World News
Mobil
Oil implicated in
Indonesian Army massacres
SAN FRANCISCO (IPS)-Mobil, the giant U.S. oil multinational, is keeping a low profile as investigators probe allegations that it helped Indonesia's armed forces carry out massacres near Mobil drilling sites in the province of Aceh in northern Sumatra.
Business Week, one of the most widely read magazines in the United States, published a six-page late December feature on the company, titled: "What did Mobil Know? Mass graves suggest a brutal war on local Indonesian guerrillas in the oil giant's backyard."
The revelations came shortly after two other U.S. companies-Freeport McMoRan of New Orleans and CalEnergy of Omaha-were accused of business malpractice in Indonesia by investigative reporters at the Wall Street Journal.
All three exposes were published in the months after the fall of Gen. Suharto's 32-year regime, which has allowed new light to be shed on the role of foreign multinationals in the southeast Asian country's affairs.
Mobil owns 35 percent of P.T. Arun, a liquefied natural-gas producer in Aceh, while Pertamina, Indonesia's state-owned oil monopoly, holds the controlling 55 percent stake. Aceh provides an estimated 30 percent of Indonesia's total oil and gas exports and 11 percent of the country's total exports.
Mass killings and disappearances near the Mobil drilling site had been rumored for a decade, ever since the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement), a local separatist group, began attacks on Mobil installations in 1980.
Earlier this year, the state Human Rights Commission substantiated the allegations when they began exhumation of the bodies of hundreds of people, who had been tortured and killed, from a dozen grave sites.
The Business Week article begins with a gruesome photograph of an Indonesian soldier examining a skull dug up from a mass grave. The article quotes Mobil's denials but also points out that the company admitted providing food, fuel and digging equipment for the soldiers who guarded the region for three decades.
One former Mobil employee told Business Week that rumors of massacres and unconfirmed reports that Mobil equipment was being used to dig graves were frequently discussed at work and in a company cafeteria.
"Every time I drove out there (Bukit Sentang), the subcontractors stopped my car. They said, 'No, don't go out there. Don't you know the army is killing people and burying them in mass graves with Mobil equipment?" he said.
An estimated 39,000 people have disappeared since the region was placed under military occupation in 1980, according to local activists.
In Bukit Sentang, after an estimated 150 bodies were found earlier this year, Baharuddin Lopa, Secretary-General of the Indonesian government-funded National Commission on Human Rights, said: "This proves that Aceh has been a killing field."
One male whose body was dug up had been blindfolded and was dressed only in underwear, with his arms bound behind his back by an army belt.
The area of the graves, an expanse of scrub between a forest and an oil palm plantation, is nicknamed "Lubang Neraka," meaning the "Holes of Hell," by local people.
On Oct. 10, 1998 a coalition of 17 Indonesian human rights organizations issued a statement saying Mobil was "responsible for human rights abuses" by providing crucial logistic support to the army, including earth-moving equipment that was used to dig mass graves.
This declaration prompted Business Week to send journalists to carry out detailed interviews with local people.
Yusuf Kasim, a local farmer who spoke to Business Week, said the army paid him $4 a night to stand guard over a borrowed excavator to prevent anyone from siphoning fuel from its tank.
He said he watched soldiers execute 60 to 70 blindfolded Acehnese men at a time with M-16 rifles, shooting them in the back so they tumbled face-first into a mass grave across a rice field in front of his house.
The publication of the Business Week article caused an immediate stir. On Christmas Eve, the National Human Rights Commission announced that it would launch an investigation. "We have to learn whether this information is accurate and clarify these reports," said Mohammed Salim, a member of the commission.
Michael Robinson, a press spokesman for Mobil at its Virginia headquarters, said the company was not willing to discuss the matter beyond a short official statement.
"Mobil strongly denies the implications contained in the article, which are based largely on unsubstantiated allegations, rumors and innuendo about allegations that took place outside Mobil's operations and control," the statement said.
But activists like George Ajitondro, an Indonesian academic who lives in exile abroad, say Mobil's operations have also devastated local communities who depend on agriculture and fish farming, through forced relocations, numerous oil and industrial spills into the rivers, sea and bay, erosion of their riverside gardens and extreme noise pollution.
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