meeting. He nearly didn't make it - Indonesian security forces grabbed his leg and were trying to pull him back to the Indonesian side of the fence. In the end, his friends on the other side, who had hold of his other leg, prevailed, and he dropped onto US soil. People also told of how they communicated by hiding notes under a rock in the fields, to be collected after dark. Villagers explained how they left some leaves from their extra harvest turned over, as a signal to guerrillas for them to take it. Dogs were also an unsung weapon of the resistance - time and again sympathisers would call out to their dog, as a code to warn guerrillas in hiding that the military was approaching. In other warnings children threw rocks on the roofs of safe-houses, part of the games they were playing in the street, and an instant signal for those inside. Knowledge empowers Tuba Rai Metin was never an attempt to present a complete history. We did locate people's stories in rough chronological and thematic context, starting from 1975 through to the 1999 vote for independence. We aimed to put key points on the record, and to avoid emphasising any one historical phase over another. One powerful program included testimony from East Timorese who had lost family to internecine killings in the hills in the late-1970s, when Fretilin was the predominant authority. Another touched on splits between some Falintil commanders and Xanana Gusmao's leadership in the mid-1980s, which have ongoing ramifications today. In neither case did we attempt anything definitive, nor address in any great depth the many historical debates involved. But at least these parts of history could be put on the public record for a national audience. This article is dedicated to Batista Canigio, Tuba Rai Metin team member who died of illness during the course of production. Matthew Abud (mattabud@hotmail.com) has been working in radio in East Timor since 1999, and produced Tuba Rai Metin. Representing history is a powerful issue of political legitimacy, in East Timor as much as anywhere else in the world. At its most obvious, current tensions between the Fretilin government and President Xanana Gusmao are contests for legitimacy at the national level. Fretilin places great store on its role leading the struggle in the seventies, and its enduring symbols, which command great loyalty, date from that era. Gusmao emphasises directions taken from the 1980s onwards when his own leadership began, which is held up as a more pluralist approach - and again, he and what he represents call up powerful loyalties. These differences were wrestled over during the resistance and many resulting splits are still alive and potent today. It is often difficult for East Timorese people (and international observers), who are not familiar with this history, and therefore have difficulty understanding contemporary East Timorese politics. Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003

