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Losing More Hearts and Minds

8 minute read
ANTHONY DAVIS/Lhokseumawe

When the people of East Timor decided 20 months ago to secede from Indonesia, the backlash was swift and horrendous. The Indonesian military, using local militia groups, spearheaded a three-week rampage of pillage and slaughter. The toll: 1,200 dead, wanton destruction of property and a population of survivors traumatized to this day.

It’s happening again.

Aceh, an oil- and gas-rich province on the opposite end of the Indonesian archipelago, is starting to relive the East Timor tragedy. Separatist sentiment is building in the seaside towns, the jungle up-country and rice-growing villages. In reaction, the military has revived its time-honored strategy of slash and burn. On the wall of a torched house in Rantau Pangang, a riverine settlement on the main north-south highway, is a date daubed in paint: 25/3/2001. That was the day police and army units arrived in trucks to shoot six villagers, apparently randomly, and burn down most of the village. “There was no reason for any of this,” mutters Yusman, a grizzled shopkeeper, who was still sifting through rubble last week to retrieve former possessions. “They killed for no reason.”

That’s not how the military views it. They see rapidly spreading support for the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM in its Indonesian acronym, and they’re determined to stanch it with a brutal combination of collective punishment for towns and villages that back GAM, and preemptive terror toward everyone else. The result: wide swathes of Aceh have been brutalized since the beginning of the year. Along a 60-km stretch of the main north-south highway of east Aceh, hamlet after hamlet displays telltale scars: razed shops and markets and blackened, gutted houses. Villages still standing are eerily deserted. The town of Idi Rayeuk, once home to 15,000, was briefly occupied by GAM fighters in early March. Security forces moved in hours later, and now it is a charred ghost town presided over by Brimob, the Police Mobile Brigade under the command of the national police force including some of the same troops who led the carnage in East Timor. The situation is so bad in Aceh that ExxonMobil, whose local plant produces one-third of the country’s gas exports, temporarily pulled out of the region. And things are only going to worsen: last week Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid ordered additional troops to the North Sumatran province.

The parallel between East Timor and Aceh isn’t exact. East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, enjoyed a brief period of self-determination before it was invaded and absorbed by Indonesia in 1975. It never really cohered to the country under former President Suharto, who ordered the invasion. Aceh, in contrastlike the rest of post-independence Indonesiahad been part of the former Dutch East Indies, and has since been a major contributor to the national wealth by producing billions of dollars worth of liquefied natural gas.

East Timor’s tragedy was touched off when Suharto successor B.J. Habibie off-ered its people a referendum on whether they wanted to split from Indonesia. They voted yes, but Habibie wasn’t in control of his own military. The men in uniform had spent two decades trying to get East Timorese to accept their place within Indonesia, and many felt betrayed. The carnage was their retaliation.

Today the people of Aceh are in a similar situation. They haven’t been offered a chance to vote on their fate, but Wahid has an even weaker grip on the nation than Habibie did. Last year Wahid promised a political autonomy and economic package for Aceh. But under pressure from the military, nationalists and Vice President Megawati, Wahid last week issued a Presidential Instruction calling for local officials to reinstate public services and destroy separatist movements using any means necessary.

The reaction is both fear and defiance. Last month in Lhokseumawe, the bustling capital of north Aceh, GAM attacked a military base on a beach near the town center. The following morning the military cordoned off an adjacent beach and set fire to scores of fishermen’s houses. “They told us we were forbidden to take any possessions out of our houses and then set fire to the area,” says Rusli, a 25-year-old fisherman. Rusli has no doubt which side he’s on in the conflict. “Around here everyone supports GAM,” he says. “We are ready for war.”

As East Timor proved, the Indonesian military isn’t good at winning hearts and minds. Over the past two years GAM has fast expanded its support base among a population jaded by decades of military repression and Jakarta’s exploitation of the province’s natural resources. Talks in Geneva last June between GAM’s leadership-in-exile in Sweden and the government brought about a cease-fire arrangement known as a “humanitarian pause,” which has been extended more than once. But the military believe that the frequently breached cease-fires have only given GAM room to strengthen its position.

They could be right. Founded in 1976 by Hasan di Tiro, last scion of the precolonial sultanate, GAM was the target of a protracted military campaign between 1989 and 1998. Jakarta called them “regional military operations,” but in Aceh they were marked by assassinations and “disappearances” of the South American sort. Some 6,000-7,000 GAM suspected activists were killed, and the group was severely depleted.

Since Suharto’s fall, however, the movement has deepened its roots across the predominantly ethnic Aceh-nese province of 4.2 million. In many areas the central government’s civil administration has all but ceased to function. “The Indonesian government is hardly working in the villages anymore,” says Warman, an Acehnese civil servant in Lhokseumawe, who makes no secret of his GAM sympathies. Sitting in a coffee shop with a group of friends, he glances swiftly around before adding: “Here in town, we’re still drawing salaries but we hardly go to work anymore. GAM is now far more active.”

GAM flags flying from electricity poles and crude roadblocks of felled trees outside the townconstructed to block military accesssuggest that’s no exaggeration. In such villages GAM is trying to set up the rudiments of a parallel administration. It is also stepping up military training in makeshift camps where GAM senior cadressome trained in Libya, others former Indonesian soldiersput village youths through their paces.

The cease-fire between the two sides is close to collapse. Two weeks ago two so-called “peace zones” in Bireuen and north Aceh were formally scrapped. Both the Indonesian army and Brimob have been reinforced, pushing up the security forces’ overall strength in Aceh to 37,000. The military is gearing up for what it has termed “limited operations,” which Acehnese fear will be an all-out assault on GAM’s military and political infrastructure, aimed at driving it back into the province’s spine of jungled hills. The French aid organization MEdecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), not known for faintheartedness, pulled out of Aceh earlier this month. Says the local head of another foreign aid agency: “I doubt we’d be targeted by either side. Our biggest fear is being caught in the cross fire.”

GAM, which has several hundred full-time soldiers and perhaps 2,000-3,000 firearms, is small and vulnerable. “Obviously we can’t face TNI (the army) in a situation of total war,” says Tengku Darwesh, one of GAM’s 17 local commanders. “As in any guerrilla conflict, we have to choose our time and place to fight.” The overwhelming bulk of the movement in Aceh is led by Abdullah Syafi, a 45-year-old graduate of a Banda Aceh school of Islamic jurisprudence. Syafi recognizes the leadership-in-exile of aged GAM-founder di Tiro and his deputies. But there is also a splinter group known as the Government Council of the Free Aceh Movement, or MP-GAM in its Indonesian acronym. Led from Europe by Husaini Hasan, the MP-GAM has declared itself opposed to armed struggle and favors some form of autonomy within Indonesia. Jakarta has raised a force of several hundred Acehnese under the MP-GAM banner, paying them to operate alongside the security forces a setup very reminiscent of the militias that wreaked such havoc in East Timor.

The one thing that isn’t being given a chance in Aceh is peace. In 1999 and 2000, a group called the Information Center for a Referendum in Aceh (sira) organized giant rallies calling on Jakarta to hold an East Timor-type referendum on independence for the province. sira was led by former student Muhammad Nazar, who was tried for sedition because of the rallies and given a 10-month jail sentence last month. “The violence in Aceh is increasing as part of a military and police effort to undermine the negotiating process,” says Nazar, whose current residence is the Banda Aceh central jail. “This is not going to solve the conflict.” Obviously, Jakarta didn’t want to hold the kind of referendum that lost it East Timor. Instead, it seems to have chosen Plan B: war.

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