”クラクラ忍者”（クラクラとはインドネシア語で亀の事）と勝手に私が命名したが、これは米国で有名な
Ninja Turtles
からである。何でここで「忍者部隊」が出てくるんだ、と思う人が、これは東ジャワ地方で起きている奇妙な殺人事件につながる。Banyuwangi（バンユーワンギ）と言う地域で、Dukun（ドゥクン）と呼ばれている”魔術師”が狙われて、惨殺されている事件がある。既に130人以上は殺られたとの発表で、一般市民は恐怖にどん底に落とされた。殺し方が非常に残忍で、人間ではないとの事。しかも、目撃者がいないとの事で、Silent
Killer、「忍者」と呼ばれている犯人グループである。
この殺人グループの話として、以下のように面白い事を聞いた。当然全部確認出来る訳も無いので、聞き流してくれれば幸いである。でもここで言うことはまんざら全部嘘でも無いので、取り敢えず読むに値するのではないでしょうか。
「忍者」と言う言葉であるが、日本人でなくてもこれは当然？のように知っていると思う。もともと、これは98年5月にジャカルタで起きた暴動の時に使用され始めたと言う。当時のプラボウオー部隊（特殊部隊-Army
Special Forces (Kopassus) ）のことを示す。以下英語の説明；
To quote from an anti-army warning about ninjas that was distributed in Jakarta last May,
"`Ninja' is the term popularly used to designate the Army Special Forces (Kopassus)
in disguise. Ninjas usually do the killing and destruction covertly." The warning
added that Kopassus started using Ninjas when the U.S.-trained General Prabowo, until this
spring a Pentagon golden boy, was Kopassus commander.
さて、手口はどの様なものかは知らないが、少なくても新聞、友人等からの情報により構成すれば、以下のような事にあるであろう。
本人を何らかの方法で呼び出し、殺した後はその死体を切り刻んでから木などからぶら下げる、川に投げ捨てる、場合によってはMUSK（寺院）に投げ込む。最初はこれを聞いた時に、「妙だな」と思った。何故ここまでやるのか。自分なりに聞きまわって、以下の推察をした。11月10日から13日にインドネシアでは重要な「国民協議会(MPR)」が開催されるにあたり、各種政治団体が双方の利権争いをしていた。これを契機に、相手の政党を叩き潰す。何故、政治的な手段に使用するのか？これは殺された相手がDukunばかりではなく、実はUNと言うイスラム正教団体の人達が多く占めていたのだ。
インドネシアに置けるこの団体の力は大きく、この団員を殺戮する事は、インドネシア国家への挑戦とも言える。寺院にバラバラになった肉片を放り込むのは「見せしめ」、「恐怖感を植え付ける」ものである。いくら趣味で殺していたとしても、これは行き過ぎである。それに、プラボウオー部隊が解散された後、特殊部隊の残党（兵士）が当然いて、その人達の殺し能力を「買う」人がいてもおかしくない。ちょうど戦国時代の様に、国家が混乱し、政権争いの真っ只中でこんなにうまい調子で相手を叩き潰すチャンスは無いからだ。
噂によると、”殺し賃”は一人頭25万ルピア（日本円で約3600円弱）からこの4倍位とか（ヨドバシカメラより安い）。一部の目撃者によると、この忍者部隊は筋肉隆々で、いかにも訓練を受けた兵士って感じがするらしい。おまけに殺し方が鮮やかで（？）、殆ど捕まらない。中には、捕まったものの、すぐに特殊なピルを飲んで精神錯乱状態になったと言う。尋問を出来なくするためだ（後遺症は無く、数日間はおかしくなる）。この薬は特殊なルートでしか入手出来ないのは言うまでも無い。何でもかんでも「特殊」でいかにもプラボウオー部隊と結びつくが、これは偶然か。彼らは、メキシコからわざわざ飛んできた「テロ対策特殊部隊（米国人編成）」と合流し、テロ行為、群集心理、群集扇動、恐怖政治、誘拐、拷問方法（テロ対策で必要な知識）等を訓練受けたので、インドネシア人のように簡単に扇動出来る民族は一ひねりだ。米国の特殊部隊と訓練をしてきた連中なだけに、特殊ルートをこう敷くしていても全然おかしくない筈だ。
肝心の雇い主は、推測では元共産党幹部、スハルト大統領の下で苦しめられた退役軍人達、漁夫の利を狙った政治団体だ。
Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and a retired UC Berkeley
professor.
