Word: indonesianness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...Unlike Aceh, East Timor no longer suffers at the often brutal hands of the Indonesian military. But now, a year after winning its freedom, this tiny nation faces a slew of daunting challenges, from constructing a viable economy to repairing lives ravaged by more than 20 years of violence and misery. None have endured more than the former members of the guerrilla group Falintil, those most responsible for liberating East Timor. For two decades these defiant fighters clung to what President Xanana Gusmao, himself a former guerrilla leader, once called the "sacred ideal" of independence. Now that they have achieved...
...Even those with jobs struggle. Mario Baptista joined Falintil at age 13 along with his father. He killed an Indonesian soldier for the first time at 15, and prayed every day for the "miracle of independence." Now an F.D.T.L. officer, the 31-year-old tries to pay for the education of five young relatives out of a salary of $130 a month. Another soldier, who still uses his code name Mausae Lary, came home in 1999 after 24 years in the bush to find that his wife, assuming he was dead, had remarried. His relatives are disappointed in him: "They...
...ACQUITTED. BRIGADIER GENERAL TONO SURATMAN, 51, former commander of the Indonesian military in East Timor during the lead-up to a plebiscite on independence in 1999, of alleged human-rights violations; in Jakarta. Suratman was the 12th accused officer to be set free in a series of highly publicized trials...