Cheryl Seal
The Model for Bush Globalization (Cont'd)
Mon Sep 23 23:29:30 2002
208.152.73.133

Bernadino of East Timor’s "Rebuild Watch." "All they need to do now is to go
around shooting people and torturing people." And, as always, all the jobs in
the "rebuilding" effort went (and are still going) to foreigners, while a
staggering 95% of natives have, on occasionin the past few years, been
unemployed.

In a last crowing outrage – and proof of the repeating patterns at work –
as the political smoke subsided, in February 2000, Habibe’s recently-appointed
replacement Wahid announced that he had named Henry Kissinger his advisor. Just
one year later, at the first big shingidg thrown in Washington, D.C. for
newly-sworn in Bush, Kissinger was also be there, ready to advise – and help
begin a new reign of energy despotism…this time on U.S. soil.

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PART TWO:
ExxonMobil’s Dirty Little War

By Cheryl Seal


ExxonMobil’s liquid natural gas (LNG) production facility (PT Arun) in
Northern Sumatra, Indonesia (an area known as Lhokseumawe in the district of
North Aceh) was originally owned by Mobil Oil Indonesia. The first thing the
company did back in the 1960s as soon as it had identified the rich LNG reserves
in the forests and cut a deal with the Indonesian state fuel company Pertamina,
was to seize a huge tract of land and summarily displace all of the resident
natives. It is a scenario that has repeated itself following countless oil/gas
discoveries in the past, from Oklahoma to Africa. However, to Mobil’s dismay,
the Aceh people were committed to throwing off domination by exploitive foreign
interests and the corrupt Suharto government that was so eager to aid the
exploitation.

In response to the Aceh resistance, the military, acting on behalf of
Mobil, beat down the opposition with a brutal fist. For example, when a handful
of Achel rebels tried to sabotage a gas pipeline in 1977, the military
systematically killed an estimated 900 natives. When the Aceh freedom movement
GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) was officially launched in 1980, Aceh was promptly
placed under military occupation. From the start, Mobil (and now ExxonMobil),
has supported and condoned the military’s atrocities. Many such crimes have, in
fact, been committed on the company’s own land, by "security officers" on the
company’s payroll. Mobil built two military barracks for the elite security
division the Indonesian military sent them to protect the LNG facility.: Post 13
and Camp Rancong. According to eyewitness reports recounted to human rights
investigators, Post 13 was on at least one occasion used as a
torture/interrogation facility.

Since 1980, hundreds of Aceh natives have been murdered and/or tortured or
have disappeared. An estimated 15,000-20,000 children have been orphaned during
this same period as a direct result of Mobil’s "protective forces." The
company’s operation of the LNG facility has taken a direct toll on the quality
of human life and the integrity of the environment. The company repeatedly
contaminated the crucial rice paddies or shrimp farms the villagers relied on
for food. Not once did the company offer fair compensation for these
transgressions. In fact, in 1992, when the village of Pu’uk sued the company for
contamination of its land, Mobil marched out its high-powered battery of lawyers
and (surprise, surprise!) defeated the poor villagers. In 1997, 1,600 villagers
were displaced when LNG wells erupted, dumping tons of contaminated mud on their
homes. In another case, four villagers sued the company for seizing their land
without adequate compensation and for taking over a village cemetery for use as
an airstrip for PT Arun. Of course, once again, the villagers lost their case.
The list of egregious violations (the same terminology recently applied to Exxon
by a lawyer in Alabama when the company recently lost a $3.4 billion fraud case)
of human rights and environmental ethics perpetrated by Mobil, Exxon, and
ExxonMobil is astounding. This is supposed to be an American company…Hell, this
is supposed to be the 20th/21st century!

