Indonesia Rights Team Unearths Bones

An Indonesian human rights team investigating reports of army atrocities unearthed the bones of at least 12 people at a suspected mass grave Saturday and said more than 150 could be buried there.

Scores of human bones and five skulls were dug up at a remote patch of wasteland in the province of Aceh, where locals say a nine-year military campaign against a separatist insurgency involved torture, rape and widespread killings.

Coils of rope found with the bones indicated the corpses had been buried with their wrists bound, investigators said.

“This proves Aceh has been a killing field,” Bahurudin Lopa, secretary-general of Indonesia’s official National Commission on Human Rights and leader of the Aceh investigation, said at the site as five laborers dug bones from the earth with shovels, knives and sharpened sticks.

The remains were exhumed at a scrub-covered mound called Bukit Sentang, at the end of a winding dirt track about 20 miles east of the industrial center of Lhokseumawe on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra.

Local villagers said the army had dug five pits at the site in 1990. Three were subsequently filled, while two remain empty, with pools of stagnant water at the bottom. Locals call the site “the holes of hell.”

“I saw the army come here many times to leave bodies in 1990 and 1991,” said Yusuf Kasim, one of the villagers who led the investigators to the graves.

Laborers slick with mud and sweat in the stifling heat found a human femur after digging six feet into one of the three refilled pits.

As scores of villagers crowded around, shouting and jostling to get a view of the digging, an intact skull was pulled from the soil. Four more were then found.

Police and forensic experts at the site said the bones of at least 12 people had been found.

Lopa halted the digging, saying enough evidence had been found that the area was a mass grave. He said scores of bodies were likely to be buried deeper in the pit and at the two nearby filled-in holes that had not yet been examined.

“Suharto is a murderer, Suharto should be executed,” shouted a group of villagers as the bones were unearthed.

Locals blame the former president for ordering the army crackdown on separatist rebels in the staunchly Muslim province in 1989.