TESTIMONY ON EXXONMOBIL INVOLVEMENT IN HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN ACEH

Made at the 120th Annual Meeting of Shareholders of the ExxonMobil Corporation in Dallas, Texas, USA on Wednesday, May 29, 2002

By Cut Zahara Hamzah
Board member of the International Forum for Aceh (IFA)

Mr. Chief Executive Officer, Members of the Board of Directors, Ladies and Gentlemen Shareholders,

Good Morning (Afternoon, Evening)

My name is Cut Zahara Hamzah. I was born and brought up by both my parents amid the noises of the machinery of the LNG plant and the thick black smoke of the industry related factories. I grew up in a very polluted environment, polluted air, polluted water, in the so-called petro-city of Lhok Seumawe, North Aceh. My house was separated by a high wall of barbed wire from the luxurious housing complex of the staffs of ExxonMobil, the complex that is named “Bukit Indah”, or Beautiful Hill in Indonesian. About a mile behind my house was located the infamous Rancung building belonging to PT.Arun, the Indonesian state company, partner of ExxonMobil. During the period of 1989-1998, that is commonly known as the DOM period when Aceh was placed under the Military Operation Area, this building was used as a center of torture, rape and execution by the Indonesian military. About 9 miles away from my house is the ExxonMobil Industrial Complex (Arun Field), where 5 Gas Exploitation Clusters belonging to ExxonMobil are located. Each of these clusters contain no less than 22 gas wells; and it is around this area that my maternal grandmother and most family members on my mother’s side reside.

Mr Chief Executive Officer, Members of the Board of Directors, Ladies and Gentlemen Shareholders,

I am here to share with you the feelings of the local residents who have to live in the middle of your giant plant that has been in operation for decades on the land that used to belong to our families from time immemorial. I am going to tell you what really your company, ExxonMobil, has given us over the years in return to the riches that it has brought back to you from exploiting our land.

ExxonMobil started production in Aceh in 1978. During the last decade it has obtained no less than 40 billion dollars from Aceh, and every year since then it has made 2 billion dollars steadily. But what has it given us, the local population, in return?

Ever since it started its activities in Aceh in 1971, ExxonMobil has built roads that interconnect all the Clusters with the other complexes of facilities such as the staff housing complex (Bukit Indah), the warehouses, the maintenance facilities, etc. The problem here is that all these roads are crisscrossing our village and cutting the agricultural site consisting of hundreds of hectares of rice fields into separated compartments. The roads cause the closing of the water source to some parts of the fields and destroy the existing irrigational system, with the end result being the loss of livelihood for most villagers who depend on their rice farming.

Mr Chief Executive Officer, Members of the Board of Directors, Ladies and Gentlemen Shareholders,

But our suffering does not end there. In 1998, at the fall of the tyrannical regime of General Suharto, we found out that your Company had been financing the military operation in Aceh for a decade since 1989. ExxonMobil had provided the facilities for the Indonesian military to torture, rape and kill our kinsfolk. It had paid the salaries of soldiers who burnt our houses and robbed our properties. There are of course people who would contest this statement, including naturally the current CEO of ExxonMobil. But we can give you proofs and eyewitnesses to what we are stating. In fact, worse stil, all the atrocities are still ongoing at this very moment. The soldiers are still being paid by this Company of yours and the soldiers are still killing civilians, raping women, pillaging and burning villages around the ExxonMobil complex, in the name of protecting your Company. The atrocities continue because ExxonMobil has legitimized the presence of non-local TNI troops in Aceh with the excuse of protecting the security of this Company. It is still fresh in my memory that every night we heard the sound of gunshots and a military van passing by our house and in the morning we would find out who were missing, taken from their houses to disappear forever without a trace. From eyewitnesses we now know that those taken in the middle of the night by soldiers in a van would be blindfolded. The van would go around and around in the village to then stop at Rancong let the passengers down for the execution. The leadership of ExxonMobil has sought to deny this fact, but when we discovered the mass graves at the Seuntang and Seuruke hills, which are within the Cluster 5 site of ExxonMobil that was made operational in 1995, such denials have become no longer acceptable.