Any protestors against this reign of terror are treated viciously. Of
course, Mobil and ExxonMobil have claimed total ignorance of such abuses,
despite repeated complaints, despite the fact that Mobil (ExxonMobil) pays the
military millions of dollars each year for the use of the military, despite the
fact that their own earth-moving equipment has been used to dig mass graves and
its roads have been used as regular routes for transporting prisoners and
bodies. Mass graves dug with Mobil equipment were identified at Sentag Hill and
Tengkorak (Skull) Hill in North Aceh in 1998 by human rights investigators.
Bottom line: the company is ultimately in complete control of the situation, as
was clearly pointed up by the chaos their recent suspension of production
caused.

It was in 1998, during the increasing controversy over Mobil’s activities
that Exxon and Mobil merged, becoming ExxonMobil. Now, to the outside world,
especially to the U.S., which, alas, rarely pays attention to the details of
what is happening beyond its own borders, the name "ExxonMobil" would seem like
a whole new horse of a different color. As a "nice touch," around the same time,
Exxon started pushing its touchy-feely "we’re so good to the environment" Save
the Tiger PR campaign (how could these nice people ever do those awful things
the Aceh accuse them of?). The company has recently also donated millions of
dollars to malaria research. So self-sacrificing! Especially, since malaria will
be a major problem and (God forbid!) expense for the company as it deploys
workers into new unexploited mosquito-laden forests in Indonesia. But a look
through the company’s history reveals one clear point: this monster does nothing
that is not completely motivated from self-interest.

In any case, the merger hasn’t abated the carnage centered around the North
Aceh facility. Last year, a human rights worker named Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, who
was born in Aceh and lived for a while in Queens, NY, began receiving death
threats after he started investigating Mobil’s transgressions. Soon after, he
was kidnapped. A month later, his tortured, mutilated body was found, along with
those of four other human rights workers. Within days of this tragedy, Safwan
Idris, a promising candidate for Aceh governor, was found murdered as well.
Human rights investigators have condemned the company and the U.S. for their
complicity, direct or indirect, in the bloodbaths. Indonesian Democracy Japan
has asserted that the U.S. "by association, is guilty of major human rights
violations."

No wonder they don’t want us on the UN human rights commission.
But human rights apparently pale in comparison to the stakes for which
Mobil and the Indonesian government are playing. Through the 1990s, one-fourth
of all Mobil’s global revenue came from the North Aceh facility. One corporate
VP calls the facility "the jewel in the company’s crown." If so, it is like the
gory Hope diamond. Meanwhile, the Indonesian government scoops in an estimated
$2 billion per year from the plant.

Things have, if one can imagine it, gotten worse in the past year and a
half. On October 20, 1999, Wahid was elected the new President of Indonesia by
the People’s Consultiuve Assembly (not by the PEOPLE, mind you). Almost
immediately, Wahid sought to pass legislation to release foreign firms like
ExxonMobil from regulatory approval requirements. Then, on February 28, 2000,
just four months after being named Pres., Wahid appointed Henry Kissinger, one
of the original authors of the nation’s ongoing woes, as his advisor. On the
same day, in fact the same hour (undoubtedly because the two things are so
intimately intertwined), Wahid announced half a dozen new appointments to
Pertanima and the mineral industry - an industry close to Indonesian gold mine
majority stock holder Kissinger’s "heart" (or the black hole where one may once
have been).

All sorts of deadly games are being played out now, games which, since Bush
was elected, have become increasingly more vicious.

Let’s back track and look at these games. In March of 2000, a US embassy
report states that LNG gas fields in Northern Sumatra are being played out and
that by 2001, some production will be discontinued. The same report mentions
major new LNG and oil projects that are being planned for other areas, including
Irian Jaya (the same area where Kissinger’s mine is located). In addition, U.S.
interests have expressed their intention to double coal output in Sumatra in the
next five years.

Now, put those pieces and recent developments together and what you come up
with is truly Machiavellian. Here’s how the game goes:

First, you create a crisis in the LNG situation in North Aceh by making it
appear that terrorists are escalating and threatening the security of the energy
supply. (Hey, blaming terrorists worked for Kissinger and the CIA in 1966 to
get rid of Suharno, in Timor in 1975, in Chile, in the Congo, in
Bangladesh…it’s a great scam). But better make sure the U.S. government doesn’t
step in and muck things up.

