Aceh, English, Indonesia

A tribute to Ersa Siregar

http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/PPDi/conversations/topics/6075 Semula terbit di The Jakarta Post 3 Jan. 2004 Fifty-two-year-old Sory Ersa Siregar was not the first journalist killed in Aceh....

Written by Aboeprijadi Santoso · 3 min read >

http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/PPDi/conversations/topics/6075
Semula terbit di The Jakarta Post 3 Jan. 2004

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Fifty-two-year-old Sory Ersa Siregar was not the first journalist killed in Aceh. Nor was he the first on-duty journalist slain in the country’s war-torn areas. Yet, his tragic death may bear some significance for the war in Aceh.

For, like Ersa, many — too many — Acehnese have lost their lives in a conflict that has dragged on for too long. Like him, they were non-combatant civilians, whose deaths have become, and are perceived as, a “normal” part of the reality of war. Yet this should not be happening if the warring parties respected the rules set out in the Geneva Convention.

Second, his death was a great shock as the country’s press corps had often been victimized in peacetime, but rarely in war. Just as we in the past tended to ignore the Balibo killings of five foreign journalists in East Timor on Oct. 16, 1975, now we are facing the public shock resulting from the death of a journalist, whose impact may affect public opinion on the war in Aceh.

Third, as Ersa was a victim of an ongoing war and conflict that has not been fully understood, his death may lead many, as apparently had led Ersa, to contemplate on the nature of this war.

I had the privilege of having had fairly intensive contacts with Ersa as we traveled together during two journalistic missions in Aceh in Dec. 1999 and last June.

The first was in the area near Jim Jim, Pidie, Aceh, only a few months after I lost a friend, Agus Mulyawan, a young filmmaker, who was murdered in East Timor in Sept. 1999. To recall Ersa is, partly, to remember Agus — two professional journalists with moral courage and honesty, who fell victim to Indonesia’s wars with its own people.

Ersa, a father of three children, tried to understand the problem of Aceh. In an attempt to grasp the issues, he once urged us to stay in a coffee shop, where we spent almost the whole afternoon talking to a number of villagers and interviewing a simple old man, who told his story of Aceh “from the Japanese period to the Soeharto era.” Thereafter, he came out with a happier face.

He dealt easily and correctly with various people and combined this with the ability to listen carefully to his sources. Few journalists greet members of the security forces by personally shaking their hands one by one, but Ersa did it consistently to all, from the privates up to the commanders.

One day in Bireuen last June, villagers, as often happened in Aceh, waited for the press and urged us to come, and showed the dead body of a badly tortured young man. It was a hysterically moment as the locals were very angry. Ersa remained calm and took the interviews professionally in a difficult and uncontrolled atmosphere amid many locals and media.

David O’Shea’s documentary film In Bed with the TNI (The Indonesian military) recorded how he acted. The film was supposed to be about Indonesia’s style of embedded journalism, but Ersa and most of the journalists covered were actually not part of the Army’s project.

Ersa, like most reporters with us then, was a free journalist. He was not the kind of journalist who looked at Aceh in a jingoistic-nationalistic spirit as if it was simply a matter of TNI versus the separatist rebels only, and as if our mission was simply to support the one to crush the other.

Instead, it was very clear that Ersa was concerned about the fate of the common people. Asked if he was hoping that the TNI would rescue him before the ultimatum ended on July 8, at 6 p.m. (local time), in his, perhaps, last interview, he told Radio Netherlands on that day: “I’m concerned. (For) in any clash, the civilians will be the ones most precarious. From the outset I often disagreed with him,” referring to the war-commander, who issued the ultimatum, Gen. Bambang Darmono.

“There is no need (for the TNI) to rescue me,” he added, as he indicated that his and the abducted group’s condition was good.

“What is more important is that the domestic and foreign media have access to the rebels and help us,” he said. He also denied the TNI chief’s allegation that he let himself be taken hostage in order to gather more news.

In the end, neither the TNI nor the rebels seem to have done their utmost to save him and last week, he was found shot dead in a swamp.

When we were somewhere on the road, I remember him saying: “How on earth could this beautiful country (Aceh), with the beautiful names (of its villages) like Juli and Permata, have become trapped in a war like this …”

The message Ersa seemed to convey was that something must have seriously gone wrong here in Aceh. That may hopefully inspire those who strive for peace.

Earlier, in Room No. 15, which we shared in Lhoksemauwe’s Vine Vira Hotel, he often showed deep concern about what the U.S. was doing in Iraq and asked a lot about what Europe would do. He said, he wanted to take a holiday after this Aceh assignment, and thought he might go to Europe and visit Amsterdam. He never made it.

I have lost a good friend and respected colleague.

Written by Aboeprijadi Santoso
Independent Journalist in the Fields of Anthropology, Political History, Political Science and Social History. Formerly with Radio Netherlands. Profile