BY NICK EVERETT
On May 21, I was arrested for attending a protest in Jakarta. Australian Books not Bombs convener Kylie Moon, South Korean student activist Yung-Chan Choi and South African anti-war activist Lydia Cairncross were also arrested. The four of us had been in Jakarta attending the Global Peace Movements Conference, held at the Wisata Hotel, which is near the site of the demonstration. We were all deported on the evening of May 22.
May 21 was the fifth anniversary of the overthrow of Indonesian dictator Suharto. In many provinces throughout Indonesia, demonstrations were planned — both to celebrate the anniversary and to protest the stalling of democratic reforms and the deteriorating economic situation.
Two days before the demonstrations, the Indonesian government declared the province of Aceh under martial law. This declaration coincided with the commencement of military attacks in Aceh involving bombings, shootings and abductions of civilians.
Four-hundred protesters, mostly members of the radical Peoples Democratic Party (PRD), the National Democratic Student League (LMND) and the Indonesian National Front for Workers Struggle (FNPBI), assembled outside Hotel Indonesia at 1.30pm. The protesters marched to the Jakarta office of the International Monetary Fund, where the rally was addressed by Cairncross and Australian Socialist Alliance co-convenor David Glanz.
Expressing her solidarity with Indonesia's poor, Cairncross explained how South Africa's authoritarian apartheid regime had been replaced by a new regime of privatisation and deregulation under the African National Congress government.
As the march made its way to the US embassy, it was joined by several more international delegates from the Global Peace Movements Conference, which had just concluded. Outside the US embassy, the rally was addressed by Bob Wing, editor of War Times and a leader of the US anti-war coalition United for Peace and Justice, PRD general secretary Natalia Scholastika, FNPBI chairperson Dita Sari and myself. Sari addressed the link between the US war on Iraq and the Indonesian government's war on Aceh, noting that both were motivated by the thirst for profits by the world's biggest oil corporations.
We then moved on to the Presidential Palace to meet up with other protesters. Four different rallies were organised in Jakarta that day, including a protest by 800 students and workers that had marched from Bandung.
After arriving at the Presidential Palace, the demonstration was addressed by Moon. As she began her speech, riot and mobile brigade (BriMob) police began to surround the protesters.
"In the middle of my speech the military began to approach the truck", explained Moon. "I jumped off the truck into a sea of activists who protected me, forming a mobile blockade around me.
"The Indonesian activists linked arms and legs to protect me and three other international participants from a violent attack by the police, who started laying in with batons."
Moon and I both believe that the the police attack was directly linked with the imposition of martial law in Aceh. The military is trying to reassert its role in Indonesian political life.
Three Indonesians were also arrested, including the chair of the rally, PRD Jakarta secretary Zeli Ariane. Protests were also repressed by the police in Pekanbaru in Riau, Makassar in South Sulawesi, and Purwokerto in Central Java.
Following our capture by police, we were taken in two cars to the offices of the police intelligence unit, where we were interrogated and held until the following morning.
We were in custody for more than 30 hours. We did not know when we would be released or what charges there would be. For much of that time we had no phone contact. We were interrogated until 4.30am — Intel are not used to
being held accountable or having any restrictions on what they do to protesters.
"While I knew that we would be okay because we are foreigners, I kept thinking about what it would be like for Indonesian comrades", Moon told me. We knew at the time, that there were three PRD members being held by police that were being beaten and possibly tortured. All three have subsequently been released.
On the morning of May 22, the four of us were transferred to the immigration department, where we met up with other conference delegates who had come to express their solidarity.
Immigration officials — without interviewing us — accepted the judgement of the police that we had breached immigration regulations by participating in a protest and should be deported.
All of us had informed the Indonesian government of our plans to attend a conference in our visa applications and the police were notified of both the conference and the street rally by the events' organisers as required by a 1998 law on "freedom of expression".
Delegates from 26 countries attended the Global Peace Movements Conference, which adopted a statement demanding an end to martial law and all military action in Aceh. The conference also resolved to organise a peace mission to Aceh to investigate the human rights situation as part of a global response to the conflict.
Moon summed up the feeling of all the foreign arrestees, when she said, "My own experience of what happened — although stressful and alarming — was a small price to pay for helping to bring international media attention to the situation." Moon and I urge more Australians to take notice of the war being waged in Aceh and the stifling of dissent in Indonesia.
We need to bring a lot more pressure to bear on our own government and its military ties with Indonesia. Unfortunately, the Australian government has not learnt from the experience of East Timor. The Australian government has rejected the Acehnese people's right to self-determination. Canberra's continued military ties with Jakarta make it complicit in the war on the Acehnese people and suppression democratic rights in Indonesia.
[Nick Everett is a co-convenor of the Walk Against the War coalition and a member of Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific. For more information, visit < http:www.asia-A href="mailto:pacific-action.org"><pacific-action.org>.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, May 28, 2003.
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