Twenty years on, Aceh and Jakarta continue managing peace

The Star

5 hours ago

JAKARTA: 'If you run, you are shot. If you don't, you are beaten,' a 20-year-old Acehnese man said about life in the region, as reported by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2003, two years after president Megawati Sukarnoputri declared martial law to maintain order in the province following years of failed peace negotiations.
For over five decades, states of emergency that involved domestic military deployment were unfortunately the norm rather than the exception for the people of Aceh.
Of the eight Indonesian presidents since 1945, three declared a state of emergency in the country's westernmost province, including two in response to the armed struggle for independence with the formation of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in 1976.
The first emergency in Aceh, which lasted nine years, was declared by first president Sukarno in 1953 as part of his efforts to suppress the Darul Islam rebellion, an insurgency group that aimed to establish an Islamic state in the region. International reports during this time told of rampant abuses by the military in counterinsurgency operations, which disrupted daily life and raising tensions among the Acehnese population.
A second emergency was declared in the 1970s, when the central government moved to suppress local grievances following the discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in the province's north.
Massive extractive operations funneled wealth to Jakarta while the average Acehnese lived in relative poverty, further fuelling local resentment against the government and leading to GAM's founding by Hasan di Tiro.
During its peak in the late 1990s, GAM had some 15,000 active fighters in its rank and file, although other estimates put the figure at around 35,000, including civilian volunteers. GAM continued to expand its separatist campaign and in 2001, president Megawati Soekarnoputri declared the third state of emergency.
Under Megawati's order, Jakarta deployed large-scale military operations that frequently involved indiscriminate violence, according to HRW, including extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, beatings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, as well as significant limitations on the movement of Acehnese people.
Despite the government's best attempts to censor any information coming out of Aceh during this time, testimonies from witnesses who had fled abroad painted a picture of widespread human rights abuses. I
t was only after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that the two sides began to look for a long-term solution to the Aceh conflict. The natural disaster, which claimed 250,000 lives across 14 nations, laid bare the province's fragility and made it unmistakably clear that peace was no longer simply desirable, but essential for the survival of Aceh and its people.
'The tsunami was definitely one of the big factors that contributed to GAM's eventual decision to trust the peacemaking process with the Indonesian government,' Munawar Liza Zainal, a former member who represented GAM at the Helsinki peace talks, told The Jakarta Post on Aug 2.
'We could not trust [the Indonesian side] to sit down with [them] at the time,' he added.
Over the next seven months, negotiators, mediators and local leaders worked tirelessly to translate a fragile ceasefire into a durable settlement, the stakes crystal clear for everyone at the table: Peace could not be measured in signed documents or military withdrawals, but in whether ordinary Acehnese people could lead normal lives.
On Aug 15, 2005, when an agreement granting Aceh self-governance was finally signed 8,400km away in Helsinki, its impact was no less than extraordinary for the millions of citizens still recovering from decades of violence and disasters.
'The day that agreement was signed, peace descended on Aceh. It's astounding, really, how quickly the hostilities stopped,' Munawar recalled, adding: 'peace was people in Aceh having the privilege of sitting still in a hut by a farm, and of entering their places of worship safely'.
Far from the European venue where negotiators brokered the deal, the people of Aceh started to measure peace in quieter, everyday moments: sipping coffee at a local stall without fear, traveling freely or having an innocent gathering with their neighbors.
'The anecdotes of how peace has triumphed in Aceh are simple,' Hamid Awaludin, who led the government's negotiation team, told the Post.
'Before the accord, coffee shops in Aceh would open only at 10am and close at 4pm, because everyone was scared. Now people can get coffee from 6am all the way to 1am. This is how we know the peace process has succeeded,' he said.
The fact that children in Aceh could go back to school again was also worth celebrating, Hamid said, noting that more than 1,000 schools were burned during the conflict.
'Peace is no woman losing her husband to war.
Peace is having people once labelled as traitors by the state working as governors,' he added.
The memory of that bloody and tragic history was still fresh when earlier this year, a new scuffle broke out between the Aceh provincial administration and the government over a development that many feared could lead to a return to conflict in the region.
In April, the Home Ministry issued a regulation transferring the four islands of Mangkir Gadang, Mangkir Ketek, Lipan and Panjang from Aceh's Singkil regency to North Sumatra's Central Tapanuli regency and triggered pushback from Aceh officials, who cited legal and historical evidence of their jurisdictional precedence over those areas.
As protests began erupting across Aceh in June, Jusuf Kalla, the former vice president who handled the process that led to the 2004 Helsinki peace talks, called for all parties to refer to the agreement signed the following year.
'There's an article in the Helsinki agreement, No. 114, which says that any issues relating to Aceh's borders should refer to the boundaries set on July 1, 1956,' Kalla told reporters in July.
On June 17, President Prabowo Subianto took a decisive move in siding with the Aceh administration, and the four disputed islands were returned to the province based on 'findings discovered in old documents', according to House of Representatives Deputy Speaker Sufmi Dasco Ahmad.
Following his decision, Prabowo underlined the need for harmony to maintain the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI).
'I believe in the principle that we are all one. The concept of NKRI will always remain as our core foundation, and if there is a need for us to reaffirm our mutual understanding, alhamdulillah [praise be to God], I think the resolution has been very swift and good,' he said in a statement. - The Jakarta Post/ANN