BRITAIN-INDONESIA: Women Who Wrecked Jet In Timor Protest Walk Free

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

IPS Correspondents

LONDON, Jul 31 1996 (IPS) - A British jury has acquitted three women who broke into an aircraft plant and wrecked a Hawk jet destined for the Indonesian air force.

The Liverpool Crown Court jury accepted their plea that the sabotage was justified to prevent the fighter from being used against East Timorese rebels.

Joanna Wilson, Lotta Kronlid and Andrea Needham broke into a British Aerospace plant at Warton, north-west England in January and did 1.5 million pounds (2.25 million dollars) worth of damage to the jet, breaking high-tech display screens in the cockpit and punching holes in the fuselage.

They videoed themselves, garlanded the wrecked jet with banners and then called the police to come and arrest them, singing peace songs while they waited for them to arrive.

In court they pleaded not guilty to charges of criminal damage, arguing that they had prevented a crime — the bombing of East Timor — by their act.

In their defence they cited the Nuremberg prosecution of Nazi war criminals, the 1969 Genocide Act and provisions against aiding and abetting murder in the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act. They were using reasonable force to prevent a crime, they told the court.

In the video, later seen by the jury, the women filmed themselves signing a declaration saying “they were acting to prevent genocide in a country where a third of the population has been murdered.”

During the two month trial hearings, thousands of people in the north of England signed petitions and protested outside the court and BAe plants in the region. Church leaders from Britain’s main Christian denominations denounced the arms sales to Indonesia.

Defence witnesses included human rights activists and East Timorese exiled leader Jose Ramos Horta. Horta told the court that news of the women’s “hammering” had reached East Timor. People in East Timor “feared the supply” of Hawk jets to the Indonesian airforce, he claimed.

The damaged jet was due to enter service with the Indonesian air force’s Bandung sqaudron, a ground-attack anti-insurgent unit, Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, told the court during the trial.

British Aerospace (BAe) has taken out High Court injunctions against the members of the acquitted women’s group, dubbed the ‘Ploughshares’ after the Christian biblical pacifist proverb about beating ‘swords into ploughshares’. The injunction bans the women from approaching BAe premises.

The verdict came as Indonesia was restoring calm after a weekend of anti-government protests in the capital Jakarta. The official Antara news agency quoted Jakarta military commander Major-General Sutiyoso as saying the military would not tolerate any more disturbances and that he had ordered his troops to open fire on anyone trying to disturb law and order.

The same day, in London, the international human rights group Amnesty International strongly condemned the Indonesian security forces for detaining opposition members during the riots and demanded a halt to arbitrary arrests.

The detentions followed a July 27 police raid on the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) in Jakarta, occupied by supporters of the ousted opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia’s late founding president Sukarno.

Up to 241 people were known to have been arrested, says Amnesty, and 90 were injured in the weekend clashes between police and demonstrators.

“The government should immediately release anyone detained for peaceful activities, and allow those injured and detained unrestricted access to their families and lawyers,” Amnesty said.

The rights NGO said restrictions on access to those injured in the riots made it difficult to assess the exact numbers killed and wounded, though at least four are thought to have died.

“The recent civil unrest should not be used by the government as a pretext for a witchhunt of opposition activists,” said the NGO, and denounced attempts by the Indonesian government to link the protestors and Indonesian NGOs to the banned Indonesian Communist Party as a possible means of justifying reprisals.

Indonesian rebel labour leader Mukhtar Pakpahan was reportedly detained by the country’s attorney-general’s office late Tuesday. Other Indonesian left-wing political activists have gone underground.

Since Indonesia occupied the former Portugese colony in 1975, 200,000 East Timorese, one third of the island’s population, have died in military assaults or forced settlement programmes.

Human rights activists say the Hawk jets that were subject of the Ploughshares protest are being used to attack Timorese communities. Both BAe and the British Government insist that the Indonesians use the Hawks only for training.