Fragile peace hangs by a thread in Aceh

By JOHN MARTINKUS Herald correspondent

The day before the leaders of GAM (the Free Aceh Movement) and Indonesian Government representatives signed a landmark peace deal to end Indonesia's longest-running conflict, the violence in Aceh continued.

GAM guerrilla commander Darwis described how 30 Indonesian troops approached the village of Abu Dinha at 6 on Sunday morning.

"It was about 500m from here. They were shooting at the people. They shot one boy in the leg."

For the next five hours, the guerrillas traded fire with the Indonesian military, wounding five, he said.

The village where the fighting took place was roughly a kilometre from the main Banda Aceh Medan highway, which links the province of Aceh with the rest of Indonesia.

The Indonesian military claims to control the highway, but in the Bireuen area, 200km from the capital, Banda Aceh, that control is tenuous, with GAM moving freely in villages lining the highway.

Last week more than 1000 fighters were reported to have gathered for the December 4 commemoration of GAM's establishment in 1976, which reignited a war for a separate state of Aceh dating to Dutch colonial times.

Since 1976 the conflict has claimed more than 10,000 lives.

Darwis explains how in the past week his men were forced to move from their previous camp by the arrival of 1000 new Indonesian troops. The guerrillas use the main highway to travel but simply go around the main military posts where Indonesian police and military are dug in behind barbed wire and sandbags.

The arrival of 2900 extra troops in the town of Lhokseumahwe, 50km away, announced by the Indonesian military as a routine rotation, has meant more patrols along the highway with convoys of heavily armoured trucks, some with heavy machineguns, passing frequently.

The GAM fighters in the Bireuen area seem to be armed almost as well as the Indonesians. The 100 or so men with Darwis carry a range of AK-47s, M-16s and Chinese-made machineguns, as well as RPGs and grenade launchers. He claims to control a total force of 5000 in the area.

Many of the guns are not of the type used by the Indonesian military, giving credence to reports that they are supplied from the black markets of Thailand and Malaysia and smuggled in speedboats across the straits of Malacca to Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra.

The peace agreement brokered by Geneva's Henry Dunant Centre for humanitarian dialogue outlines a plan whereby GAM will confine itself to areas known as peace zones, and if the ceasefire holds, begin disarming in two months as the Indonesian military redeploys its forces away from the province.

The Indonesian police force and its notorious Brimob mobile assault troops are to be responsible for maintaining law and order and are no longer to attack GAM, which has been their primary function.

The main difference between this agreement and a previous ceasefire brokered by the Dunant Centre in 2000 is that 50 international monitors from the centre will join a 150-member Joint Security Commission, alongside representatives of GAM and the Indonesian Government, to monitor infringements of the agreement.

The last agreement fell apart last year and never led to a halt in hostilities, with each side blaming the other of abusing the ceasefire to build up its forces.

The advance team of six observers, mostly former members of the British military, arrived in Banda Aceh three weeks ago and monitoring began yesterday.

The monitors will be from Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. GAM has pushed for European countries to be involved in the monitoring, claiming Malaysia and Thailand are not democracies and are too close to Jakarta.

The day before the signing, Darwis said the ceasefire would not work because it was a "one-sided disarmament".

He also said GAM did not accept the autonomy deal offered by Jakarta and would still push for independence. The additional troops being brought into Aceh and the requirement by the Indonesian negotiators to set up a police post in every town were also unacceptable to the fighters on the ground, he said.

The agreement stipulates that both sides are to immediately refrain from "acts of violence including intentional destruction of property and any offensive or criminal actions".

These are stipulated as "attacking, shooting, engaging in torture, killing, abducting, bombing, burning, robbing, extorting, threatening, terrorising, harassing, illegally arresting people, raping, conducting illegal searches".

The list of possible violations gives an indication of the tactics employed by the Indonesian security forces in Aceh.

"If the TNI [Indonesian Army] come to the villages and steal things like cars and motorcycles, GAM will attack them," Darwis says.

He admits that an Indonesian sergeant shot dead in the town of Bireuen last Saturday was killed after he was reported to GAM for trying to extort money from the locals.

The most recent incidents Darwis describes are all related to money.

He says that on November 30, Indonesian Army troops rounded up all 300 inhabitants of the village of Cot Plieng in front of the mosque, where they beat them and demanded money.

Two days before, elite troops from the Army's Kostrad strategic reserve rounded up the villagers from nearby Blang Kuta and shot three children aged 8, 14 and 17 in front of the crowd.

Darwis says the reason was that the Army had found out that the villagers were paying more money to the Brimob police than to the military.

It is well known in Indonesia that the military receives only a quarter of its operational expenditure from the Government.

The rest comes from a combination of military-run businesses, extortion rackets and illegal activities.

The Indonesian authorities admit that there are 50,000 soldiers and police stationed in Aceh (which has a population of 4 million), but local non-government organisations say the true figure is anywhere between 60,000 and 70,000.

GAM claims to have 25,000 armed men, but this is impossible to verify.

The financial burden on the population imposed by the military, which one foreign observer in Banda Aceh described as having a "predatory role" in the province, has only increased support for GAM in the countryside.

For the past month the Indonesian military has been carrying out a high-profile operation near Lhokseumahwe, Aceh's second-largest town, as part of a plan to pressure GAM into signing and to present the peace deal as a military victory to the Indonesian public.

Armoured personnel carriers, tanks, armoured cars and helicopters have been deployed with 1400 elite troops, including Kopassus special forces and Kostrad, to encircle a 4sq km swampy area near the village of Cot Trieng.

They first claimed to have surrounded the GAM leadership and 200 fighters. Now they say there are no more than 60 inside.

A tour of the area shows relaxed, heavily armed troops posing for television crews. GAM now says there is no one left in the encircled area, they left long ago. Brigadier General Bambang Dumarno, Army second-in-command of in Aceh, says "the operation has nothing to do with the peace agreement".

But at the time of interviewing, he said that if GAM did not sign the agreement, he would follow orders to proceed with Plan B, a full-scale offensive against GAM.

In Banda Aceh, the intimidation of those involved in the peace process took a more familiar form.

On November 30, six armed men kidnapped 26-year-old human rights worker Musliadi as he was sitting down to break the Ramadan fast with his evening meal. He was due to travel to Geneva this week to represent Achinese civil society at the talks.

His body was found floating in a river four days later.

Witnesses to his kidnapping identified the car involved as belonging to the Brimob, whose right to carry assault weapons and conduct operations against GAM was one of the sticking points in the peace deal.

There is a well-documented history of kidnappings, torture and assassinations carried out by the Indonesian security forces in Aceh since the calls for a referendum on the province's status intensified the conflict in 1999.

In the field, the GAM fighters express a willingness to go along with the agreement to allow international monitors in to Aceh, but Darwis says that in the long run, "only a just referendum for self-determination can solve the Aceh conflict".

But that is not something that the Indonesian Government is willing to propose.

Herald feature: Indonesia and East Timor