by Steve Coll
President Wahid’s government would be grateful for American backing in the effort to calm Aceh’s violence, he continued, “not in terms of public intervention,” but through private messages to G.A.M. that might have “great weight on the other side.” As in the Middle East, the United States had the leverage in Aceh to force the two sides to negotiate, Shihab believed. His government was willing to give the Acehnese “everything short of independence,” he said.
Powell said that if the Indonesian military abused civilians in Aceh, it could cause “the greatest harm” to the country’s relationship with the Bush administration. It was critical that the Indonesian military apply only that force that was “reasonable and necessary to the task,” he said. The secretary made clear, however, that he had taken note of Shihab’s message that there might be a role for the United States to “send signals to the other side” in Aceh’s war.27
ExxonMobil’s gas operations in Aceh had now become embedded in U.S. diplomatic and intelligence priorities in Indonesia. The Bush administration sought, overall, to support Indonesia’s fragile democracy, improve civilian control over the military, stanch human rights violations, and suppress Islamist radicals—goals that sometimes competed with one another, because the Indonesian military was at once a potential source of stability and instability. ExxonMobil seemed to be both part of the problem and part of the solution in Aceh. On the one hand, its gas production seemed to provoke and exacerbate guerrilla violence, and that violence encouraged abuses by the military. Yet the revenue ExxonMobil’s gas sales provided Jakarta was critical to the country’s young democracy. The Bush administration found itself simultaneously under pressure from ExxonMobil to do something about the deteriorating Aceh war and from the Indonesian government to do something about ExxonMobil’s unwillingness to operate amid guerrilla violence. The corporation’s decision to shut down gas production that spring had provoked an outcry in Indonesia’s parliament. Politicians threatened to nationalize the gas fields; they summoned Ron Wilson, the ExxonMobil country manager, to a parliamentary hearing to explain the corporation’s decision to suspend production. Other politicians spoke darkly about American conspiracies to undermine Indonesia’s fragile democratic government; some accused Gelbard of forcing ExxonMobil to close down.
That accusation so aggravated the ambassador that he shot off letters to local newspapers refuting the charge. The decision to cease production had been ExxonMobil’s alone, he wrote, although the corporation enjoyed the support of the U.S. government. In Washington, Robert Haines met repeatedly with frontline Bush administration officials in charge of Indonesia policy at the National Security Council and the State Department—Karen Brooks at the N.S.C. and Ralph “Skip” Boyce at State. The corporation’s message, crafted by an informal Indonesia crisis committee that included Haines and senior executives in Houston and Irving, was that only the United States could resolve the Aceh war by brokering some sort of agreement between Jakarta and G.A.M. Haines also made clear that G.A.M.’s decision to target ExxonMobil directly was a new factor in the corporation’s experience of the war, that it placed ExxonMobil personnel at risk, and that this was the reason they had shut down their operations. “You really need to get in there and do something,” Haines told Bush administration officials. ExxonMobil did not have a specific blueprint or plan of action, but like Indonesia’s foreign minister, the corporation felt that only the United States government had the necessary leverage on both sides of the war. “We are not diplomats, but we do know this is a problem and you are the guys that can do it,” Haines said.
ExxonMobil refused to negotiate with G.A.M. Its Acehnese employees included many G.A.M. sympathizers and probably a few formal members. Some of these local employees urged cooperation with G.A.M., but the corporation’s executives in the United States concluded that their contractual and political position with the Indonesian government required them to be careful. ExxonMobil’s position was that G.A.M. was an illegal armed group, and therefore the corporation would have no direct dealings with its leaders. What the Bush administration might do was another matter.
Ambassador Gelbard arranged a meeting for ExxonMobil at the Ministry of Industry and Trade, which was headed by Luhut Panjaitan, a retired four-star general. Ron Wilson arrived with Gelbard and other embassy officers at the ministry’s headquarters, located on a riverbank beside one of congested Jakarta’s major highways.
It had not been a single event, Wilson explained to the Indonesian officials, but an accumulation of threats and near misses that had led to ExxonMobil’s decision to shut down Aceh’s gas operations. Snipers had fired upon ExxonMobil airplanes and had wounded employees, Wilson said. Hijackers had stolen more than fifty company vehicles. Assailants had bombed four company convoys by remote control.
