By Richard Startari
Indonesia's government has killed, tortured and jailed its opponents at will for almost three decades, under the guise of fighting communism and instability. Amnesty International has launched a worldwide campaign which hopes to highlight the human rights situation in Indonesia.
The report released by Amnesty entitled "Power and Impunity: Human Rights under the New Order" reveals that torture, political killings, "disappearances", unfair trials, arbitrary arrest and the harassment and imprisonment of peaceful critics are part of today's Indonesia.
Systematic human rights abuses are inextricably linked to the structure of political power in Indonesia. From a human rights perspective, the key features of the political establishment are the extensive political power of the military, the concentration of executive power in the hands of the president and the strict enforcement of ideological conformity.
The absence of any check on presidential and executive power has resulted in the arbitrary use of repressive methods. This pattern has been reinforced by the fact that the security forces have generally been free to commit human rights violations without fear of punishment.
Political killings provide the most dramatic evidence of the human rights problem in Indonesia and East Timor. In East Timor 200,000 people, one-third of the population have been killed or have died from starvation or disease since the 1975 Indonesian invasion. Some 2000 civilians were killed in Aceh between 1989 and 1993 alone. Hundreds of people have been executed extrajudicially in Irian Jaya over the past 15 years.
In recent years, aggressive economic development policies have involved banning free trade unions and evicting farmers from their land for hydro-electric and real estate projects. This in turn has led to increasing industrial unrest and widespread rural opposition to which the government has reacted with arbitrary imprisonment, torture and killings.
The Indonesian government has attempted to suggest that such human rights violations are the result of a few poorly disciplined soldiers, when, in fact, the situation in Indonesia is the by-product of a network of institutions, procedures and policies which the government uses to crush any form of resistance.
Amnesty has documented cases where men in their 70s have been hauled before firing squads after 20 years in jail on political charges. Young children have been tortured in custody, women have been raped and molested by their captors and thousands of people imprisoned following show trials solely for their peaceful political or religious views.
Amnesty International's campaign director, Ced Simpson, has called on the Australian government to acknowledge the severity of the human rights situation in Indonesia and East Timor and to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the human rights policies the government has been pursuing.
Launching the campaign, Simpson stated that "If present human rights policies are built on the belief that there has been major improvements, they are resting on fragile foundations of illusion and wishful thinking".
[For more information on Amnesty's campaign on Indonesia, contact your state branch.]