A MARTYR FOR ACEH.

Jafar Siddiq Hamzah enrolled as a graduate student at the New School for Social Research in New York in September 1999 to learn, according to his application, what democracy is, at the theoretical level; what the benefit will be to the people by choosing democracy; about the government and the history of democracy itself."

As a lawyer for the Legal Aid Foundation in Medan, Indonesia, Hamzah had not received many opportunities to witness democracy in action in his homeland.

Hamzah was born in 1965 in the village of Blang Pulo in Aceh, a region on the northwest protrusion of the island of Sumatra.

For centuries, the independent sultanate of Aceh, endowed with vast natural resources, was known as the Gateway to Mecca. Colonized by the Dutch in 1873, Aceh helped Indonesia secure independence after World War II and was conditionally integrated into the new republic.

But the conditions, including the establishment of an Islamic state, were not honored, and the Acehnese rebelled.

In 1957, Indonesia sent in troops to quell the uprising. Unable to prevail with military force alone, Indonesia made Aceh a separate province and in 1959 granted it "special region" status with greater autonomy.

In 1971, when Hamzah was six years old, he saw security forces cart his father off to prison for his refusal to join Golkar, the Indonesian government's political party. He never saw his father again.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, the political situation deteriorated as the military repression in Aceh grew worse. In 1989, under the pretext of attacks by the Free Aceh Movement (or GAM), Indonesian security forces launched a counterinsurgency effort. They have killed thousands and have engaged in widespread torture and rape. So far, more than 200 people have died in the first part of 2001 alone.

Hamzah's peace advocacy in Aceh kept pace with the violence.

At Legal Aid in Medan, Indonesia's second largest city, he began documenting human rights abuses, and he defended GAM fighters when they were brought to court. In 1996, when six captured GAM members burned to death in their cells, the military claimed the prisoners themselves were responsible. It was

Hamzah who challenged this account. Within two days, the military torched his office. Security forces accused him of being a member of the Free Aceh Movement and threatened him and his family.

Hamzah fled with his wife, a political scientist, to New York via Malaysia in 1996.

In 1998, Hamzah founded the International Forum for Aceh (IFA) "to bring the Aceh case to international attention and to gain international solidarity and support for the people of Aceh in their struggle for peace and justice in their homeland," according to IFA's documents of incorporation. He also helped to establish the Support Committee for Human Rights in Aceh, and he even managed to testify before a Congressional subcommittee in 1999.

"Aceh is one of the poorest and most underdeveloped provinces in Indonesia, with a very high number of people living below the poverty level," Hamzah stated. "What Aceh contributes to the central government in terms of oil, natural gas, and other resources and what the Acehnese people receive in return is profoundly unequal."

In the summer of 2000, he returned to Aceh to publish an English-Acehnese newspaper and to establish an Acehnese branch of IFA. Despite the fact that his cousin had been killed in Aceh only three months earlier, Hamzah continued to document corporate complicity in systematic human rights violations. He looked into the operations of Mobil Oil (now merged into ExxonMobil), one of the largest investors in Aceh.

Hamzah received death threats for poking around this story. He disregarded most of them but shared his concerns with his wife and other IFA members.

The gas facility in Aceh, jointly owned by ExxonMobil and the Indonesian government company Pertamina, "produced nearly a quarter of Mobil's global revenue" in the early 1990s, according to an article by Jay Solomon in The Wall Street Journal last September. One corporate vice president called it "the jewel in the company s crown.

But the jewel was a tarnished one, according to many Acehnese.

"Mobil's contract obliges it to rely on the Indonesian military for on-site security, the same military that has been implicated in a string of high-profile human rights abuses," the article noted. "Some villagers claim they were physically abused by soldiers assigned to Mobil duty." One villager told Solomon that he and seven other men were "tortured with electric shock," and he lifted his shirt to show the scars.

For its part, the company told The Wall Street Journal that it wasn't aware of any troops assigned to Mobil being involved in harassment or torture. And ExxonMobil gave a statement to The Progressive saying that its presence in Aceh "has been a stabilizing factor in the region."

The company statement, released in January, added: "We have always been sensitive to the needs of our employees, the local residents, and the government."

Because of his investigations and his human rights activities, Hamzah suspected he was being followed. He had taken to calling home every two hours to check in for safety reasons. On August 5, he was abducted in broad daylight from a busy street in Medan. Vendors and motorists thronged in the streets, yet no one seems to recall his abduction. His colleagues at IFA, the New School, and the East Timor Action Network lobbied ceaselessly for an investigation and his release. The State Department issued a statement, and the Jakarta newspapers followed the story carefully.

On September 3, Hamzah's tortured, mutilated, and decomposing body was discovered fifty-two miles from Medan, in a stretch of land often desecrated by the blood of murdered Acehnese. Four other corpses were found in the same area. The complicity of the Indonesian security forces seems beyond doubt.

