By Lisa Macdonald
Mobil Oil Indonesia, the country's biggest producer of natural gas, is linked to serious human rights violations in the north Sumatran region of Aceh in Indonesia.
The company is a joint venture between US-based oil giant Mobil and Indonesia's state-owned Pertamina. The contract, signed in December 1965, gives the company access to the rich oil and gas fields of Lhokseumawe, in north Aceh. P.T. Arun, of which Pertamina owns 55% and Mobil owns 35%, processes the gas for export.
The Acehnese have been the victims of decades of atrocities by the Indonesian military in its attempt to crush the independence movement. Despite detailed reports from Indonesian and international human rights groups, the plight of the Acehnese has been largely ignored by the western powers. The oil and gas industry, which reaps rich rewards for its owners, is an important factor in that silence.
It was attacks by independence fighters on Mobil Oil's installations in Aceh that prompted Jakarta to militarily occupy the region in 1980. Since then, tens of thousands of people have been killed or "disappeared" by the military.
Mobil Oil's discovery in 1971 of one of the world's richest onshore reserves of natural gas, estimated at 40 billion cubic metres, quickly became the most important source of revenue for Jakarta. By the late 1980s, Aceh provided an estimated 11% of Indonesia's total exports, yet less than 10% of this wealth was being reinvested in the province and government data showed that 40% of Acehnese villages were officially "poor".
Mobil Oil has been a heavy burden on the Acehnese. The list of abuses includes land seizures with minimum compensation, explosions which have destroyed farmland and villagers' homes, and water and noise pollution. On one occasion, villagers from Pu'uk, whose fields were flooded by liquid waste from a Mobil operation in 1992, filed a lawsuit against the company. They lost.
But the abuse goes much further, centred around the cosy relations between the company and its protectors in the Indonesian military.
When, in May 1990, clashes between the Acehnese and Javanese settlers threatened the security of Mobil's gas operations, Suharto's troops poured in from Jakarta. By August, there were thousands of soldiers in Aceh, including the feared Kopassus battalion.
Two military posts were set up, one near one of Mobil's operations, called Post 13, the other near the P.T. Arun plant, called Camp Rancong. Soon afterwards, witnesses say, evidence of the military's gruesome handiwork was strewn everywhere.
It is only since the fall of Suharto that the scale of the abuses in Aceh have begun to be exposed. Mass graves have been exhumed and local people have begun to tell their stories. By August, the Indonesian Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) had gathered evidence of the murder of 781 people by the military, 163 disappearances, 368 cases of torture and at least 3000 women widowed because their husbands were killed or disappeared. The number of children orphaned as a direct result of military activity has been estimated at 15,000 to 20,000.
According to a media statement issued by Sumatran non-government organisations and the national environmental NGO WALHI on October 10, 1998, the buildings and facilities for Post 13 provided by Mobil Oil were used for interrogating local people.
The statement adds that the company's excavators were used to dig mass graves for military victims in the Sentang and Tengkorak hills, and that its roads were used to bring victims to the mass graves.
An investigation by Business Week journalists reported in the December 25, 1998 issue, uncovered more than a dozen witnesses of these atrocities or their aftermath. A former Mobil employee told Business Week that rumours of massacres and reports of Mobil equipment being used to dig graves were frequently discussed at workplaces and in a company cafeteria at the time.
P.T. Arun built Camp Rancong, which the NGO statement says was used by the Kopassus to torture and murder Acehnese independence activists.
So far, 12 mass graves have been identified. One is on Pertamina-owned land less than four kilometres from a Mobil gas-drilling site. Other suspected graves in close proximity to Mobil operations, such as at Rancong, have not yet been investigated. Komnas HAM member B.N. Marbun estimates that at least 2000 Acehnese torture victims, mostly civilians, are buried around the Aceh area.
Pertamina public relations general manager A. Sidick Nitikusuma says, "Incidents connected to human rights violations were beyond Pertamina and MOI's authority and knowledge", and Mobil's chief executive officer, L.A. Noto, told the Jakarta Post in November that the corporation should not share the blame for any such abuses.
But locals interviewed by Business Week argue that the military operation was too big and the talk of killings too widespread for the company not to know. "There wasn't a single person in Aceh who didn't know that massacres were taking place", says H. Sayed Mudhahar, a former public relations manager for P.T. Arun. Faisal Putra, an attorney in Lhokseumawe who intends to sue Mobil on behalf of victims, agrees: "The crimes occurred over a long period of time. Mobil Oil cannot utter the words, 'We didn't know'."
The extent of Mobil's legal responsibility is not clear because there is no precedent in US law. The Alien Tort Claims Act allows US companies to be sued for wrongful actions committed overseas, and in the last few years, human rights organisations and foreign victims have filed suits in US courts seeking damages for activities by Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria, Unocal in Burma and Texaco in Ecuador. However, these cases remain in the courts.
Meanwhile, Mobil's operations in Aceh continue. Last September, when clashes broke out again in the area, Indonesian troops were sent back to Aceh, with hundreds of them posted at a gas refinery and other industrial sites near Mobil operations.
Indonesian NGOs are demanding that Mobil and P.T. Arun apologise, pay compensation and rehabilitate the victims of human rights abuses carried out by the military with the support of Mobil Oil and P.T. Arun. They are also urging Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to investigate Mobil Oil's finances, especially funding for military operations.
[Much of this information was drawn from an article in the November, 1998 issue of Down to Earth magazine.]