MURDERS IN JAVA, PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE, AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
At this moment the world is watching with concern a sinister wave of killings against
moderate Muslim clerics in East Java. The killings have the marks of a psychological
terror campaign, much like that waged in 1965 by the Indonesian Army. By its use of psywar
the Army was able both to kill off its Communist political opposition, and also reinforce
a desire for rule by a strongman regime. In that Army campaign over 500,000 civilians were
killed.
The analogies with 1965 are many: the distribution of death lists to terrify the public,
the arrival of assassins in trucks, mutilation of corpses and display of body parts in
public places. This has led observers inside and outside Java to speculate that, once
again, Army elements are fomenting terror to justify a military crackdown. In fact Army
members have already been arrested by local authorities for the killings, and then
mysteriously released.
In the October 20 _New York Times_, Nicholas Kristof presented an almost opposite
analysis, attributing the killings not to the army but to social upheaval in the
transition away from army dictatorship. "With the decline of strongman rule," he
wrote, "there seems to be an increasing willingness to attribute a problem to a
sorcerer's magic -- and to settle the problem immediately by picking up a sickle."
To support the case that killings began from below, not above, Kristof supplied a
falsified chronology. He wrote that the "killings began with the slayings of dozens
of Muslim leaders," which then led to retaliations against suspects with alleged
"supernatural powers." In fact, the original victims were traditional sorcerers
(dukuns), who are part of the Javanese culture. Their practice is offensive to sectarian
Muslims, but is tolerated by the clerics of the more moderate NU (Nahdlatul Ulama)
organization. These became targeted after some of them had come to the sorcerers aid.
Mob violence only began after killers dressed in black, whom the public called ninjas, had
killed almost 100 NU clerics, and even thrown parts of dismembered corpses into mosques (a
gesture certain not only to terrorize but to infuriate.) Kristof writes that "the
original ninja were secret Japanese fighters," not mentioning that in Java the term
is applied to killers trained by the ruthless Army Special Forces -- now called Kopassus
-- who organized the great massacre of 1965.
To quote from an anti-army warning about ninjas that was distributed in Jakarta last May,
"`Ninja' is the term popularly used to designate the Army Special Forces (Kopassus)
in disguise. Ninjas usually do the killing and destruction covertly." The warning
added that Kopassus started using ninjas when the U.S.-trained General Prabowo, until this
spring a Pentagon golden boy, was Kopassus commander.
In his article Kristof reported accurately that many believe the killings are an extension
of those engaged in by "the ruling political apparatus" in the Suharto era,
"either to eliminate Muslim critics or else to sow chaos and the conditions for a
coup." But this language avoided mentioning the army. Indeed the only reference to
the army in his three-column story was as a force entering the area belatedly,
"pledged to solve all the killings."
Indeed in his story the original targets, the sorcerers, have been identified with their
murderers. He describes as "people accused of sorcery" victims who in fact were
falsely accused ninjas (the sorcerers' killers). His chief example, a man whose head was
paraded at the top of a bamboo stake, was killed in the Malang region. In this region,
according to local police, the black magician rumor had hardly been heard of.
Apparently the man was a mental patient, one of over a dozen who someone had taken from a
mental hospital and dispersed through villages where they were strangers. This is another
sign of a psywar operation designed to inculcate violence. As the Malang Military
Commander observed, someone was victimizing people with mental disorders. Why else would
they send them out to scattered villages, where ten have been killed in less than a week?
In short, the Kristof story presents a picture of mob violence requiring army
intervention, where reporters from AsiaWeek to the London Sunday Times have seen yet
another covert army intervention to induce mob violence.
In contrast to other New York Times reporters, Kristof's stories on Indonesia have
consistently betrayed the same propagandistic bias. This was his first Indonesia story
since last May, when, after anti-Chinese violence for which Kopassus and its former
general Prabowo have been blamed, Kristof wrote that "new freedoms" were
responsible for the ethnic frictions (5/25/98). And he showed his nostalgia for army rule
four days earlier, when he belittled the student protest movement in Jakarta, and
described the Army as "The institution that used to keep the passengers in the back
seat and maintain order" (5/21/98). This was shortly after exposures of Kopassus
atrocities for which General Prabowo was demoted and eventually fired.