Making peace newsworthy

Indonesian journalists attend a peace journalism training workshop in Manado Jake Lynch Indonesian journalists have the advantage over most of their Western counterparts in at least one respect - experience of frontline conflict coverage. As recent training workshops with Indonesian journalists reveal, by contrast, that many have indeed been close to violence and now carry, seared into their minds, some terrible sights and experiences from the conflicts that have scarred so many parts of the country in recent years. In late 2002, more than 200 Indonesian journalists, including reporters and editors from SCTV, RCTI, Kompas and the Antara news agency participated in peace journalism training workshops in Jakarta, Surabaya, Makassar and Manado. The workshops were part of a broader peace journalism project, which the author helped to run, and which were developed in conjunction with the British Council, as well as several Indonesian media reform groups, and funded by the British Embassy. The Manado leg of the trip comprised a workshop for journalists from north Maluku, as well as a field trip where participants from national news organisations filed reports for their own newsdesks, with trainers acting as consultants, encouraging them to think about how their reporting would contribute to a wider understanding of peacebuilding concepts in Indonesia. With a plentiful supply of conflict zones to choose from, why, then, did we end up in Manado for a field trip in Peace Journalism, where we worked alongside journalists from leading news organisations as they filed reports aimed at helping Indonesian society to seek peaceful solutions to conflicts? Peaceful conflict Manado, the capital of North Sulawesi, is, after all, known as one of the safest places in Indonesia. In fact, Manado offers important lessons about both conflict and peace, for North Sulawesi has managed to avoid the violence engulfing its neighbours. In North Maluku and Ambon to the east, and Poso to the south, Muslims and Christians ended up at each other's throats - but not here. Across the Celebes sea lie the troubled southern provinces of the Philippines - Mindanao, Basilan and Jolo, fingered in the War on Terror as strongholds of Muslim separatism and Abu Sayyaf kidnappers. And what's this in Manado, revealed to the more careful observer? Look again, and the cupolas of the occasional Mosque - less conspicuous but still numerous - are visible on the skyline. This colourful, vibrant, thriving city has different strokes for different folks. What's at stake for such a community is not the absence of conflict but the capacity to respond to conflict issues with non-violent means. The word, 'conflict' is often used, in news reports, as a synonym for fighting or violence. Understanding the difference is crucial to peace journalism. In an analytical sense, conflict simply means two or more parties pursuing incompatible goals. If, in order to avoid a repetition of the harrowing scenes witnessed by many Indonesian journalists, we required an absence of conflict, we would be condemned to perennial disappointment. The peace journalists descended on Manado to try to find out how this beautiful city has managed to live with conflict, within and without - and yet avoided lapsing into the kind of violence that has afflicted surrounding areas across a radius of hundreds of miles. Peace, in Manado, is something that many people are actively working at, all the time. These active people include religious leaders, coming together to give messages of tolerance and mutual understanding to their followers. Relief agencies have worked to prevent the trauma brought to North Sulawesi, in the minds of thousands of refugees from North Maluku, from festering, and potentially inflaming religious sensibilities in Manado itself. The peace journalists will never forget the sight and sound of Christian children, singing Christian songs in a refugee camp, led by a Muslim teacher wearing a headscarf (jilbab). Good news and hard news In the hands of the more creative reporters, interviews with these children, about their hopes and experiences, became the basis for wonderful stories, full of imaginative connections and arresting images, which contain much of the music of today's Indonesia. These were great pieces of peace journalism - real contributions to the understanding we will need if a more peaceful future is to lie ahead. Most editors would still think of these as 'features', but there was no shortage of 'hard news' in Manado either. This was the time of the Bali bomb, and Manado had its own explosion on the same night. Its location - outside the Philippines consulate - seemed to portend infiltration by outsiders, intent on drawing Manado into political struggles which have taken on a religious overtone. The incident did draw a show of strength from the city's famous militia groups; prominent among them, Brigade Manguni, the 'Night Owls' of North Sulawesi. Their rampage through the streets, hundreds clinging to open-topped vehicles, wearing black t-shirts and shouting at the top of their voices, looked both spectacular and slightly sinister - it certainly made dramatic TV pictures. Listen carefully to these people, though, and they project a sort of muscular communitarianism, which may not be as threatening as their appearance suggests. What would they do, if, for instance, any of their members discovered 'outsiders' in Manado? Why, hand them over to the police, of course. If they keep their word - and the signs are that, so far, broadly speaking, they have - then that would at least represent a step forward from the situation in other, more troubled parts. In Poso, for instance, the trigger incident for the first round of rioting came when a Muslim man, injured in a street brawl with Christian youths, ran instead into a local Mosque to rouse fellow believers to take revenge. One pervasive form of structural violence in Indonesia is a lack of impartial and transparent law enforcement - so people don't trust or feel they can rely on the police. The militias in Manado were formed amid suspicions that Laskar Jihad was plotting to cause trouble. In a sense, tseirs could be a positive response - 'OK, let's give the police a helping hand, as vigilant and active citizens'. There are dangers to this situation of course, to do with 'in-group' and 'out-group' politics. Who decides who belongs here and who does not; and how? Police were just beginning to carry out sweeps for ID cards, something the militias have been calling for, but there were fears that this could prove divisive. Word on the street was that, if you really wanted an ID card, you had to pay considerably more than the official going rate of Rp 5,000, or face an interminable wait. Those without proper accreditation were likely to be the poor, like refugees who now cling to one of the lowest rungs of the economic ladder as street vendors. In Ethnic Conflict & Civic Life, Ashutosh Varshney, an Indian political scientist based at the University of Michigan, offers a sociological profile of 'Peaceful Cities' in India, which identifies several common characteristics. One is that members of different sections of the communi$y mingle freely in civic society. In Manado, we met a group of volleyball players - some Christian, some Muslim; their game taking place in the shadow of one of the city's most beautiful churches, with a local religious leader (ulama) among the spectators. Equally, we discovered journalists making their own contribution. In Ambon, notoriously, the giant Jawa Pos group runs both a Christian and a Muslim newspaper, each of which has often adopted a strident sectarian stance. Here, there is just one Jawa Pos group newspaper, the Manado Post, and every day it has a double-page spread called Teropong - 'Lens' in English - devoted to cross-cutting religious issues. Christian, Islamic and other religious figures are equally at home here; a Muslim and a Christian journalist form the dynamic two-person team responsible for it. Jake Lynch (JakeMLynch@aol.com) helped run the Peace Journalism project, and was one of the trainers at the Manado workshop. Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003

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Stand your ground

Making peace newsworthy

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