John Doe Versus ExxonMobil - Part One
Indonesian villagers allege that the oil and gas giant was responsible for human rights abuses in the early 2000s. Now, a lawsuit two decades in the making is finally going to trial.
Aceh, Indonesia - Baharuddin Yusuf was getting a haircut when his life split in half.
From that day forward, the calendar would be forever changed.
There would be the time “before” and the time “after” he was allegedly tortured by Indonesian soldiers—suspected of being a member of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), a so-called separatist group fighting a long and bloody civil war of independence in Aceh Province in Indonesia.
“They sliced off the tops of my ears with the razor,” the farmer, then 21-years-old, alleged.
“One of the soldiers ate the cartilage in front of me. I could hear it crunching in his mouth. My mind was blank. I don’t know how to describe the pain. I just kept praying.”
It was March 2001, and the soldiers were employed as security guards at the ExxonMobil oil and gas plant at a place called Arun Field in Aceh—one of Indonesia’s poorest yet most resource rich provinces located in the northern tip of the island of Sumatra.
According to the local community, the soldiers who worked for ExxonMobil were as feared as they were hated around the sleepy town of Lhoksukon—known for undertaking unauthorised sweeping raids and abusing the local populace, all under the guise of rooting out suspected GAM separatists fighting for Acehnese independence from the rest of Indonesia.
The locals called them the “Exxon Army”.
ExxonMobil Corps
ExxonMobil Corporation (then Mobil Oil Indonesia) first came to Aceh in 1968, keen to start exploiting its famously fertile land and the natural gas and oil reserves that lay beneath it.
In 1971, Mobil Oil Indonesia struck liquid gold when it discovered that the area around the towns of Lhoksukon and Lhokseumawe were rich in natural gas which would be extracted and liquified through the Arun Field plant. In its heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Arun Field, which was part of the wider Lhokseumawe Industrial Zone, was generating over $1 billion annually.
In 1999, Exxon bought Mobil and formed ExxonMobil Corporation, now headquartered in Irving, Texas in the United States, which continued to run Arun Field until 2001. At the time, the natural gas field was the largest of its kind in Indonesia and held up to 14 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Yet despite its subterranean riches, Aceh Province was a problematic place for ExxonMobil.
From 1989 until 1998, it was a designated Military Operation Area in Indonesia due to the ongoing civil war—a protracted battle that first bloomed in the 1970s and had claimed the lives of over 15,000 civilians and soldiers by its end in 2005.
The civil conflict mainly rested on the economic disparity felt within the resource rich region and accusations that the central Indonesian government was plundering Aceh’s natural coffers while leaving its people in relative poverty.
This economic tension led to the creation of the Free Aceh Movement or Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM) in 1976, and GAM attacked Mobil Oil in Lhokseumawe in 1977 leaving one American staff member dead.
From 1989 onwards, the violent attacks and counter attacks between the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian military escalated, as both GAM fighters and the Indonesian soldiers stationed in Aceh to quell unrest developed a penchant for summarily executing each other, causing members of the general populace to get caught in the crosshairs.
In order to allow operations to continue, ExxonMobil contracted members of the Indonesian military to guard its plant and keep the company’s foreign staff safe.
It was to be a relationship that was ripe for abuse.
As part of the contract between ExxonMobil and the Indonesian military, the soldiers guarding Arun Field were meant to stay either inside the plant or stand watch at posts studded along the Pipeline Road, under which lay the gas pipeline that transported Aceh’s gas from the plant to the neighbouring town of Lhokseumawe.
The soldiers were not supposed to take part in sweeping operations, but instead focus their energies on guarding Arun Field, for which ExxonMobil paid an eye-watering $500,000 per month.
Yet, according to Baharuddin, the soldiers did not keep to this agreement.
Baharuddin
In March 2001, Baharuddin was doing something he did often—sitting in a communal area on the outskirts of Lhoksukon while his friend trimmed his hair.
It was a place used by the local community to relax, made up of a square of grass with a small pond in the middle and several wooden huts on stilts. The floors of the huts were covered with straw mats and, in the afternoon, young men congregated in them to escape the fierce Acehnese heat.
As Baharuddin was getting his hair cut, a commotion ensued.
Indonesian soldiers claiming they were sweeping the area for suspected GAM fighters had arrived. According to Baharuddin, they could only have been members of the “Exxon Army” because the communal area was just off the Pipeline Road and there were no other guard posts anywhere nearby other than those used by Exxon personnel.
If they were indeed soldiers contracted to Exxon, what happened next was something they had no authority to do.
Baharuddin was detained and the huts torn apart. What sealed his fate was the discovery of four bullets under one of the straw mats.
“They weren’t mine. I have no idea where they came from,” he said. “So many people used those huts, they could have belonged to anyone.”
Baharuddin also said that the bullets were from an M16 rifle—one of the most common military rifles used by armed forces in the United States and around the world. “Only the military [in Aceh] had those. So they must have planted the bullets,” he alleged.