My husband used to work for ExxonMobil for 6 years. He related that he and several of his friends were often ordered to repair equipment and vehicles used by TNI soldiers in their military operations. They often found blood splashed all over the equipment and vehicles. When in the end he and his friends were arrested and tortured by the TNI soldier who were based within the ExxonMobil complex, the Company did not lift a finger to try to help them. Instead of protesting, the staffs of the Company, in fact, sought to cover up the incident. Such incidents were often repeated at the ExxonMobil in Aceh. Consequently, the presence of the TNI troops within the Company’s premises does not bring the feeling of security to the people, in fact it is the cause of the disturbance of peace and security in the area, including to the personnel of the Company themselves. However, despite knowing such a reality, ExxonMobil is still until this very moment giving facilities to the TNI troops to co nduct operations into the surrounding villages without caring at all the atrocities that these troops are performing on the innocent villagers.

According the data that I have managed to gather, at present there are 82 military posts located in North Aceh, and 21 of them are within the relatively small area of ExxonMobil. Every post is usually manned by about 40 to 500 soldiers. For Rancong, especially, there are 1200 TNI troops. Do you, Ladies and Gentlemen Shareholders know what these troops are doing to us villagers? They launch operations after operations into our villages with the pretext of searching for Free Aceh Movement (GAM) guerillas, who are fighting to free Aceh from Indonesia. But in reality, they arrest, detain, torture and cause to disappear innocent villagers. They set up roadblocks and extort money from petty traders such as fishmongers passing through the Company’s roads. Women and children are not spared. They pillage village shops, confiscate properties at will and they burn houses for the slightest excuse. Each military post imposes monthly “contribution” on petty traders. Chiefs of villages are told to form night watch teams. Saying no to any such instruction is a sure death sentence. Villagers continue to be missing; many are our own relatives, our loved ones. Those arrested and taken away will invariably turn up as corpses the next day on the roadside.

Amongst those victims of kidnap, torture and murder were my own uncle, cousin and brother. My brother Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, was a human rights activist and a permanent resident of the US who used to live in New York. He went back to Aceh in July 2000 to investigate cases of human rights violations that include the involvement of Mobil Oil in giving facilities to the perpetrators of gross human rights violations in Aceh. He was kidnapped in broad daylight in August of that year and a month later his mutilated body was found wrapped in barbed wire. Such a situation has been going on for the last 13 years in Aceh and producing thousands of victims with the related problems of refugees, displaced persons, single parents, widows and orphans. The impunity accorded to the security forces by the State and the lack of international pressure on Indonesia to respect human rights, have geared the TNI towards a real genocidal action in Aceh. The international community, that unfortunately includes you, ladies and gentlemen, leaders and shareholders of this giant Company ExxonMobil, seems to be not so concerned with this reality. You are still too eager to cooperate with the Indonesian government in keeping its killing machine, the TNI, well oiled, if you forgive me the pun.

The horrible September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States has made the people of this great country, especially the New Yorkers, live in panic and in fear for their safety. The families of the victims have to live in sorrow for the loss of their loved ones. We cry with them in our heart, because only those who have experienced such wanton brutality could fully understand the pain. We have been suffering such pain for the last 13 years without any sign of a way out. The TNI has taken the role of the terrorists in Aceh. At this time when the United States as the remaining Super Power has set itself up as the champion of the fight against terrorism, it is very strange that it could, not only tolerate the TNI, but seek to assist this unruly Indonesian apparatus in its suppression of the budding democracy in Indonesia. ExxonMobil in its turn is working hard to influence the public opinion in this country, that Indonesia deserved further assistance in perpetrating its terr orism in Aceh. Please do understand that for the people of Aceh, the TNI is the state apparatus that has gone berserk and turns into a terrorist group that continues to oppress the innocents in our land.

Mr Chief Executive Officer, Members of the Board of Directors, Ladies and Gentlemen Shareholders,

I would like to take this opportunity, to represent my long suffering brothers and sisters in Aceh, to call on all of you leaders and shareholders of ExxonMobil to lend your ears to our cries of pain. We call on you to stop your Company from hiring TNI killers to guard your premises. We, the poor villagers living around your rich properties in North Aceh, pose no danger to your Company’s facilities or staffs. Even the Free Aceh Movement has given their pledges to ExxonMobil as well as to your Government that they have never attacked your Company and have no intention of doing so. We believe you have the power and the means to stop the atrocities perpetrated by the Indonesian security forces in the name of protecting your Company. Please listen to your heart, to your conscience as the good people of this great country, the United States of America, and let us live in peace in what remains of our own land.

Thank you.

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The Stop ExxonMobil Alliance is a broad association of rights groups working to influence ExxonMobil's behavior in the human rights, environment, governance and community relations areas. Alliance members support each others' demands but do not have expertise or take public position on all the issue areas.