Headlines - Military, Police Violence Up in Indonesia: NGO

1) Military, Police Violence Up in Indonesia: NGO

2) USAID cooperating with YCTP to control HIV/AIDS in Mimika

3) Human Rights Watch demands release of Papuan, Moluccan activists

4) Interpol faces legal threat for helping oppressive regimes hunt dissidents

5) New York Times Continues to Conceal U.S. Role in 1965 Indonesia Coup

6) Human rights violations are occurring in Puncak

7) Human rights violations in Papua are very high, according to a three-year ssurvey

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1) Military, Police Violence Up in Indonesia: NGO
Agus Triyono | January 24, 2012

Human Rights Watch on Monday accused Indonesian authorities of using excessive force against peaceful protesters in Papua and standing by while mobs attacked religious minorities in Java and Sumatra last year.

In its World Report 2012, issued on Monday, the New York-based rights group said that in 2011 there was a marked rise in police and military violence and attacks on religious minorities in Indonesia.

'The common thread is the failure of the Indonesian government to protect the rights of all its citizens,' said Elaine Pearson, HRW's deputy Asia director.

The report called on the government to release 'all detainees held for peacefully expressing views opposing the government,' mainly Papuan and Malukan activists.

It also urged the government to thoroughly investigate and prosecute violence against religious and ethnic minorities. It said that in October a police operation to disband a three-day Papuan Congress in Jayapura left three people killed, more than 90 injured and more than 300 arrested.

No police officers were disciplined but five Papuan leaders were charged with treason.

The report also pointed out that a least 75 other people, mostly Papuan and from the Maluku islands, are being imprisoned for peaceful political activities and acts of free expression.

'The Indonesian government's jailing of people for peacefully expressing their political views is an ugly stain on the country's human rights record,' Pearson said. 'Indonesia's reputation as a rights-respecting democracy will be tarnished until all of these prisoners are released.'

The report also said that incidents of violence against religious minorities became more deadly and frequent during 2011.

It said that hard-line mobs had attacked various religious minorities and the few attackers for whom a real effort to apply justice had been made received only light sentences.

The government also did not revoke several decrees discriminating against minority religions and fostering public intolerance, according to the report that assessed progress on human rights during the past year in more than 90 countries.

Minority congregations have reported that local officials arbitrarily refused to issue them permits required under a 2006 decree on building houses of worship. Those who attempted to worship without a permit faced harassment and violence.

'Incidents of sectarian violence are no longer isolated cases in Indonesia but are taking place at an alarming rate,' Pearson said.

'The Indonesian government needs to reverse course and start prosecuting violence against religious minorities and replace the discriminatory regulations that only encourage such attacks.'

Meanwhile, the Commission on Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) accused President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of trying to shun his responsibility to deal with the human rights violations that have taken place under his watch.

Haris Azhar, a Kontras coordinator, said that while addressing a meeting of leaders of the police and armed forces on Friday, the president said the violence that had taken place in the country could not be categorized as serious human rights violations.

'From this statement, it is clear that this is an effort by SBY to evade responsibility for human rights problems in the country,' Haris said in a statement issued on the weekend.

Haris cited the examples of continuing violence against members of the Ahmadiyah sect and the ongoing violence in Papua. In both cases, he said, it was clear the police or armed forces had failed to prevent violence and protect citizens.

'We are suspicious that this statement by SBY is a political defense for the various incidents,' he said.

In his speech, Yudhoyono defended the police and military, saying some activist organizations were 'quick to accuse [the government] of gross human rights violations,' which he said were not occurring in Indonesia.

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2) USAID cooperating with YCTP to control HIV/AIDS in Mimika

Mon, January 23 2012 20:21 | 215 Views

Timika, Papua (ANTARA News) - The United States Agency for International Cooperation (USAID) is cooperating with the Yayasan Caritas Timika Papua (YCTP) foundation in carrying out a HIV/AIDS control program in Mimika, Papua, a YCTP director said.

YCTP Executive Director Vincent Tsia said here on Monday that the cooperation with USAID would focus on controlling HIV/AIDS in villages located far Timika City.

He said the focus would be on remote areas because health facilities in remote villages and Mimika coastal areas were not yet adequate. Besides, information and knowledge about AIDS in rural areas was still low.

"The control program will be focused on remote areas and coastal areas which are far from the city," he said.

Up to July 2011, there were 2,623 HIV/AIDS cases in Mimika making it the region with the highest incidence of the disease in Papua province.

In the January - July 2011 period, 210 new cases had been detected.

In the meantime, a total of 181 people suffering from HIV/AIDS died in Jayapura district during 2011, the region`s AIDS Eradication Commission (KPA) said earlier.

The number was down compared to 2010 when 192 HIV/AIDS patients died, KPA secretary Purnomo said adding that although the number of people living with HIV/AIDS who died had declined, the number of sufferers had increased.

