Obituary: Asmara Nababan (Updated)

By Clinton Fernandes

Mr. Asmara Nababan died on 28^th October 2010 in China.

In July 2009, I asked him whether he would be willing to come to Melbourne to speak at a concert to commemorate the 10th anniversary of East Timor's ballot on independence. He replied as follows:

It is a honor for me to stand and speak publicly concerning our debt to the victims of human rights violation in East Timor. Please send me the official invitation for visa application to the Australian Embassy.

Mr. Nababan was born in Siborong-borong, a small town in North Sumatra on 2^nd September 1946. I asked him how he first got interested in human rights. He said he learnt a lot from his family, especially his mother. Both his parents were teachers. His mother belonged to groups that helped the needy, and he sometimes accompanied her. He remembered one occasion in particular: an unknown patient in a hospital in Bali died. The hospital rang his mother, who arranged the burial of the unknown man. Mr Nababan was still in elementary school at the time. He says, ‘It made me think that this guy maybe had a mother and father who didn’t know what had happened to their son. Maybe they still thought their son was earning a living in the city. I felt sad that he died like that, lonely, without his family around him. I was about 11 or 12 years old at the time.’ When he was a student in his parents’ class, they treated him in exactly the same way they treated the other kids. He was punished for not doing homework just like any other kid. He didn’t receive any special treatment. This experience made him realised the importance of justice and fairness. Later, when he became a political activist, they worried for his safety but supported his decision to fight for human rights.

He finished high school in Medan in 1964, then moved to Jakarta to go to university. He joined the Student Christian Movement in 1964. During the 1965 crisis, he and many other students opposed Sukarno, because they believed he was authoritarian. He said, ‘we hoped that by taking down Sukarno that we would be able to develop a democracy in Indonesia. Many students had great hopes to establish democracy in Indonesia.’

He said that many students’ feelings were reflected in an early speech given by Suharto [this was the 16^th August 1967 speech before the Interim People’s Representative Council]. They believed that Suharto would develop an Indonesia in which human rights would be respected, democracy would flourish, economic justice would be implemented, and so on. Mr. Nababan said, ‘what actually happened in 1970s was totally different. So I joined groups of students from many backgrounds. We staged protests for transparency and against corruption. I also got involved in protests against the development of Taman Mini Indonesia Indah.’

Mr. Nababan and his fellow student activists campaigned against corruption before the first general election of the New Order). They had a lot of discussions about whether to join the government or stay outside it as critics. Some of the activists said that they needed to work inside the government in order to improve it. They decided to become Members of Parliament. Others took up posts in the bureaucracy. But Mr. Nababan ‘belonged to the other group which claimed that we have to be outside the government in order to put pressure on it by working with the public.’ They received a lot of information about the political parties’ involvement in corruption. He said, ‘If I reflect on this now, I believe the military itself supplied this information to us through its special channels in order to influence us to campaign against political parties… If I compare Sukarno with Suharto’s regime, of course Suharto was much more dangerous, much worse.’ Later in the 1970s, some activists began to move away from protest and towards development. Some, including Mr. Nababan, began a long-term involvement with NGOs. In 1993, when Indonesia set up its National Commission on Human Rights, Suharto asked Ali Said, the former Attorney-General, to select several people to join it. Mr. Nababan was asked to join. This caused problems with a number of his long-time fellow activists, who had all refused to participate in the Commission. He says, ‘Todung Mulya Lubis, Frans Hendra Winata, Abdul Hakim and others didn’t want to join. I discussed it with Hakim and Luhut Pangaribuan. I asked, “Why can’t we try? If we cannot make good use of the Commission, we can quit any time.” I decided to join it. It was a difficult decision because some of my friends were very angry, upset. Adnan Buyung Nasution told me that a lot of my friends were angry with me… I was told that even Todung Mulya Lubis was very upset, but as far as I know, he was the one who recommended my name to Ali Said.’

