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by Sonja Jacobs '00 The world has been outraged and stunned by the Indonesian military's conduct in East Timor. The government is sponsoring killing of civilians there, the armed forces are blatantly perpetrating violence and supplying militias with weapons and training, and everyone knows that the violence in the territory was not only originally started by government officials but is continued with government acquiescence. This event is not limited to East Timor!! In the provinces of Aceh in North Sumatra, Ambon in the Moluccas, Irian Jaya (West Papua), and West Kalimantan, the situation is the same. But no international attention has been drawn to these areas. Granted, the scale of killing is lower than in East Timor. But government intervention and provoking of violence by the armed forces is the same all over Indonesia. In Aceh, thousands of suspected insurgents were slaughtered or imprisoned by the military, which has led to a growth in popularity of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), a group of guerillas who themselves have a questionable human rights record. The conflict has gone on for almost ten years, and the military still remains a hated presence there. In Ambon, there has been steady rioting since December 1998, and bad rioting in August 1999. There it is religious (between the Muslims and the Christians), but the military has supplied weapons and training to the Muslims, resulting in the deaths of many innocent Christians. The same is true in Irian Jaya and West Kalimantan. The Indonesian government hopes to use the military to create enough chaos that the democratic processes that have tentatively started in Indonesia will necessarily be halted. The military stirs up conflict in tense areas of the country, hoping that martial law will need to be enacted, which would keep the current leadership (the party GOLKAR) in power. Sources: Human Rights Watch website: http://www.hrw.org/
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