"In 2011 the number HIV/AIDS sufferers continued to increase but we are still grateful that the number of those who died decreased," Purnomo said.

He said this was the result of the seriousness of the local administration, through the local health office, in continuing to conduct HIV/AIDS checks on all people in regional hospitals and health centers as well as auxiliary health centers throughout Jayapura district.

In addition, the local administration was also intensifying efforts to familiarize the public about HIV/AIDS through the health office and regional AIDS Eradication Commission (KPA), Purnomo said.

He noted until November 2011, the number of HIV/AIDS cases had reached 796, consisting of 335 HIV and 461 AIDS cases.
(Uu.A014/HAJM/S012)

Editor: Priyambodo RH

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http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/01/23/human-rights-watch-demands-release-papuan-moluccan-activists.html

3) Human Rights Watch demands release of Papuan, Moluccan activists

Sita W. Dewi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Mon, 01/23/2012 6:06 PM

A |

The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) is urging the Indonesian government to release all political detainees, including Papuan and Moluccan activists, who have been held for peacefully expressing views opposing the government.

'Police violence in Papua got a lot worse in 2011,' HRW deputy director for Asia Elaine Pearson said in a statement published on its website, www.hrw.org, on Monday.

'The common thread is the failure of the Indonesian government to protect the rights of all its citizens,' Pearson added.

In its 676-page report, HRW assessed progress on human rights during the past year in more than 90 countries, including in Arab countries where revolutionary uprisings bloomed.

In October, police used excessive force when arresting more than 300 Papuans involved in a three-day Papuan Congress near Jayapura, the capital of Papua province. At least three men died and more than 90 were injured. No police officers were punished but five Papuan leaders were charged with treason, according to the report.

HRW also cited that at least 15 other Papuans, including Filep Karma, who has been imprisoned since December 2004, were convicted of treason for carrying out peaceful political activities. Around 60 more people throughout Indonesia, mostly activists from Maluku Islands, are also imprisoned on charges related to peaceful acts of free expression.

Several of the prisoners have suffered from long-term illnesses, exacerbated by poor medical care in prison, HRW noted.

'The Indonesian government's jailing of people for peacefully expressing their political views is an ugly stain on the country's human rights record,' Pearson said. 'Indonesia's reputation as a rights-respecting democracy will be tarnished until all of these prisoners are released.'

The watchdog pointed out that access to Papua in 2011 remained tightly controlled. Few foreign journalists and human rights researchers could visit independently without close monitoring of their activities. (mtq)

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4) Interpol faces legal threat for helping oppressive regimes hunt dissidents

Interpol has issued a "red notice", above, for Benny Wenda, a tribal leader who campaigns for independence for the West Papua region from Indonesia. Wenda has been granted asylum in the U.K. on political grounds, according to Fair Trials International.

By Ian Johnston, msnbc.com

LONDON -- A landmark lawsuit alleging that dictatorships and other oppressive regimes are using Interpol's alert system to harass or detain political dissidents is being planned by rights activists and lawyers.

Campaigners allege that rogue states have fabricated criminal charges against opposition activists who have been given refuge in other countries and then sought their arrest by obtaining "red notices" from the global police body.

There are currently about 26,000 outstanding red notices. While they are only designed to alert other nations' police forces that an Interpol member state has issued an arrest warrant, some countries will take suspects into custody based on the red notice alone.

In one case, Rasoul Mazrae, an Iranian political activist recognized by the United Nations as a refugee, was arrested in Syria in 2006 as he tried to flee to Norway after a red notice was issued...

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/23/10167327-interpol-faces-legal-threat-for-helping-oppressive-regimes-hunt-dissidents?chromedomain=worldblog

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http://www.fpif.org/blog/new_york_times_continues_to_conceal_us_role_in_1965_indonesia_coup

5) New York Times Continues to Conceal U.S. Role in 1965 Indonesia Coup

By Conn Hallinan, January 23, 2012

Gen. Suharto (left)

Why is the New York Times concealing the key role that the United States played in the 1965 coup in Indonesia that ended up killing somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people? In a story Jan. 19'Indonesia Chips Away At the Enforced Silence Around a Dark History'the Times writes that the coup was 'one of the darkest periods in modern Indonesian history, and the least discussed, until now.'

Indeed it is, but the Times is not only continuing to ignore U.S. involvement in planning and carrying out the coup, but apparently doesn't even bother to read its own clip files from that time that reported the Johnson administration's 'delight with the news from Indonesia.' The newspaper also reported a cable by Secretary of State Dean Rusk supporting the 'campaign against the communists' and assuring the leader of the coup, General Suharto, that the 'U.S. government [is] generally sympathetic with, and admiring of, what the army is doing.'

