Word: gam
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...enough, 17 days later, Khairurrazi's corpse was lowered into a muddy trench in a village cemetery in Peusangan, an area near Bireun in northern Aceh that has been ravaged by conflict since the Indonesian military last week launched its massive campaign to crush the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM). As the gravediggers maneuvered Khairurrazi's body onto its side to face Mecca, blood seeped through his shroud. Khairurrazi, always a thin, sickly youth, had expected an illness to kill him. Instead, he was beaten and bayoneted, then shot in the head. "Half his skull was blown off," weeped...
...massacred alongside him. TIME has confirmed that eight male villagers were executed that day, each shot in the head at close range. Besides Khairurrazi, one was 20 years old, two were 18, one was 17, one 14, one 13 and one just 11. The t.n.i. claimed the dead were GAM suspects killed during a shoot-out. The terrified villagers told me a very different story. I arrived in the area just as a company of high-spirited soldiers was leaving. "You should have come earlier," grinned a burly soldier wearing the insignia of Indonesia's notoriously vicious Kopassus special forces...
...across the province, killing dozens. Jet fighters and U.S.-made Bronco OV-10 bombers screamed low over the palm trees while tanks and armored troop carriers rumbled through the countryside. More than 200 schools were burned to the ground within 36 hours, a wanton destruction of property blamed on GAM in the past, but which this time was so well orchestrated that one independent observer suggested the military might have been behind it. Curfews, either military-ordered or self-imposed, were in effect in every Acehnese town. Meanwhile, in Lhokseumawe in northern Aceh?the military's command center...
...bloody campaign in Aceh. That's because all sides want?even need?the conflict to continue, observed a senior Western diplomat in the capital. Everyone, that is, except the benighted province's populace, some 12,000 of whom have died in the 27-year struggle between Indonesian soldiers and GAM guerrillas, who are seeking independence from Jakarta's rule...
...house, pounding on doors with their rifle butts, pistol-whipping men of all ages. One was Zul Karnaini, a slender 28-year-old with a bandaged head. "One soldier shouted that I was a dog, a pig, a communist. He said, 'If you don't tell us where GAM is, we'll burn your house.'" Chillingly, the soldier then bragged, "We've already killed 10 rats over there...