“ExxonMobil has had an Indonesian presence for one hundred years,” Wilson said. The company had shipped more than five thousand liquefied natural gas cargoes without missing a single one until now. It was in Indonesia for the long run and had made its decision to suspend production reluctantly. The safety of its employees was paramount, however.
Panjaitan explained that Indonesia intended to restore security in Aceh by launching a “limited offensive” against G.A.M. New battalions of Indonesian forces were arriving around Lhokseumawe as they spoke.
Wilson chose his words carefully. “I understand how difficult it is to restore peace,” he said. “I appreciate that the military is preparing to carry out operations in a careful, selected way. As a company, ExxonMobil cannot condone human rights abuses. The whole world is watching events in Aceh. Charges of human rights abuses could cripple efforts to resume operations.”
Wilson emphasized that his corporation had never paid money to G.A.M., despite the demands of Abu Jack and other commanders. Payoffs would only aggravate the situation and lead to more extortion, he said.
ExxonMobil was not demanding that Indonesia’s government reduce the risk faced by its employees in Aceh to zero, Wilson declared as the meeting concluded. But the corporation’s employees had to “feel safe traveling by road and assured that the workplace was not likely to come under mortar attack, or that they might be kidnapped.”28
After the meeting with Panjaitan, the Indonesian government continued to try to persuade Wilson that it could meet his standards. Purnomo Yusgiantoro, the energy minister, called Wilson and suggested they fly into Aceh on a government plane to tour the area, so that the ExxonMobil manager could see that order was being restored and that it was safe enough to resume production.
Wilson called Gelbard and asked if he should accept Yusgiantoro’s invitation.
“Don’t be insane,” the ambassador advised. “Don’t go.”
The minister went anyway, alone, and G.A.M. rebels shot at his plane.29
During the first week of April 2001, Ambassador Gelbard flew to Banda Aceh, the seaside provincial capital, a flat and humid expanse of low-slung, water-streaked concrete buildings shaded by palm trees. A Swiss peacemaking organization, then known as the Henry Dunant Centre, maintained a local forum for on-again, off-again talks between Indonesian and G.A.M. representatives. Gelbard scheduled separate meetings with leaders on each side of the conflict. He raised the subject of human rights with Indonesia’s government delegation: G.A.M. certainly committed abuses, Gelbard told them, but the international community holds democratically elected governments to higher standards than guerrilla groups.
ExxonMobil had no covert agenda in closing its Aceh operations, Gelbard said. The corporation had been entirely justified in its concerns about security; the United States supported ExxonMobil’s decision but had not instigated it.
The ambassador became more forceful when the G.A.M. delegation arrived. “G.A.M. is clearly responsible for the attacks on ExxonMobil,” Gelbard announced. “Some G.A.M. leaders are now even boasting about shutting down ExxonMobil.” He said that Hasan di Tiro had promised in private meetings with Clinton administration officials that he would iss
ue a public statement that ExxonMobil was not a target of the guerrilla campaign; he had never done so. G.A.M.’s attacks on the oil company now were a “major mistake,” Gelbard declared.
The United States would not tolerate terrorism against U.S. citizens and economic interests. G.A.M. had been “very lucky” that no American citizens working for ExxonMobil had been killed thus far. Even so, he warned, there would be “severe consequences” if G.A.M. did not stop the attacks immediately. The Bush administration had so far refrained from naming G.A.M. a terrorist organization under American law. A terrorist designation would mean travel and banking restrictions for G.A.M. leaders. The administration might reconsider that decision, unless the assaults on ExxonMobil property and interests ended. Moreover, the United States received many requests from the Indonesian military and police for help in fighting against G.A.M.—intelligence, training, and equipment.
“Do you really want us as an enemy?” Gelbard asked.30
The G.A.M. representatives acknowledged responsibility for the attacks on ExxonMobil. They said that Indonesian troops guarding the gas fields were fair military targets. The troops used ExxonMobil property as a “sanctuary” from which to launch raids into nearby villages. Therefore, in their analysis, ExxonMobil facilitated the killing of Acehnese.