"For those of us who knew him," said Robert Kostrzewa, assistant dean of academic affairs and scholarships at the New School, "Hamzah was truly one of the gentlest of human beings--but passionate and firm in his convictions. Hamzah is now a martyr. It is our responsibility to remember that he lost his life for what we hold to be one of our inalienable rights."

Outraged at this peace worker's death, thousands held pray-ins outside the police headquarters in the capital city of Banda Aceh and staged protests in Medan demanding that an investigation be conducted in earnest.

More than six months later, while expressions of sympathy have abounded, there has been no progress in the investigation. This inaction is indicative of the Indonesian government's unwillingness to put serious pressure on the military. While the beleaguered President Wahid (a.k.a. Gus Dur) periodically denounces the extra-judicial killings in Aceh and other provinces as barbarous, he also reiterates his unflagging support for Indonesian territorial integrity--integrity which the military is authorized to ensure by whatever means.

There has been no credible investigation or prosecution of any high-level official involved in human rights abuses. A perilous culture of impunity reinforces the military's brutal repressions.

Hamzah's murder coincided with the killing of three U.N. workers on the border of East and West Timor. In the last several months, there has been an escalation of violence, in Aceh and around the archipelago, and the Indonesian military has stepped up its attacks on human rights activists and pro-democracy advocates. Dr. Safwan Idris, a renowned intellectual and potential candidate for governor of Aceh, was murdered at his home soon after Hamzah's death.

"The Indonesian government is allowing its security forces to target humanitarian workers in Aceh, just as it allowed militias to target such workers in West Timor," Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch remarked in a joint statement on December 8, 2000.

The U.S. embassy in Jakarta raised Hamzah's case with the Indonesian government, but the Clinton Administration did not go public with any criticism. "It would have been nice to see [then-Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright herself raise the issue publicly," says John Miller of the East Timor Action Network. But Miller recognizes that the Indonesian government does not have full sway over the military. "Raising issues with the government of Indonesia doesn't necessarily translate into action on the ground."

Though the Clinton Administration had already placed restrictions on U.S. military ties with Indonesia, Washington remains a firm backer of the Indonesian government. The United States has long adhered to a policy of supporting the territorial integrity of Indonesia, which is not good news for those who seek independence for Aceh or even a reduced military presence. At the height of the Indonesian military's operations in Aceh in the late 1980s, there were 12,000 troops stationed there. Now there are 70,000. Eight hundred civilians were killed in Aceh last year, most of them by the military.

Now with the Bush Administration in power, there may be even less pressure on the Indonesian military. "The new Administration raises a lot of questions from our perspective," Miller says. Secretary of State Colin Powell "has never shown any commitment to linking arms sales to human rights requirements." In fact,

Miller says, Powell has argued against cutting off arms sales.

Miller says the United States has the clout, however, to influence the military's stance on human rights. "The Indonesian military is dependent on U.S. spare parts and ammunition for its operations," he says, "so the U.S. is in a good position to make clear statements about what it expects from the Indonesian military in terms of human rights."

But the U.S. government is not likely to make such statements without mass pressure. "Unless the international community changes its tactics, we're going to see more bloodbaths in Aceh," says Noam Chomsky.

Robert Jereski, who took the reins of IFA after Hamzah's death, places some of the blame on consumers: "I think the international community must first become aware of the ties between the Indonesian armed forces, which are committing atrocities, and the cheap oil, timber, gas, computers, and sneakers which consumers in so-called developed countries enjoy," he says. "The Indonesian military supports its operations through various legal and illegal means. Seventy-five percent of its budget comes from these business ventures. We in the developed world must recognize the real expense of such cheap goods in terms of human suffering."

On November 10 and 11, half a million people, more than 10 percent of the region's total population, rallied in Banda Aceh to demand a referendum to determine their future political status, notwithstanding the Indonesian military's intimidation tactics. While the international eye was focused on the American Presidential elections and the Middle East crisis, fifty-two people in Aceh were confirmed murdered by the military; local human rights groups estimate that the death toll from November 8 to November 11 surpassed 200.

Even ExxonMobil says it's concerned about the violence.

"It is to everyone's interest to resolve differences peacefully so that Indonesia might use its rich base of natural and human resources for the benefit of its people," the company said in its January statement.

Ironically, that's the cause Hamzah gave his life for.

"We've been told that in small, remote villages, one will find `IFA' written on the walls of houses," says Jereski. "That is why the professional hit on Hamzah was at once such a devastating blow to the Acehnese and a rallying cry to carry on his work."

Stephanie Brancaforte, president of the Student Coalition for Aceh, is a graduate student at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.