Word: peusangan
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Dates: during 2003-2003
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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...
...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 in the head at close range when rampaging soldiers ran into them near a cluster of fish ponds. Others were gunned down as they...
...shockingly clear. First, saturate the 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...
...ruthless campaign against a single ethnic group. The reaction overseas has been similarly muted. So far, protests from abroad have been pro forma or nonexistent or, in the case of Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer, who wholeheartedly threw his support behind the Aceh campaign only days after the Peusangan massacre, bordering on cold hearted. The U.S. is too anxious to maintain good relations with its war-on-terror allies to do anything but urge the T.N.I. to make its soldiers' actions more transparent, a plea the T.N.I. notes and then ignores-as the U.S. allows it to do. If anything...
...gone and human-rights activists too scared to do fieldwork, fresh atrocities are likely to go unreported. I asked an elderly rice farmer near Lhokseumawe for his view of Indonesia's military strategy in the province. "To wipe out all Acehnese people," he replied simply. Meanwhile, bereaved villagers in Peusangan are developing strategies of their own to deal with the unfolding horror. Clutching her prayer book, Ramla, the grieving mother of 18-year-old Khairurrazi, explained: "We pray, the whole family together. We pray until we weep...