G.A.M. leaders said years later that they felt increasingly agitated at the time by ExxonMobil’s possible complicity in extrajudicial killings of their cadres. The corpses unearthed along the Pipeline Road and elsewhere late in 1998 legitimized ExxonMobil as a target, they said. The corporation “seemed to support the Indonesian government,” recalled Nordin Abdul Rahman, one of G.A.M.’s political leaders. “People concluded that ExxonMobil provided heavy equipment for the burials.” Not only was “ExxonMobil land used for mass graves,” said Munawar Zainal, a G.A.M. student leader and occasional representative of the movement in Washington, but “they gave the Indonesian security forces money. This to us was unacceptable.”31 Gelbard, for his part, felt that ExxonMobil had “behaved very responsibly and very sensibly,” as he put it later. He regarded the corporation’s dilemma as a “textbook example” of “a dangerous situation when a U.S. energy company behaved very well.”32
At the Banda Aceh meeting, Gelbard told G.A.M. that its guerrillas had mounted attacks on ExxonMobil’s civilian housing, employee buses, and other targets clearly unconnected to the Indonesian military. This had to end.
The ambassador flew back to Jakarta, but the Bush administration’s campaign to coerce G.A.M. to stop targeting ExxonMobil continued. On April 23, Skip Boyce arrived in Banda Aceh from Washington; Boyce was a career foreign service officer who now ran the East Asia and Pacific portfolio out of Foggy Bottom. The envoy met Indonesian officials and assured them that the United States opposed Acehnese independence, but he urged negotiations that would address the legitimate grievances of the Acehnese.
“We are deeply concerned by attacks on ExxonMobil facilities in Aceh,” Boyce said. He warned against cracking down on G.A.M. now that the American oil corporation had withdrawn: “The closure of ExxonMobil should not be a pretext for launching a military offensive, which would only worsen the security situation.”
He also took up G.A.M.’s concerns about the offensive operations waged by Indonesian forces from inside the corporation’s property. Indonesian forces guarding ExxonMobil’s fields “should not perform any other mission—specifically, they should not sweep or raid neighboring villages, which only exacerbates the violence,” Boyce said.
When the envoy met with G.A.M.’s leaders, he reinforced Gelbard’s earlier warning: Attacks on ExxonMobil “risked turning the U.S. into G.A.M.’s enemy.” The separatist guerrillas would want to “consider carefully before making an enemy of a superpower like the U.S.”33
Hasan di Tiro and several of his top political aides had found asylum in Sweden. The Bush administration pressed its warnings further, through the Swedish foreign ministry, two weeks later. A Swedish official met with two senior aides to Di Tiro, Zaini Abdullah and Malik Mahmud, and told them that attacks on ExxonMobil had become “self-defeating” and should be stopped. The G.A.M. men stated that it was not their policy to attack foreign property. As to the wider war in Aceh, they believed it was the T.N.I. that was defeating itself: Human rights abuses by the Indonesian military against Acehnese civilians would soon produce international sympathy for G.A.M. and its cause.34
Indonesian security forces killed Abu Jack in an operation in Aceh on June 4. By then G.A.M.’s leaders seemed to be wavering about ExxonMobil. Boyce sought an audience with Di Tiro and Mahmud on June 15 and repeated his warnings.
The telephone rang in ExxonMobil’s office in Aceh in late June. The caller claimed to be a lieutenant of G.A.M.’s senior military commander on the ground in Aceh, Abdul Syafie. The guerrilla movement had received orders “from Sweden,” the caller reported, not to attack ExxonMobil facilities anymore.35 The corporation could return to gas production without fear.
Ron Wilson conveyed to the U.S. embassy that production would resume soon—probably in July. The disruption to Mobil’s operations had come to an end, due in part to the Bush administration’s quiet threats to designate G.A.M. leaders as terrorists. The loss of revenue had lasted about five months.
