Population: 4.3 million

Natural resources: liquefied natural gas, oil, fishing, logging

Geographic size: 182,828 square miles, including more than 100 small islands along its western coast

Capital city: Banda Aceh

Location: on the northernmost tip of the island of Sumatra, across the northern inlet of the strait of Malacca from Malaysia


The people of the resource-rich Indonesian province of Aceh endured decades of repression under Dutch occupation before Indonesia became an independent country. Unfortunately for the Acehnese, the new rulers have offered little respite from military terror.

In the 16th and 17th centuries Aceh was a sultanate. Strategically located on sea lanes between south and east Asia, the region became a major trading post. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 guaranteed Aceh’s independence, but in 1871 the British authorized a Dutch invasion to avoid possible French annexation. The Dutch waged a war which lasted 30 years and, while it never fully consolidated control of the region, killed 100,000 Acehnese. During WWII, the Dutch were forced to leave their colonial possessions in what is now Indonesia.

The Acehnese were fierce fighters in Indonesia’s 1945 –1949 war for independence from the Dutch. Resentment over Jakarta’s centralization and secularist policies led to rebellions in the 1950s (some of these were aided and abetted by the U.S., as detailed in Audrey and George McT. Kahin’s excellent history of that period "Subversion as Foreign Policy"). Aceh subsequently became its own province (it had been part of North Sumatra province) and was promised "special status," with greater autonomy in matters of education, religion and culture. Jakarta never actually allowed these changes to be implemented.

The 1971 discovery of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Aceh yielded large revenues, virtually all going to the central government and multinational corporations. After the initial rise in employment during the construction phase of extraction facilities, job opportunities for Acehnese dramatically declined. People living near the LNG facilities suffered land expropriations, serious environmental devastation and atrocities at the hands of the Indonesian military (see box). Revenues raised from taxes and royalties went directly to Jakarta, with little money spent locally. In 1997, before the Asian economic crisis, some 51 percent of Acehnese villages were categorized as poor.

Resentment over extraction of resources with little local compensation and extreme centralization of state power contributed to the October 1976 formation of the armed Free Aceh Movement (GAM), known formally as the Aceh/Sumatra National Liberation Front. GAM, whose platform was predominantly secular, declared Aceh’s independence.


Dark Days of "DOM"


From 1989 to 1998, Aceh was declared a Military Operations Area, known by the Indonesian acronym DOM. During this period of military rule, human rights violations soared as police and military intentionally targeted the civilian population as a means to destroy the GAM. The military (TNI) implemented a systematic campaign of terror, burning down houses of families suspected of supporting the rebels, disappearing people, routinely torturing and raping detainees and leaving corpses in public places. Human rights organizations estimate that thousands of people were killed during DOM. Commenting on one mass burial site, Major General R. Pramono said "the grave certainly exists but I don’t think it could have been 200 bodies. It’s hard to tell with arms and heads all mixed up." After the dictator Suharto was driven from office in 1998, DOM officially ended and investigations into Indonesian military atrocities began.

Abuses under the DOM left Acehnese with deep anger toward Jakarta. This only increased after the Habibie and Wahid governments did nothing to bring any officers to justice for carnage committed in Aceh .

But the post-Suharto democratic political space which opened up across Indonesia allowed for a growing nonviolent political movement to develop in Aceh. In 1999 more than one million people (almost a quarter of the province’s population) peacefully demonstrated in Banda Aceh, the capital, to demand a referendum on the region’s political future. Recognizing the threat of a well-organized non-violent movement, the TNI subsequently targeted political activists, human rights defenders and members of civil society via imprisonment, kidnappings and murder. This polarization of the conflict has made a peaceful solution much less likely.


The Cessation of Hostilities Agreement


Violence increased in 2001 and 2002, with almost 3,500 people, mostly civilians, killed in the conflict. After long negotiations between GAM and the Indonesian Government, the two sides signed a Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA) on December 9, 2002 in Geneva, under the auspices of the Henri Dunant Centre. The CoHA dramatically reduced casualties and brought the Acehnese a long-overdue reprieve from terror.