What the Indonesian Army was doing was raping and beheading communists, leftists, and trade unionists. Many people were savagely tortured to death by the military and its right-wing Muslim allies in the Nahdlatul Ulama and the Muhammadiyah. A number of those butchered were fingered by U.S. intelligence.

According to a three-part series in the July 1999 Sydney Morning Herald, interviews with Indonesian political prisoners, and examinations of U.S. and Australian documents, 'Western powers urged the Indonesian military commanders to seize upon the false claims of a coup attempt instigated by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), in order to carry out one of the greatest civilian massacres of the 20thcentury and establish a military dictatorship.'

General Suharto claimed that the PKI was behind the assassination of six leading generals on the night of July 30, 1965, the incident that ignited the coup. But the Herald series included interviews with two of the men involved in the so-called July 30 putsch, both of who claim the PKI had nothing to do with the uprising. At the time, the PKI was part of a coalition government, had foresworn violence, and had an official policy of a 'peaceful transition' to socialism. In fact, the organization made no attempt to mobilize its three million members to resist the coup.

The U.S. made sure that very few of those communists'as well as the leaders of peasant, women, union, and youth organizations' survived the holocaust. According to U.S. National Security Archives published by George Washington University, U.S. intelligence agents fingered many of those people. Then U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, Marshall Green, said that an Embassy list of top Communist leaders 'is being used by the Indonesian security authorities that seem to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership at the time…'

The U.S. was well aware of the scale of the killings. In an April 15, 1966 telegram to Washington, the Embassy wrote, 'We frankly do not know whether the real figure [of PKI killed] is closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000, but believe it wiser to err on the side of the lower estimates, especially when questioned by the press.'

Besides helping the military track down and murder any leftists, the U.S. also supplied the right-wing Kap-Gestapu movement with money. Writing in a memo to then Assistant Secretary of State McGeorge Bundy, Green wrote 'The chances of detection or subsequent revelation of our support in this instance are as minimal as any black bag operation can be.'

States News Service reporter Kathy Kadane interviewed several former diplomats and intelligence agents and found that the list turned over to the Indonesian security forces had around 5,000 names on it. 'It was really a big help to the Army,' former embassy political officer Robert J. Martens told Kadane. 'They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that is not all bad. There is a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.'

At the time, Washington was beginning a major escalation of the Vietnam War, and the Johnson administration was fixated on its mythical domino theory that communists were about to take over Asia. The U.S. considered Indonesia to be a strategically important country, not only because it controlled important sea passages, but also because it was rich in raw materials in which U.S. corporations were heavily invested. These included Richfield and Mobil oil companies, Uniroyal, Union carbide, Eastern Airlines, Singer Sewing Machines, National Cash Register, and the Freeport McMorRan gold and copper mining company.

At the time, Indonesian President Sukarno was one of the leaders of the 'third force' movement, an alliance of nations that tried to keep itself aloof from the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The 1955 Bangdung Conference drew countries from throughout Asia and Africa to Indonesia to create an anti-colonialist, non-aligned movement. It also drew the ire of the U.S, which refused to send a representative to Bangdung.

In the polarized world of the Cold War, non-alignment was not acceptable to Washington, and the U.S. began using a combination of diplomacy, military force and outright subversion to undermine countries like Indonesia and to bring them into alliances with the U.S. and its allies. The CIA encouraged separatist movements in the oil-rich provinces of Sumatra and Sulawesi. The British and the Australians were also up to their elbows in the 1965 coup, and France increased its trade with Indonesia following the massacre.

The relations between Jakarta and Washington are long and sordid. The U.S. gave Indonesia the green light to invade and occupy East Timor, an act that resulted in the death of over 200,000 people, or one-third of the Timorese population, a kill ratio greater than Pol Pot's genocidal mania in Cambodia. Washington is also supportive of Indonesia's seizure of Irian Jaya (West Papua) and, rather than condemning the brutality of the occupation, has blamed much of the violence on the local natives.

The Cold War is over, but not U.S. interests in Asia. The Obama administration is pouring military forces into the region and has made it clear that it intends to contest China's growing influence in Asia and Southeast Asia. Here Indonesia is key. Some 80 percent of China's energy supplies pass through Indonesian-controlled waters, and Indonesia is still a gold mine, literally in the case of Freeport McMoRan on Irian Jaya, of valuable resources.

So once again, the U.S. is turning a blind eye to the brutal and repressive Indonesian military that doesn't fight wars but is devilishly good at suppressing its own people and cornering many of those resources for itself. The recent decision by the White House to begin working with Kopassus, Indonesia's equivalent of the Nazi SS, is a case in point. Kopassus has been implicated in torture and murder in Irian Jaya and played in key role in the 1999 sacking of East Timor that destroyed 70 percent of that country's infrastructure following Timor's independence vote. Over 1,500 Timorese were killed and 250,000 kidnapped to Indonesian West Timor.

It appears that Indonesians are beginning to speak up about the horrors of the 1965 coup. Books like Geoffrey Robinson's 'The Dark Side of Paradise' and Robert Lemelson's documentary film, '40 Years of Silence: an Indonesian Tragedy,' are slowly wearing away at the history manufactured by the military dictatorship.

But the U.S. has yet to come clean on its role in the 1965 horror, and the New York Times has apparently decided to continue that silence, perhaps because once again Indonesia is pivotal to Washington's plans for Asia?

For more of Conn Hallinan's essays visit Dispatches From the Edge. Meanwhile, his novels about the ancient Romans can be found at The Middle Empire Series.

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from tapol

Bintang Papua, 20 January 2012

6) Human rights violations are occurring in Puncak

The Papua branch of Komnas HAM, the Indonesian Commission for Human Rights, has confirmed that human rights violations have been occurring in Puncak. These include a number of deaths that have occurred during this prolonged conflict.

'While not yet knowing the motive or who was responsible, the killings were clearly human rights violations. Lives were lost which is an indication that the right to life has been ignored.,' said Matius Murib, deputy chairman of the Komnas HAM Papua branch. He made the statement after attending a Forces Group Discussion on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ECOSOC) held by the Papuan branch of Komnas HAM.

When lives are lost, human rights are certainly violated. No need to ask about the motive as this goes beyond the power of the Almighty. The state or government have no right to destroy life, which is totally without justification .' The right to life comes only from God and no one has the right to kill people,' he said.

In this Puncak case, those involved were planning to conduct investigations in February and were planning to visit the site of the killings, in order to make recommendations to the authorities. Murib said that he could not make any comments until they had visited the site

Responding to a question about whether the government had been responsible fir triggering the conflict, he said that such a charge would need to be investigated. If this turns out to the true, then some individual or institution that had been granted powers by the state had failed o take action quickly enough to prevent the incident from occurring, and this is matter for KomnasHAM to issue a charge.

He recognised that according to investigations reported in the media, there were indeed actions by the government and related persons, and the question was, why had the conflict occurred and why were casualties still occurring. 'It is our task to investigate whether actions were taken by the state and whether they were justified.'

As has previously been reported, the conflict that relates to the election of the head of the district of Puncak and has resulted in 49 casualties among the local community since 30 July 2011. This conflict was still on-going up until 14 January 2012 in the district and the government has not made any efforts to resolve it, nor have the police done anything to resolve the conflict, which is being described as a tribal war between people living in the Central Highlands. It relates to an internal dispute within the political party called Gerindra, between a number of candidates. Gerindra has turned this internal conflict into a conflict between the commnity in general which has paralysed all development activities there.

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from tapol

7) Human rights violations in Papua are very high, according to a three-year ssurvey

JUBI, 20 January 2012

[A photograph at the beginning of the article shows three little boys squatting in the street and inhaling aibon.]

The Papuan branch of Komnas HAM, the National Commission on Human Rights, believes that violations of economic, social and cultural rights in Papua are very serious and can be described as gross human rights violations.

The commission's chairman for co-ordination, Adriana S. Walli, has drawn together a great deal of information in her review of the prospects for economic, social and cultural rights in Papua which she presented at a Focus Group Discussion which was held in Jayapura on 20 January.

According to Adriana, repression and ECOSOC violations have been perpetrated on a vast scale during the past three years .'These violations are occurring on a daily basis and can be identified as gross violations. However, she said, they are brushed aside as being nothing more than trivia.

She went on to say that there were two indicators for why these violations continue to occur. The first was the prevailing view that these violations were trivial, and the second was the lack of commitment of the government and various related agencies.

While presenting her data, Adriana said that when she was carrying out her investigations during the past three years, she had come across a great number of ECOSOC violations, especially in health, economic rights and children's rights.

She drew attention to the fact that in the various hospitals, little had been done to improve the facilities. Many of the personnel were harking back to Dutch times. The supply of clean water is inadequate while there has been a big increase in the number of street children. Many of these youngsters consume alcohol and sniff dangerous substances such as aibon; they also participate in free sex practices, take drugs and so on.

Small indigenous Papuan traders have great difficulty obtaining credit to grow their businesses while they still use traditional methods to handle their finances.

The chairman of the Papuan branch of Komnas HAM, the National Commission on Human Rights, Julius Ongge, told the gathering that the government of the province of Papua must be held responsible for the implementation of ECOSOC rights. When local people call for their basic rights such as customary rights and their rights to education and health, it is obligatory for the government to respond but what in fact happens is that they come face to face with the security forces.

'Whenever people make demands for their rights, they confront many alarming accusations and often have to face lengthy legal processes even they have done nothing wrong,' he said.

ENDS

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