Robert Gelbard and his colleagues could not in the end protect President Wahid and those around him who favored peace talks in Aceh. A political crisis, stirred by hard-liners in the Indonesian army, gathered in the parliament. In July, as ExxonMobil moved in expatriate engineers to check valves on the Aceh wells and restart gas production, Wahid fell from power. Megawati Sukarnoputri, the third president of Indonesia since Suharto’s fall, succeeded him. She was close to the T.N.I. That month she declared martial law and ordered thousands more soldiers into Aceh to defeat G.A.M. once and for all by military force.
As the new troops arrived that August, ExxonMobil officials met with the U.S. embassy to provide an update on their security regime. Gas production was ramping up again; revenues were flowing. The executives “expressed satisfaction with current levels of security,” the embassy’s reporting officer informed Washington. “The military had changed its operations from one of passively occupying [ExxonMobil’s] facilities to providing a secure perimeter. About 3,000–5,000 soldiers, a large increase from last year, were patrolling an area out to five kilometers. . . . The military had also more than tripled the stationary posts along the Pipeline Road. The improved security had netted individuals attempting to infiltrate bombs.”36 Yet even under renewed military pressure, G.A.M. for the most part refrained from turning its guns back on ExxonMobil. The Bush administration had made clear that the consequences of such targeting could be grave.
G.A.M.’s international lobbying activities were, at best, ad hoc. Acehnese students scattered around the world, inflamed by the violence in their homeland, organized chapters and agitated for attention. From Sweden, Hasan di Tiro and his aides ran a makeshift political and communications campaign. In Gelbard’s judgment, they showed “no realistic attitude or skillful diplomatic strategy” and apparently preferred “the morally repugnant and totally flawed position that ‘losing is winning,’ i.e., less dialogue and more . . . violence and atrocities might win international sympathy.”37
G.A.M.-aligned students won visas to study in the United States or were resettled there as refugees; one cluster of younger refugees lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, about two hours’ drive northwest from Washington. That group took advantage of its proximity to the capital to try to win appointments with anyone who would listen to them. They had few allies.
In 2001, an Acehnese student activist named Faisal knocked “out of the blue” on the Dupont Circle door of Terry Collingsworth’s office. Collingsworth was then general counsel of the International Labor Rights Forum, a nonprofit that campaigned against child labor and sweatshops in developing countries. Collingsworth belonged to a network of American human rights lawyers who employed novel legal arguments and a previousl
y obscure eighteenth-century law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, to sue corporations, individuals, and governments for civil damages arising from human rights atrocities overseas. In 1997, he had supported a lawsuit, Doe v. Unocal, in which thirteen Burmese villagers asserted that they had been forced at gunpoint by the Burmese military to build a pipeline for Union Oil Company of California.
One of Collingsworth’s assistants, who happened to speak the Indonesian language of Bahasa, took the meeting. Faisal, it turned out, had heard of the Unocal lawsuit and explained that “he had a case just like it, involving Exxon,” Collingsworth recalled being told. The lawyer flew to Aceh within two weeks. Traveling secretly with local activists, Collingsworth snuck into the villages on the edges of the Indonesian military’s defensive perimeter around Lhokseumawe and took notes during interviews with victims and witnesses.38
That June, just as Robert Gelbard succeeded in his unpublicized campaign to persuade G.A.M. not to target ExxonMobil any longer, Collingsworth and his colleagues filed John Doe I et al. v. ExxonMobil Corporation et al. in United States District Court in Washington, D.C. The lawsuit drew upon the allegations of eleven Acehnese villagers, whose names were withheld to protect them from T.N.I. reprisals. The Acehnese plaintiffs lived in the vicinity of the ExxonMobil gas fields. Plaintiff John Doe I alleged that in January 2001, “while riding his bicycle cart to the local market to sell his vegetables, he was accosted by soldiers who were assigned to ExxonMobil’s T.N.I. Unit 113. The soldiers shot him in the wrist, threw a hand grenade at him and then left him for dead.” John Doe II alleged that soldiers from the same unit beat him, took him to Rancong Camp near the gas fields, and “detained and tortured him there for a period of three months, all the while keeping him blindfolded.” Later the soldiers removed his blindfold, took him outside, and showed him “a large pit where there was a large pile of human heads. The soldiers threatened to kill him and add his head to the pile.”39