Although this initiative was a major step forward, it didn’t address the region’s political future and side-stepped issues on which the two sides disagreed. It was therefore a cease-fire but not a thorough peace plan. The talks provided for an "All-Inclusive Dialogue" and elections, but these goals were never clearly defined and meant different things to each side. "Civil society," shorthand for unarmed sectors of Acehnese society (including the student movement and human rights organizations) offering an alternative to GAM and the TNI, was also denied a real role in negotiations.

The Joint Security Committee (JSC), a tri-partite monitoring body, including members of GAM, the Indonesian government and observers representing the mediating Henri Dunant Centre, listed violations on both sides. But Jakarta did all it could to undermine the CoHA, including targeting political and human rights activists. In February the Indonesian government imprisoned Muhammed Nazar, chair of the Information Centre for a Referendum in Aceh (SIRA), and other campaigners despite a CoHA clause which read "both parties
will allow civil society to express without hindrance their democratic
rights.". Eyewitnesses described military personnel abducting Mukhlis Ishak and Zulfikar, two human rights activists, in late March. In April, the Indonesian military began organizing mobs to demonstrate against and ransack local JSC offices. The JSC was forced to limit its operations to the capital, making the body even less effective.

The Indonesian government insisted that GAM drop its independence demand and disband, a highly inappropriate demand given that such compromises were not part of COHA terms. Indonesian police then arrested five GAM negotiators at the Kuala Tripa Hotel in Aceh as well as hotel owner Cut Nur Asikin. When Johnson Panjaitan, a well known Jakarta lawyer, came to offer legal representation for Cut Nur Asikin, he was told that under martial law she was not entitled to counsel for 20 days. His hotel room was also searched by security forces who claimed they were looking for "marijuana and other banned drugs."

The two sides agreed to meet in Tokyo to discuss the CoHA, but the Indonesian government negotiated in bad faith by reiterating demands that GAM abandon independence and that the rebels disband. Meanwhile, the TNI readied troops and equipment for the assault on Aceh.

Immediately after the talks ended in Tokyo, on May 19, 2003, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri declared martial law in Aceh and the TNI launched a full-scale invasion. Echoing the East Timor occupation, the TNI will "resettle" between 100,000 and 200,000 Acehnese, by moving them to camps for internally-displaced people, allegedly for their own "protection." Radio Australia noted that by early July, two-thousand school buildings had been burned to the ground and over 100 homes destroyed. Also tragically reminiscent of East Timor, widely reported accounts of Indonesian troops killing noncombatant children and young adults and raping women make clear that civilians will continue to suffer most.

Major General Djali Yusuf, head of the regional military command based in Banda Aceh, has stated that GAM could be broken in six months. The International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based monitoring organization, responded to this claim by noting, "if that were true, however, the conflict would not now be 27 years old." Clearly, as also demonstrated by the current U.S. regime, old war hawks do not abandon faulty logic simply because it has been proven wrong.

Box:

ExxonMobil

In 1971 Mobil Oil discovered massive reserves of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Aceh. Today, ExxonMobil (Mobil Oil merged with Exxon in 1999) operates in partnership with the state oil company, Pertamina. The LNG fields make the province Indonesia’s fourth largest contributor of export earnings from natural resources: the Jakarta government receives a reported US$1 billion per year from the gas fields. The installations are closely guarded by troops who have perpetrated numerous abuses of nearby villagers; Indonesian troop concentration is highest around the ExxonMobil liquefied natural gas facilities near Lhokseumawe.. In June 2001, a lawsuit was filed against the company on behalf of 11 Achenese villagers. The suit alleges that the oil giant is complicit in the Indonesian military’s systematic use of torture, murder, rape, and other acts of terror; that ExxonMobil knowingly hired these brutal security forces to protect their facilities; and that the multinational provided TNI troops financial and other material support. The U.S. State Department filed an opinion with the court claiming that the suit would have a "serious adverse impact" in the "struggle against international terrorism." The lawsuit is still pending.