Indonesian security personnel have arrested a US national on suspicion of stirring up separatism in the country's restive province of Irian Jaya, a minister was quoted as saying Monday.
Defense Minister Mohammad Mahfud, speaking in the Central Java city of Yogyakarta on Sunday, said security personnel had arrested the US citizen.
But when they were in the process of deporting him, the suspect was picked up by the US Ambassador to Jakarta, Robert Gelbard, the Jakarta Post said.
"The US citizen, Aaron Ward Maness, was arrested on October 21 but he was taken by the US ambassador to Jakarta when he was about to be deported at the Sukarno-Hatta international airport," Mahfud said according to the daily.
Mahfud gave no details as to how the ambassador could have taken someone that was about to be deported away from immigration officials. Neither did he say where the suspect was arrested or where he was now.
"Based on the information that I obtained, the man was not deported as he was immediately taken by Ambassador Gelbard," Mahfud said.
Officials were cited by the daily as saying that Gelbard has claimed that Maness was a US airforce pensioner.
But Mahfud also admitted that the authorities had yet to find concrete legal evidence against Maness to support the accusation that he was trying to encourage separatism in Irian Jaya.
"I have data showing that Maness met with leaders of the Papua taskforce just a day before the bloody riot in Wamena," the minister said.
He was referring to the violence in the hinterland town of Wamena in Irian Jaya on October 6, which followed the forceful taking down of separatist flags there by Indonesian security personnel.
Shooting by the security forces and the subsequent riot left six Papuans and 31 migrant settlers dead by official count.
Maness, Mahfud said, had also taken pictures of the Papuan victims, but not of the settlers who died.
"Maness did not take pictures of the other victims. He was on a tourist visa, but he was working as a journalist," Mahfud said.
Commenting on the alleged incident, Foreign Minister Alwi Shihab said, "the action of one citizen should not be construed as a reflection of the policies of his government."
"For an example, if it turns out that there is an individual who is carrying out espionage and happens to be a civilian, we can't just come out and say that it (his action) was a representation of America's politics," Shihab told journalists in his office Monday.
Mahfud, who has in the past accused Washington and its ambassador here of interference in Indonesia's internal affairs, said that he believed Maness' objective was to prompt UN intervention in Irian Jaya.
"If he had succeeded, it would have been as what happened in East Timor," he said.
A bloody campaign of terror by pro-Indonesian militia groups that followed a pro-indepedendence ballot in East Timor last year prompted the dispatch of a UN-sanctioned multinational peackeeping force.
Irian Jaya, Indonesia's easternmost province and a former Dutch colony, was formally incorporated into Indonesia in 1969 after a UN supervised act of free choice, which Papuans say was flawed.
Mahfud has in the past accused Gelbard of putting weight behind a candidate for the top army post in Indonesia and charged foreign involvement in an incident in West Timor which saw three UN workers killed in September -- JAKARTA (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
