Also: AP - Indonesian Rts Groups Slam Papua Police Chief Appointment
South China
Morning Post
Tuesday, December 2, 2003
EAST TIMOR
Timor's Guterres forms Papua militia
Rights activists fear the group may try to spark a conflict
MARIANNE KEARNEY in Jakarta
A notorious
East Timorese militia leader has formed a militia group in the
mining town of Timika, a Papuan rights group reported yesterday.
Feared militia
leader Eurico Guterres was sentenced to 10 years' jail in
November last year for instigating attacks on pro-independence leaders
during East Timor's bloody referendum in August 1999. He was released
pending an appeal -
which could take years - and formed the Laskar Merah Putih, or Red and
White
Warriors militia, last month, the Papuan rights group Elsham said.
"He
has 200 members and they consist of refugees from Maluku, Timor and
Sulawesi," said Elsham's head, Aloysius Renwarin.
"The
Papuan community is afraid this group will be used to create a
conflict," she added.
The 29-year-old
militia leader was continuing to sign up members and had
asked the local government in Timika to provide the group with an office,
Ms
Renwarin said.
The report
came as a national police spokesman in Jakarta said yesterday that
a former Indonesian head of police in East Timor, who has been acquitted
of
charges of gross rights violations, would head the force in the troubled
province of Papua.
Inspector-General
Timbul Silaen would replace Inspector-General Budi Utomo,
who was taking the top police slot in East Kalimantan province, deputy
police
spokesman Sunarko Danu Ardanto said.
Inspector-General
Silaen, 55, headed the Indonesian police in East Timor from
June 1998 until September 1999, when unrest broke out after the
pro-independence results of a UN-held poll were announced. He was acquitted
of all charges of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity
in East Timor in
1999 by an ad-hoc Indonesian human rights court in August last year.
Guterres
was given the harshest sentence ever handed out by the court for
leading at least two violent attacks on pro-independence Timorese
supporters in
1999.
The Red
and White Warriors militia group, reportedly now led by Guterres, was
formed by joining forces with Muslim militia groups, which consisted mainly
of non-Papuan migrants who live in Papua, said Ms Renwarin.
Reports
of Guterres' move to Papua and his training of militia had appeared
in the Timika Post newspaper, according to Elsham. The organisation said
it
suspected Guterres might have the support of either the central government
in
Jakarta or local militias to intimidate Papuans who oppose their province
being split into two or three.
"Most
Papuans oppose the division of the province, so maybe he [Guterres] can
influence the Papuan community not to oppose the division," said
Ms Renwarin,
who pointed out that Guterres had strong ties to President Megawati
Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, and was appointed
head of one of her civilian security groups in 2000.
Jakarta
has supported the division of the province because it is seen as a
way of diluting the Papuan independence movement, analysts say. "People
with a
security-minded approach are very concerned about separatism and believe,
mistakenly, that this is a way to combat it," said political analyst
Kevin
O'Rourke.
Papuans
yesterday marked the 42nd anniversary of their failed declaration of
independence. Since 1961, the armed Free Papua Movement has fought a sporadic
guerilla war against the Indonesian military, which annexed Papua in 1962.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse