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Date Published: 26/10/2001
Author: Stephen R. Shalom Fortune Global500 has named Exxon-Mobil the world’s highest profit-making company. Stephen R Shalom gives an insight into what it takes. |
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On 20 June, the International Labour Rights Fund filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Washington, DC on behalf of 11 villagers from the Indonesian province of Aceh. The suit was brought against Exxon-Mobil for complicity with Indonesian security forces in committing serious human rights abuses, including murder, rape, kidnapping and torture.
In Aceh, a province at the northern tip of Sumatra, the Indonesian military has been waging a savage counter-insurgency war against a secessionist movement for years. Most of Aceh’s four million people want independence, for three main reasons.
Firstly, although Indonesian authorities in Jakarta proclaimed a special autonomous status for Aceh in recognition of its historical and Islamic identity, in practice this autonomy was never realised. In 1945, the province was designated a ‘special area’, but this was repealed in 1950. In 1959, following secessionist conflicts, Aceh was declared a ‘special territory’ with considerable autonomy, but the central government never carried through its promises.
Secondly, Aceh’s abundant resources, especially natural gas, have been exploited by largely bypassing the population of the province to the benefit of foreign firms, corrupt politicians, military officers, and well-connected locals. General Suharto, who ruled Indonesia from 1965 to 1998, insisted on being cut in on every major economic enterprise. Members of his family still own vast assets.
The third factor has been the great brutality of the Indonesian security forces. In 1989, Jakarta declared Aceh a ‘Military Operations Region’ (DOM), which essentially placed the province under martial law. The military launched a ruthless counter-insurgency campaign against the small ‘Free Aceh Movement’ (GAM), particularly targeting civilians suspected of sympathising with the guerrillas. Human rights groups estimate that at least 2,000 Acehnese civilians were killed between 1989 and 1993 alone.
In May 1998, Suharto was forced from power and President Habibie and his successor President Wahid pledged to seek a resolution to the conflict. Yet killings increased and in the first half of this year alone 800 people have lost their lives.
What does this have to do with Exxon-Mobil? Aceh’s natural gas is produced under contract by Mobil (which merged with Exxon in 1999), liquefied and sold by PT Arun, a joint venture between Indonesia’s national energy company, Mobil and a Japanese firm. Mobil obtained its contract in the 1970s by the then standard method: providing stock shares in Mobil to Suharto’s family.
The lawsuit filed in late June against Exxon-Mobil charges that in order to protect this exceedingly profitable investment, the US oil giant was complicit with Indonesian security forces in carrying out gross violations of human rights. This complicity is alleged to have operated on a number of levels:
1. Suharto assigned at least one unit of the Indonesian army, Unit 133, ‘for the sole and specific purpose’ of providing security to Mobil and PT Arun. In return, the two companies ‘paid the Indonesian military a regular monthly or annual fee for such services’. According to the suit Mobil did not just pay for the military services, but controlled and directed them, ‘making decisions about where to place bases, strategic mission planning, and making decisions about specific deployment areas’.
2. The lawsuit claims Mobil provided Indonesian security forces with buildings used to ‘interrogate, torture and murder’ Acehnese civilians suspected of separatist activities. It claims that Mobil provided equipment such as excavators used by the military to dig graves as well as roads on which victims would be transported.
3. The lawsuit charges that Mobil bought military equipment for Indonesian security forces and ‘paid mercenaries to provide advice, training, intelligence and equipment’ to the Indonesian army. Mobil’s funds and support have not been used just to help protect the natural gas facilities, but to ‘crush any dissent within Aceh’.
Exxon-Mobil argues that it had no knowledge of what was going on and of how its assistance was being used. It claims it was told that its equipment was being borrowed ‘for projects beneficial to the community’. Said Mobil’s CEO in 1998: ‘If anything happened because somebody used the equipment in a wrong way, I’m sorry about that.’ According to Mobil officials, if the company had had any knowledge of atrocities, it would have protested strongly.
These are interesting claims. Suharto came to power in 1965, presiding over the slaughter of up to a million suspected leftists. Could Mobil have been unaware of this? The killings were widely cheered in the West (and facilitated by a dispatch of arms from Washington). The murderers were never punished; rather they were the very ones that Mobil hired as its security force.
As for Aceh itself, Business Week quotes H Saved Mudhahar, a former top official in the province: ‘There wasn’t a single person in Aceh who didn’t know that massacres took place.’ On a road travelled by Mobil employees every day during 1990 and 1991, there was a spot known as ‘Skull Hill’, where the stench of rotting human flesh could be smelled half a mile away.
In October 1998, a coalition of Indonesian human rights groups held a press conference in which they detailed how Mobil had supported human rights abuses in Aceh. If by some miracle Mobil didn’t know what was going on before, it surely knew now. Yet it made no effort to break ties with the Indonesian army.
Then, in March 2001, Exxon-Mobil announced that it was suspending its activities in Aceh – not because of the ongoing massive atrocities against the Acehnese, but because the military could not guarantee the safety of Mobil facilities and personnel. On 19 June, after further deployment of Indonesian troops, Exxon-Mobil indicated that it would resume its operations.
Nine days after the court suit was filed, readers of The New York Times were treated to a fascinating op-ed by Exxon-Mobil entitled Corrosive Corruption. ‘Companies that participate in corrupted dealings do themselves no favours,’ it thundered, going on to lament the inherent corruption in governmental institutions around the world; corruption that responsible multinationals should not, nay, must not tolerate. ‘Reducing the impact of corruption will remain a long and difficult struggle.’
Noble stuff, and surely unconnected with the above events.
This article is taken from ‘Exxon-Mobil in Aceh’ by Stephen R Shalom, published as a ZNet Commentary on www.zmag.org. Other useful
sites include www.pressurepoint.org, www.stopesso.com and www.campaignexxonmobil.org
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