Indonesian rights body may reopen cases under Soeharto

Indonesia's National Human Rights Commission wants to reopen six cases of human rights violations during former president Soeharto's era that had been put on hold, a senior commission official said on Saturday.

Achmad Baso, the commission's research coordinator on cases during Soeharto's rule, said they included the killing of 5,000-10,000 Indonesians, mostly ethnic Chinese, in West Kalimantan in 1967-1968.

The agency is also looking at cases of alleged human rights violations by the army in Aceh, which was torn by separatist violence for decades until a peace pact after the December 2004 tsunami, and in Papua where a low-level separatist insurgency

has simmered for years.

"I don't know why the previous team put the cases on hold.

We started following up the reports as soon as we were elected in late August and expect to complete our report by the end of December," Baso told Reuters.