Second, start threatening higher energy prices

Third, shut down your LNG operation and scream about needing more security,
while keeping your eye on other places you’d REALLY like to exploit, like the
waters off North Aceh where a rich oil reserve has been found. Almost no one but
you knows your Aceh facility is on the way out anyway.

Fourth, play the terrorism card to its end and stand aside wringing your
hands as rebels are massacred, thereby daunting any other rebels who might try
to make life difficult for you in other areas you plan to exploit.
Just like clockwork, the above scenario has unfolded. In February and
March, 2001, ExxonMobil began complaiing of escalating terrorism by GAM. GAM,
on the other hand, which has never had any trouble claiming credit for its
incursions against the military or Mobil when they WERE guilty, denies the
charges. In early March, Exxon security claims an Aceh rebel lobbed a hand
gredande into the facility – mysteriously, I could find no record or a death or
injury from this "attack." Tengku Sofyan Daud, deputy of GAM, was angered by the
charge. "We never threatened the company and we never told them to close down
the plant."

On March 8, ExxonMobil closes down the plant and around the same time,
Wahid threatens to jack up fuel prices. Meanwhile, in early March, G.W. Bush
expresses his support for the Indonesian military’s tough stance against the
rebels, while, Colin Powell makes it plain he does not want to link human rights
issues to arms sales (I mean, what POSSIBLE link could there be between the two,
right?). By April, Wahid has called for an all-out assault on the Aceh natives,
this time specifically targeting civilians. As the bodies mount up, ExxonMobil
officials stand on the sidelines wringing their hands and saying and doing
nothing – condoning the slaughter by their very inaction.

Since February, at least 400 Aceh civilians have bee murdered, some, like
the baby in Part I, horribly. Meanwhile, on its website, Pertanima reassures
prospective oil entrepreneurs that the current "unrest" is temporary and won’t
affect their ability to do business. The same site echoes the National Security
Council’s 1953 statement in which it indicates it will take "appropriate action"
to insure companies are unimpeded.

Most frightening to me – as it should be to all Americans – is that our
country is now RUN by oil executives – men from the very same club to which the
ExxonMobil’s Indonesian robber barons belong…men with, it is becoming obvious,
the very same attitude. In a reined-in repeat of the Suharno Coup and post-coup
corporate feeding frenzy in which Suharto richly rewarded all those who aided
him, the Bush-Cheney consortium has lost no time handing out the prizes, seeking
to reduce regulations, promoting wholesale drilling, creating a phoney energy
crisis and driving up fuel prices, stalking unspoiled wildlands and even trying
to push for legislation to allow the fed to seize private land for energy
interests. The series of coincidental fires at oil refineries and the rolling
blackouts aren’t so different from mysteriously lobbed hand-grenades.

And lest we overlook it, the basic Bush energy plan appears to have been
taken almost it for tat from the Baker Institute’s "Strategic Energy Policy
Changes for the 21st Century" report – a report created by a task force that
includes two dozen major oil/energy moguls and also Kissinger Associates. (now
McCarty Kissinger)

How can the behemoths (as one Indonesian writer described the American
corporate-fueled government) be stopped? The question that screams to be asked
is: Why are the stockholders silent on the crimes of the company in which they
hold a material interest? For that matter, why are there still any stockholders
in Exxon at all, in the face of such crimes? Is money so important that nothing
– however evil – matters any more?

It is time for the Democrats, as the only opposition party to the new
leadership, to realize that compromise is not only impossible with these robber
barons, it would be suicidal.

Cheryl Seal = CHERDAV44@aol.com

• URL: The Roots of the Bush-Cheney's Oil Government — Cheryl Seal, Wed Sep 25 16:06