The Commission was an attempt to contain international condemnation after the Santa Cruz massacre. Suharto appointed the director-general of the national prison system, Baharuddin Lopa, as head of the Commission. Lopa had a strong reputation for incorruptibility and would subsequently prove to be a dedicated human rights investigator. However, he had to make statements acceptable to the regime (given its power at the time) before departing on his first three-day visit to East Timor. He said that rumors of human rights violations in East Timor were designed to discredit Indonesia, adding, ‘from the data we collect, we will make efforts to … tell the rest of the world that the information being used to protest against Indonesia is not totally true.’

The Commission’s first investigation was in February 1994 in Aceh. The Commissioners went there and found that 20 suspected members of GAM were in prison. They visited the prison very early in the morning without informing the local military commander or the police. They met prisoners who told them about their suffering, torture and detention.  According to Mr. Nababan, ‘After that we went to the Korem. We introduced ourselves and said we were there to do the investigation. The commander of the Korem said he would be happy to show us the prisoners. We told him we had already met them and gotten their statements. He was speechless.’

The Commission wrote their report and sent their recommendations to Suharto. They recommended that the prisoners had been in detention for more than a year without charge, so they must all be released and rehabilitated immediately. The Indonesian military was furious, demanding that any future report that implicated them had to be vetted by them first. The Commission refused. They continued their policy of visiting prisons without warning, practicing deception measures before going on visits, and using the political space they had.

They visited Liquica in 1995. Soldiers from Kodim 1638 had arrested residents of the village of Gariana on suspicion of hiding members of Falintil. They took six residents including the village head to a military command post, tortured them overnight and executed them the next morning. Military sources later claimed that they had killed six guerrillas in a military encounter. If true, it would have been the highest Falintil death toll in years in a single clash. But the claim seemed doubtful to informed observers from the very beginning because of Falintil’s knowledge of the terrain, its tactical competence and its battle discipline. The local church also contradicted the military’s claim, saying that only civilians had been killed. There was immediate international interest in the killings, prompting several diplomatic representatives in Jakarta to ask for an inquiry. Under pressure, President Suharto instructed military chief General Faisal Tanjung to begin a formal inquiry.

A team of seven officers led by Brigadier General Sumarna from the office of the Inspector General of the Armed Forces left for Dili to investigate. Another team from the National Human Rights Commission arrived in Dili to conduct its own investigation. One of its members (Professor Muladi of Diponegoro University in Semarang) undermined the investigation by saying that soldiers’ morale might be harmed if they were punished, and that troops might ‘hesitate to accept assignments in East Timor.’ His view was shared by the armed forces spokesman, Brigadier General Syarwan Hamid, who asked, ‘If soldiers are continually prevented from taking action because of human rights considerations, who is going to secure peace and stability in the area?’ But the Commission did not hide the truth, concluding that the six dead people were ordinary villagers, not Falintil. Subsequently, an Army lieutenant and a private were each ordered to serve four and a half years in prison.

Mr Nababan said, ‘When we went to Dili we asked members of parliament, people in the bureaucracy and people in the governor’s office how they feel about the general situation. All of them said that the situation was worse even though the government had announced a reduction of the military presence in East Timor. They were very cautious, and didn’t trust their neighbours due to the large number of spies and informers.’ The local military commander arranged a breakfast meeting between the Commission and local East Timorese who he believed were ‘good Indonesians’. He believed that the Commission was reporting unfavourable information because it was only meeting ‘anti-integrationists.’ But when the meeting took place and the military commander was out of hearing range, those supposedly pro-integrationist East Timorese told Mr. Nababan the same thing. In the car on the way to the airport, Mr. Nababan says he had a revealing and insightful conversation with Armindo Maia, who said that Indonesia had already lost East Timor, since ‘with all their intelligence they cannot identify who is their friend.’

As Indonesian forces were leaving East Timor in 1999, Mr. Nababan was a member of the special team known as the National Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Violations in East Timor (Komisi Penyelidik Pelanggaran HAM di Timor Timur, or KPP-HAM). It found “evidence of crimes that could be classified as crimes of universal jurisdiction including systematic and mass murder; extensive destruction, enslavement, forced deportations and displacement and other inhumane acts committed against the civilian population.” It urged the “Government and the Attorney General” to ensure that crimes against humanity were investigated and punished “whoever is the perpetrator”, in a free and independent manner “without any interference whatsoever.”

CF