The chances now for further $ aid to Indonesia are growing dimmer and dimmer and dimmer....
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(C) NY Times
By TIM WEINER
ASHINGTON -- Pius Lustrilanang, a student activist, says he was kidnapped at gunpoint on Feb. 4 at a bus stop in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, blindfolded, driven outside the city and placed in a cell, naked.
Before the first electric shock, he says, he heard one interrogator say: "Here there is no law. There is no human rights. All you have to do is answer our questions. Some people leave here alive. Some don't. They are never found."
His questioners were military men who went about their work methodically and patiently, Lustrilanang said. "They tortured me to get information, not merely for pleasure," he said in an interview, his first since he fled Indonesia 11 days ago. "They wanted to know the constellation of the opposition, the alliances between different leaders."
They threatened him with death, he said, and warned him that if he wanted to live after his release, he should stay silent forever.
Lustrilanang was one of about 50 Indonesians who have disappeared in the past three months, apparently into the hands of the Indonesian security forces, according to the nation's leading legal aid organization.
The Indonesian government acknowledges that there have been disappearances among the political opposition; some Indonesian officials have suggested that they are the work of vigilantes or criminals. But opponents of the government have suffered death, torture and jail for their beliefs at the hands of the government, the State Department says.
Lustrilanang, who is 30 years old and leader of a prominent student group opposed to President Suharto, was held for two months and then released after international pressure on the government. He arrived in the United States Wednesday night, and testified Thursday at a congressional hearing.
As Indonesia endures the worst political and economic crisis in the 32-year reign of Suharto, the Clinton administration is straining to separate questions of political freedom and human rights from economic support. On Monday the administration expressed support for resuming financial aid to Indonesia through the International Monetary Fund, while simultaneously voicing concern about the kidnapping of dissidents.
Lustrilanang said Thursday that the issues are inextricable. "Any aid to the Suharto regime should be stopped because it only props up his dictatorship," he said. If aid continues, "there should be conditions: political reforms, human rights."
The IMF says it cannot insist on human rights in exchange for financial assistance, but the administration has failed so far to convince Congress to provide $18 billion in additional financing for the Fund.
In Indonesia Thursday, General Wiranto, the chief of the armed forces, proposed that the military set up a commission to study political reform. But Lustrilanang said he placed little faith in generals as instruments of change. He believes it was Indonesian soldiers who kidnapped him, held him in a jail on a military base with about 10 other political prisoners and punctuated their questions with prods from an electrified baton.
"This weakened government has become more vicious and brutal toward voices of dissent," he said Thursday in testimony at a congressional hearing convened by Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J. "Often, the perpetrators of those violations are publicly known. In most cases, they are members of the security forces."
Smith, chairman of the House subcommittee on international operations and human rights, criticized the administration for providing military training to Indonesia security forces, including units accused of human rights violations. American special-operations soldiers have conducted 41 training exercises with the Indonesia military over the past five years, including courses in psychological operations and urban combat, at a cost of more than $3.5 million, according to Pentagon officials.
"The first rule should be that the United States does not give any kind of military assistance whatever to governments that murder their own people," Smith said.
The White House spokesman. Michael D. McCurry, said Thursday that the United States "would continue to call on the government of Indonesia to respect the individual human rights of those who are voicing legitimate dissent."
At the hearing Thursday, another Indonesian human rights worker testified under a pseudonym and behind a veil. "I am an Indonesian from a middle-class background who is scared about telling you my honest opinion," she said, explaining her request for anonymity. "We are a people who are terrified of expressing our opinions and terrified of getting involved in politics of any kind.
"We are not citizens of a state. We are subjects of a modern, militarized sultanate."
In an interview before the hearing, Smith compared Suharto to the late African dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who amassed a personal fortune worth billions while his nation, Zaire, now Congo, went begging. And the congressman scathingly criticized the administration and the IMF for sending $1 billion to Indonesia this week.
"Suharto is the Mobutu of Asia," he said, "a dictator, and he and his family have been made filthy rich at the expense of his countrymen. He uses torture, and meanwhile the West goes begging him to take their money for stability's sake."
Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin said Thursday that for Indonesia, "the best protection against a political breakdown is the restoration of financial stability."
But Lustrilanang said in the interview that the Suharto government was already breaking down, and that only the military was keeping it from falling.
"The military will have to support Suharto or support the will of the people," he said. "Maybe there will be a transition government that will conduct just and fair elections." In either case, by bullets or ballots, change would come, he said.
And, he added with a smile, his own captors had given him some hope of that change: "They asked me, 'What is the goal of your political activities?' I said, 'I want to see Suharto step down.' They said, 'Be patient. Just wait two or three years more.' " |