This nostalgia for the Indonesian Army's version of "order" has been a recurrent
feature of Times reporting (and misreporting) about Indonesia in the past. Just as for
decades the Army and its U.S.-trained Kopassus Special Forces were the preferred assets of
the CIA and Pentagon, so their propaganda campaigns were faithfully parroted by the Times.
In 1965, as the Special Forces proceeded to massacre thousands of Communists, the Times
repeated the Army claim that it was Communists who were massacring their enemies
(10/30/65). In 1975, seven weeks after CIA reports that the Indonesian Army had begun
fighting overtly in East Timor, a Times correspondent wrote of Indonesia's "hands-off
policy with regard to the civil war that is engulfing Portuguese Timor" (11/26/75).
To its credit, Times coverage of Indonesia has improved greatly, especially on East Timor,
since the great massacres of 1965 and 1975. For example a story by Seth Mydans (8/25/98)
frankly acknowledged the terroristic practices which led to the dismissal of General
Prabowo.
But just as Prabowo and Kopassus are still feared in Indonesia as possible manipulators of
the ninja terror campaign, so there still appear to be those in Washington, and at the
Times, who wish to remain close to them. Kristof's story is much worse, and more ominous,
than a piece of bad journalism. It suggests that, once again, the Times has become an
instrument in a psywar campaign to protect mass killings.
Protection of this sort coming from the U.S., Indonesia's patron state, is a green light
for terror to continue as in the past. And in just one week since Kristof's story, there
has indeed been a new wave of unpunished violence against pro-democracy forces and human
rights groups in Jakarta, none of it reported by the Times.
SIDEBARS:
NEW YORK TIMES INDEX OF REPORTING ON INDONESIA 1965
Through three crucial months the Times repeated Indonesian Army propaganda about a
Communist-directed terror campaign and massacre. The first hint that Communists were the
victims of the massacre was published on 11/27/65.
10/8 Army seen curbing drive against Communists and heeding Sukarno plea for unity
10/19 Mobs reported burning and sacking country
10/25,36 Army seen as bulwark against take-over by Communists
10/28 Army declares martial law in central Java; alleges Communists massacre civilians
there
11/1 Communist rebels reportedly seize two areas; martial law earlier imposed and troops
sent in to halt terrorism
11/3 Communist revolt rapidly spreads from central to E and W Java; 500 rebels battling
11/15 Communists in central Java, under army pressure broken into small-scale bands
capable only of amall-scale
terrorism
11/27 Roman Catholic newspaper reports 71 Communists captured, many killed by army
troops...many Catholic
youths killed by Communists
12/20,16 Singapore sources say Communists planned large-scale terror campaign if coup
succeeded
In fact the alleged Communist campaign never existed:
"The collapse of the coup in Jakarta demoralised the leading military conspirators in
Central Java. During the night of 1/2 October they withdrewto the Mount Merapi-Merbabu
area with two companies of soldiers. The officers they left behind realised that the cause
was lost and begged forgiveness. Jakarta thus regained control of the region." (M.C.
Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 270)
THE NEW YORK TIMES AND EAST TIMOR IN 1975
In 1975 the Times (often relying on British sources) repeated Indonesian Army lies about
the new government of East Timor, as "Communists" receiving arms from Communist
bloc countries, who in seizing power "had cut the throats of babies," and who
were violating the Indonesian territory of West Timor. See: New York Times 8/26/75, 2
(babies); 9/14/75, 2 ("Communists"); 9/27/75, 11 (violations); 12/13/75, 12
(Communist bloc).
Former Australian diplomat James Dunn, who was in East Timor at the time, has since
denounced these claims as either "macabre fantasy" or else fabrications from the
Indonesian Army intelligence agency Bakin. See James Dunn, Timor, 157 (babies), 177
("Communists"), 200 (violations), 195 (Communist bloc).
Meanwhile an extraordinary despatch (11/26/75, 8) from the Times' own correspondent, David
Andelman, spoke of Indonesia's "hands-off policy with respect to the civil war that
is engulfing Portuguese Timor," and noted that "The Indonesian forces...have
been showing remarkable restraint."
This was seven weeks after the Indonesians, as the CIA had reported internally on October
10, had launched an overt military attack from West Timor, in order (according to Dunn)
"to keep up the fiction that the civil war was continuing to rage" (Dunn, Timor,
202; cf. 314).