Word: indonesian
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Khairurrazi Ismail always believed he would die young. He was right. The thin, sickly, 18-year-old's corpse was lowered last week into a muddy trench in a village cemetery in Peusangan, in the north of the Indonesian province of Aceh. But it wasn't sickness that stole his life. Khairurrazi was beaten, bayoneted and shot to death by Indonesian soldiers. "Half his skull was blown off," weeps his mother Ramla. "I had to pick up my poor boy's brains and put them back in his head...
Khairurrazi was among the first casualties of a massive military campaign launched last week by the Indonesian military to crush the separatist Free Aceh Movement after the government's peace talks with the rebels collapsed. The fiercely nationalistic Acehnese have long resented what they consider Indonesia's illegitimate occupation. In 27 years of fighting between the military and the separatists, some 12,000 people have lost their lives. The military claimed the Peusangan villagers were killed during a shoot-out. But witnesses tell TIME that some of the eight males, from 11 to 20 years old, were shot...
...sedan that unnerved us journalists the most. The car bore a large sign reading "Press," yet it carried several uniformed men with guns. Who were they? Rebels of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM)? Not likely: the car was spotted several times in broad daylight in areas controlled by the Indonesian military (T.N.I.). More likely, we thought, the passengers were soldiers deliberately misusing press stickers to besmirch our independent and noncombatant status, and to draw us into the line of fire by making vehicles carrying journalists legitimate targets of either GAM or the T.N.I...
...worked. By the end of the campaign's first week, at least seven real press vehicles had to brave a hail of bullets. Then, as journalists began to report on the mounting military atrocities against civilians, several reporters-Indonesian and foreign-were interrogated by the police or army, and at least three received death threats. The 54 Indonesian journalists "embedded" with various T.N.I. units fared no better. They arrived in Aceh frightened, partly because they wore military uniforms and were indistinguishable from the troops and partly because their military keepers had told them GAM knew all of their names...
...benighted countryside with trigger-happy soldiers and flush out any GAM suspects on a tsunami of civilian blood. Second, frighten into silence anyone who dares to report on the gory consequences, such as the summary execution of eight young men and boys at Peusangan in northern Bireun district. The Indonesian government has told foreign journalists and aid workers to stay out of the province, because it does not want Aceh's plight to be internationalized as East Timor's was. But reporters are not the only ones who have been intimidated. Fearful of reprisals from men in uniform, morgue workers...