Inside Indonesia, April-July 2008

How Indonesia’s Democratic Transition Transformed Aceh

Edward Aspinall

In the first two or three years after the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998, some people inside and outside the country thought Indonesia was on the verge of breaking up. Violent communal conflicts erupted in several parts of the country, notably in Kalimantan, Central Sulawesi and Maluku. Separatist movements re-emerged with new vigour in the three outlying provinces of Irian Jaya, Aceh and East Timor, and new separatist sentiment was stirring elsewhere. One common view was that this happened because the country was not yet ready for democratisation. Indonesia was said to be like a pressure cooker – take off the lid of authoritarian control and the country would explode.

Aceh seemed to present the clearest evidence for this gloomy assessment of the relationship between democracy, national unity and social peace. From early 1999, many Acehnese believed the momentum toward independence was unstoppable. One of the largest mass mobilisations in Indonesian history took place in November 1999. Hundreds of thousands gathered outside Banda Aceh’s Baiturrahman Mosque to demand an independence referendum. Armed rebellion was also better organised in Aceh than elsewhere. At its peak the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, or GAM) controlled 70 percent of the countryside.

At the centre, the Aceh conflict seemed to turn democrats back into authoritarians. So important was Aceh to Indonesia’s national birth myth, and so visceral were the fears of national break-up, that successive post-Suharto presidents authorised stern military action against GAM. The mood of the parliament turned bellicose. The Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia, condensed in the acronym NKRI (Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia), replaced the ‘Pancasila’ of the Suharto years as a catch-all phrase to justify human rights abuses of the worst kind. The depredations of the Suharto years repeated themselves in Aceh. The province became a giant military camp. Elsewhere the military had been forced into a humiliating political retreat. But in Aceh, after a time, officers spoke in public as if the old ‘dual function’ doctrine – giving the military both a security and a socio-political role – had never ended. They boasted that the armed forces were the last bastion of the Republic and the guardians of the state. They sneered at the capacity of civilian politicians to keep the country together. As most of Indonesia democratised, Aceh militarised.

Immediately after the December 2004 tsunami, I drove to Banda Aceh from Medan in a van with NGO activist friends from Jakarta. Not far past the border of Aceh, we passed a roadside military base. It was sunset, and the soldiers were ceremoniously pulling down the national flag for the night. They ordered all passing traffic – including the trucks carrying emergency relief – to stop in respect as they did so. ‘This doesn’t happen anywhere else these days’, my friends told me, shaking their heads and recalling the Suharto years. Going to Aceh was like passing into a time warp. I felt the Indonesian state was reproducing the very tactics that had caused the Acehnese to turn en masse against it in the first place. Even amidst the wreckage of the tsunami in Banda Aceh, people would approach me and whisper about their hatred of the security forces. One fisherman, trying to salvage machinery from his boat stranded in a suburban housing estate, looked around at the wreckage and told me: ‘They will never kill all the Acehnese, even if they try. For every GAM member they kill, ten take his place.’

Aceh’s transformation.

Aceh’s transformation.