Baharuddin alleged that he was hooded and taken in a van to a building he could not identify. Then the military officers went to work. They had come prepared, with a torture toolkit that was as comprehensive as it was cruel: a lead pipe, a razor, a piece of wire, a telephone cord, a hammer, nails, salt and calamansi—a small acidic fruit also known as Philippine lime.
“Where is your gun?” they would ask him ad nauseum.
“I don’t have one,” he would reply.
“They kept asking me, ‘Where are your weapons?’ If I said I didn’t have any they would punch and kick me or slice at my chest with a razor. They would rub salt and calamansi into my wounds.”
When that failed to elicit a confession, Baharuddin alleged that the soldiers poked holes in his earlobes with a piece of wire and ripped it out. “They did my right ear, then the left,” he said. “Then they took the pipe, hit my shins and knees, and nailed me to the floor.”
According to his testimony, the soldiers placed Baharuddin on a chair and hammered nails into him until they came out of the soles of his feet and into the floorboards.
“I was nailed to the floor for about three hours. But it never occurred to me to give them the answers they wanted. I couldn't give them another answer. I wasn’t a member of GAM. I was just a civilian,” he added, before pointing out the obvious absurdity of the situation.
“If I had had a weapon, I would have used it to shoot them.”
According to Baharuddin, as the days passed, the torture became routine, despite the theatrics the soldiers liked to employ. They would remove his t-shirt, gag him with it, then take a razor blade and slice the flesh on his chest every time he gave them an answer they didn’t like—which was always.
The soldiers wanted Baharuddin to confess to being a member of GAM, he guessed, so that they had an excuse to shoot him.
“Sometimes they would take a chair made of metal and pull the rubber caps off the legs, put it over my feet and sit on it. They pulled my toenails out, one by one,” Baharuddin said, pointing to scars on his feet and his deformed toes. Some of his nails have never fully grown back.
At other times they would put cigarettes out on his face, or stab his legs and attach leeches sourced from a nearby field to the wounds, he alleged. The questions continued day after day, until both Baharuddin and the soldiers grew tired of the situation.
“If you don’t tell us what we want to know within the next few hours, we will take you to the graveyard and shoot you there,” one of the soldiers screamed. “We have already dug your grave.”
Baharuddin was usually shackled to a metal pipe by his hands and his feet bound together, but on that particular night the soldiers, perhaps having become absent-minded due to the longevity of his detention, had forgotten to tie him to the wall, binding only his hands and leaving his legs free after he had been unshackled to eat his evening meal of plain rice.
“I guessed they would shoot me the next day, so my only thought that night was of trying to escape,” he said.
It was 11.30 pm when he noticed that the soldier guarding him outside the room he was held in on the second floor of the makeshift army post had fallen asleep. A tremendous storm was raging outside, the sky full of sound and fury as the rain lashed the neighbouring jungle and lightning tore through the clouds.
Cautiously, Baharuddin managed to maneuver himself so that his arms were in front of him, and bit through the ropes that bound his hands. By this time, the clock on the wall in front of him read 11.56 pm. At midnight, there would be a changing of the guard, who would presumably not fall asleep, making escape impossible.
Due to the extensive torture that he had suffered for almost a month, Baharuddin could no longer walk, and instead shuffled towards the door and down the stairs to the front of the house. “In my heart, I promised God that I would sacrifice a small goat if I made it out of there safely,” he said.
Once outside the house, in the dead of night, Baharuddin saw that there was an area of dense jungle around 50 metres across a dirt road. Summoning all his strength and spurred on by adrenaline, he forced himself to stagger forward and into the forest. The storm was helpfully making the trees bend and sway, obscuring his movements as he made his way deeper and deeper into the vegetation.
It had been 27 days, but he was finally free.
Ironically, Baharuddin was picked up the next day by GAM fighters who were hiding out in the forest and happened across him. They dressed his wounds, gave him some food and nursed him back to relative health. Too scared to go home for fear of being arrested again, he ended up joining the group.
Some months later, as Baharuddin spent his days adapting to his new life, rumours started to circulate of a mysterious visitor to Lhoksukon.
The visitor, an American, was a lawyer who had heard about the “Exxon Army’s” alleged treatment of villagers around Arun Field.
He planned to file a lawsuit in the United States, alleging human rights abuses by the soldiers contracted to ExxonMobil, for whom the American company was supposedly legally responsible.
The man had come to find survivors who would become plaintiffs in the legal action, the rumour went, and he wanted people like Baharuddin to be part of it.
That lawsuit, first whispered about in rice fields and carried on the wind through the Acehnese jungle, would eventually become known as John Doe vs ExxonMobil Corps.
Further reading:
After 20 years, Indonesia’s ExxonMobil accusers eye day in court - Al Jazeera
John Doe Versus ExxonMobil PDF