January 12, 2006
Arrest of Indonesian Over Killings Could Boost Relations With U.S.
By RAPHAEL PURA and MURRAY HIEBERT
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The arrest of an Indonesian indicted by a U.S. grand jury for the killings of two American schoolteachers in 2002 could remove a prickly diplomatic issue between Washington and Jakarta and hasten the pace of already improving relations.

On Wednesday, Indonesian police arrested a dozen men they said were suspects in the murder of the schoolteachers, who were ambushed near a huge copper and gold mine in Papua province operated by a unit of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Mine Inc. One of the detainees is Anthonius Wamang, an alleged Papua separatist leader, who was indicted by a U.S. grand jury in 2004 on two counts of murder in connection with the slayings.

The U.S. praised the detention of Mr. Wamang. State Department spokeswoman Darla Jordan was quoted by the Associated Press as saying the arrest was "a welcome development and we look forward to seeing justice done in this case."

U.S. officials said Federal Bureau of Investigation agents assigned to assist Indonesian authorities in investigating the murders were present when Mr. Wamang and 11 other men were detained in the town of Timika, near the Freeport mine Wednesday night. A U.S. official, who declined to be named, said the men "turned themselves in to Indonesian authorities with [U.S. government] support."

"We appreciate the extensive efforts made by the government of Indonesia to make this possible," the U.S. embassy in Jakarta said in a statement. "Cooperation between Indonesian law enforcement and security authorities and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has been excellent."

The men were flown to Papua's provincial capital, Jayapura, on Thursday for further interrogation, according to Papua Regional Police Chief, Inspector General Tonny Yacobus. Indonesia has no extradition treaty with the U.S. and it wasn't immediately clear whether Jakarta intends to surrender Mr. Wamang to U.S. custody.

But the detainees have a different version of what happened. After their arrest, they told local human-rights activists that they had agreed to meet with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at a hotel in Timika on the understanding that they would be flown to the U.S. to stand trial, according to Aloy Renowarin, a lawyer for Elsham, a Papua-based human-rights group and Eben Kirksey, a Papua specialist at the University of California in Santa Cruz, who spoke with the activists by phone.

Instead, the men were led to a truck and taken to a local police station where they were strip-searched and interrogated by officers from Indonesia's elite mobile police brigade, according to Mr. Kirksey.

Human-rights activists in Papua also criticized other aspects of the arrests. They said one of the detainees was Rev. Isak Ondawame, a well-known local pastor and human-rights advocate, whom they said had helped arrange the meeting at the Timika hotel. Rev. Ondawame, who has been critical of Jakarta's policies in Papua, hasn't previously been identified as a suspect in the teachers' murders.

The uncertain circumstances surrounding the detention have prompted concern among some human-rights activists in Papua and the U.S. that testimony could be coerced from the detainees. Edmund McWilliams, a former U.S. Embassy official in Jakarta and now an independent human-rights activist, said he feared interrogators could get "a twisted result aimed at exonerating the military, which I believe was heavily involved in [the] Timika [killings]."

The 2002 killings have long strained ties between Washington and Jakarta, with the U.S. pressing for a full investigation of the affair, amid allegations by American and Indonesia human-rights groups that Indonesian military personnel guarding the Freeport mine may have been involved in the attack.

Indeed, Indonesian police initially said they believed that soldiers from an elite military unit were implicated in the attack, which killed 44 year-old Rickey Spier and 71-year-old Leon Burgon, both U.S. citizens, and one Indonesian teacher. Police investigators came to that conclusion in late 2002 after questioning witnesses and examining forensic evidence related to the attack. The victims were riding in a convoy of vehicles that was ambushed by assailants with automatic weapons as it traveled down a twisting mountain road from the Freeport mine where the teachers worked at a company school.

But the Indonesian military has consistently denied it had any part in the ambush, and no charges have been made implicating Indonesian troops in the attack.

The affair strengthened support in the U.S. Congress for maintaining sanctions on military assistance to the Indonesian government – first imposed in 1991 and strengthened in 1999 -- after widespread allegations of human-rights abuses by the country's security forces as it tried to suppress an independence movement in East Timor. But relations have improved dramatically since U.S.-educated former General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono became Indonesia's first directly elected president in late 2004. In February last year, Washington resumed a small training program for Indonesian military officers, after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice certified to the U.S. Congress that Jakarta was cooperating with the FBI in investigating the Papua killings.

In November, Washington restored full military ties with Jakarta after receiving Congressional approval on an appropriations bill to waive restrictions on aid. At the time, the State Department cited the "national security interests" of the U.S. as the reason for the waiver, noting that Indonesia plays a strategic role in Southeast Asia and is a "voice of moderation in the Islamic world."

Mr. Wamang is described in U.S. court documents as an operational commander of the military arm of the Free Papua Movement, which seeks a state independent of Indonesia. But local and international human-rights groups have repeatedly questioned Mr. Wamang's role in the affair, with some alleging that he had a history of close ties to the Indonesian army.

The activists have suggested that the 2002 attack was a provocation by the military to discredit the separatist movement or to extort more money from Freeport, which pays local military units to guard its mine.

Puspa Madani contributed to this article.