Soldiers Involved In U.N. Worker Killings?
Indonesian soldiers have been implicated in the murders earlier this month of three U.N. aid workers in West Timor, attorney general Marzuki Darusman said Thursday.
Police in the town of Atambua were in the process of questioning and arresting six people, including some members of the military, for the killings of three staffers of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees on Sept 6, Darusman said.
Darusman did not know the ranks of the soldiers involved, but stressed that the suspects were rogue elements of the armed forces and were acting outside the chain of command.
The three were killed by an anti-independence militia mob, and international pressure on Indonesia to rein in such militias has grown dramatically since the killings.
This week, Secretary of Defense William Cohen warned during a visit to Jakarta that Indonesia risked losing international financial assistance if it fails to immediately disband the armed packs.
On Thursday, the U.S. embassy in Jakarta warned American companies and citizens that they are likely targets for terrorist attacks by nationalists angered by world condemnation of Indonesia.
The militias are the same gangs that went on a killing and looting rampage last year after East Timor voted in a U.N.-supervised referendum to separate from Indonesia.
The militias, now operating in Indonesia-ruled West Timor, are intent on destabilizing U.N.-administered East Timor's transition to self-rule and preventing 120,000 East Timorese refugees languishing near the border from returning home.
In New York on Tuesday, Indonesia's top security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono promised the U.N. Security Council that Indonesia's military would start forcibly disarming the militias if they do not surrender their weapons by next Tuesday.
After the killings in Atambua, the United Nations suspended its operations in West Timor and evacuated about 400 aid workers.
UNHCR spokesman Peter Kessler said the arrest of the suspects was a step forward but stressed that the humanitarian workers will not return until their security can be guaranteed.
"Our minimum requirement to go back to West Timor is that the perpetrators be brought to justice, the militias be disarmed, disbanded and removed from the refugee sites, and that law and order be re-established," he said.
Kessler said the refugee agency left about 2,000 tons of food in West Timor, enough to feed the refugees for about two months. He said the government had pledged to distribute additional rice and aid groups were gearing up to ship more in.
Meanwhile, Indonesian police on Thursday fired tear gas to disperse rock-throwing protesters at a rally against former President Suharto near his inner city home.
About 100 protesters demanding the stroke-afflicted former ruler be called to account for widespread human rights abuses and corruption during his 32-year, army-backed rule dispersed after the gas was fired when they tried to charge riot polie.
Another group of about 100 pro-Suharto demonstrators watched peacefully from nearby.
The 79-year-old ex-autocrat is on trial for corruption over the misuse of $550 million from charities he controlled while president. But his doctors say he has suffered three strokes and is too ill to face a courtroom.
Protests, sometimes violent, have been a regular event near his home since he was forced from office during social and economic chaos in May, 1998.
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