Word: aceh
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...midnight at the top ten karaoke bar in Banda Aceh, and the portly drunkard everyone respectfully calls "Commander" is on the mike. "Indonesia," he wails between gulps of Guinness. "You are the red of my blood, the white of my bone." His bleary rendition wins huge applause from the bar's other customers, all Indonesian soldiers deployed in the capital of war-torn Aceh province. "I love that song," slurs the Commander, who is actually an army major. "It makes me feel so patriotic...
...Outside the smoke-filled Top Ten, where the Indonesian armed forces, or TNI, are fighting a bloody war against Acehnese separatists, a different military performance is being appraised, and with much less applause. Since the Suharto dictatorship collapsed in 1998, the Aceh conflict is viewed as one indicator of just how much the TNI has changed?or, more often, hasn't. For 32 years, the Indonesian armed forces propped up Suharto's hard-line rule with killings, torture and kidnappings, while senior officers grew rich from corrupt business deals and helped thwart political reform. By 1998, no institution...
...interests in some 250 businesses, including Jakarta department stores, Bali resorts and massive land holdings nationwide, worth an estimated $3 billion?remains intact. And most importantly, say critics, the military has paid little more than lip service to improving its human rights record. In conflict zones like Aceh, its troops continue to commit atrocities at a rate humanitarian groups can barely track...
...Just how effectively this system operates is made clear by a spokesman for the fundamentalist Free Aceh Movement, better known by its Indonesian acronym gam. Agreeing to talk only by telephone and refusing to give even a nickname, the 10-year veteran of the murderous struggle - his wife and three children have all been killed in the fighting - says that he regularly places orders with arms syndicates for hundreds of weapons: M-16 and AK-47 automatic rifles, handguns and ammunition. Tracing a well-worn route, the weapons are bought in Thailand, sent down to Malaysia and then carried...
...Worst Move Indonesian soldiers, paid by oil giant ExxonMobil to protect its facility in Aceh from the local rebel army, stand accused of torturing and killing villagers, hundreds of whom have filed complaints with human rights groups. The response from ExxonMobil execs about the behavior of the troops on their payroll? Nothing we can do about it. Whatever happened to spin control...