Breaking News: Secret Files Show Kopassus, Indonesia's Special Forces, Targets Papuan Churches, Civilians. Documents Leak from Notorious US-Backed Unit as Obama Lands in Indonesia.

Breaking News:  Secret Files Show Kopassus, Indonesia's Special Forces, Targets Papuan Churches, Civilians. Documents Leak from Notorious US-Backed Unit as Obama Lands in Indonesia.

By Allan Nairn

Jakarta, November 9, 2010.

Secret documents have leaked from inside Kopassus, Indonesia's red berets, which say that Indonesia's US-backed security forces engage in "murder [and] abduction" and show that Kopassus targets churches in West Papua and defines civilian dissidents as the "enemy."

The documents include a Kopassus enemies list headed by Papua's top Baptist minister and describe a covert network of surveillance, infiltration and disruption of Papuan institutions

The disclosure comes as US President Barack Obama is touching down in Indonesia. His administration recently announced the restoration of  US aid to Kopassus.

Kopassus is the most notorious unit of  Indonesia's armed forces, TNI,  which along with POLRI, the  national police, have killed civilians by the hundreds of thousands.

The leaked cache of secret Kopassus documents includes operational,  intelligence and field reports as well as personnel records which list the names and details of Kopassus "agents."

The documents are classified "SECRET" ("RAHASIA") and include extensive background reports on  Kopassus  civilian targets  -- reports that are apparently of uneven accuracy.  

The authenticity of the documents has been verified by Kopassus personnel who have seen them and by external evidence regarding the authors and the internal characteristics of the documents.

Some of the Kopassus documents will be released in the days to come, in part via this website.

Those being released with this article are about West Papua, where tens of thousands of civilians have been murdered and where Kopassus is most active.  Jakarta has attempted to largely seal off Papua to visits by non-approved outsiders.

When the US restored Kopassus aid last July the rationale was fighting terrorism, but the documents show that Kopassus in fact systematically targets civilians.

A detailed 25-page secret report by a Kopassus task force in Kotaraja, Papua defines Kopassus' number-one "enemy" as unarmed civilians.   It calls them the "separatist political movement" "GSP/P, " lists what they say are the top 15 leaders and discusses the "enemy order of battle."

All of those listed are civilians, starting with the head of the Baptist Synod of Papua. The others include evangelical ministers, activists, traditional leaders, legislators, students and intellectuals as well as local establishment figures and the head of the Papua Muslim Youth organization.   

The secret Kopassus study says that in their 400,000 - person area of operations the civilians they target as being political are  "much more dangerous than "any armed opposition" since the armed groups "hardly do anything" but the civilians -- with popular support -- have "reached the outside world" with their "obsession" with "merdeka" (independence/ freedom) and persist in "propagating the issue  of severe human rights violations in Papua," ie. "murders and abductions that are done by the security forces."  

(See  SATGAS BAN - 5 KOPASSUS, LAPORAN TRIWULAN I POS KOTARAJA, DANPOS NUR WAHYUDI, LETTU INF, AGUSTUS 2007, p. 8, 12, 9, 6, 5, )

The Kopassus document cited above is embedded below, followed by supplementary field reports.

Source: http://www.allannairn.com/