Lesley McCulloch, Banda Aceh – He speaks in barely a whisper, his mind frozen in the moments of horror when he thought he would die.

"I was forced to dig my own grave," he said. "But I was very weak and the grave was shallow. I thought then I would die." "D" – he does not want to be identified or the exact location of his ordeal named – is just one victim of a new and growing menace facing the people of the Indonesian province of Aceh as Jakarta seeks to suppress an entrenched independence movement.

The new menace is the emergence of militia groups, allegedly backed by the Indonesian military. Locals say there is strong evidence linking the army's special forces command, Kopassus, with the militia, in a repeat of Kopassus tactics that laid East Timor waste in 1999.

According to D, eight members of the militia came to his house, accusing him of being a member of the independence movement, which he denied. He was taken to the outskirts of the village, where he was beaten with an iron bar to force a confession. The militia then took him to a graveyard, where he was forced to dig his own grave. The iron bar was then used to push him into the grave, he said.

"When they had covered me with earth and everything was dark they started to stab me with their bayonets through the grave. I passed out. Before darkness covered my brain I thought of my wife and baby, and asked God to keep them safe." D survived. He says he does not know how long he was unconscious. Unable to walk, he began to crawl towards the village. Friends found him and took him to hospital.

His chilling account of what happened to him is not unusual in Aceh. D is convinced his attackers were militia and not members of the independence movement, which the government usually blames for the violence in Aceh.

D says his attackers were Javanese. They looked Javanese and did not speak the local language, Acehnese. They were also well known in the area as army-backed militia.

Militias such as those who attacked D are being blamed for widespread destruction and terror in central Aceh province, where the economy has almost ground to a halt, many schools and clinics have been destroyed and whole villages have been burnt or deserted.

Official figures for last year show that more than 1900 houses were burnt in Banda Aceh alone, and there were almost 400 conflict-related deaths, a devastating blow to the 300,000 people of the region.

The real level of destruction may be even higher. A local journalist, who does not want to be identified because of the risk of reprisals, has been keeping his own tally. He alleges that more than 2200 houses were burnt and that 450 died.

In addition, many have disappeared and are presumed dead. Many have been tortured and several thousand have fled because of the violence.

Officials blame the Aceh Sumatra National Liberation Front (ASNLF), commonly known as the Free Aceh Movement for the violence. But locals blame the Indonesian military and police.

And increasingly, they accuse groups of militia who, they allege, are recruited, trained and armed by the military and often operate in conjunction with them.

While it is difficult to prove the military-militia connection, locals provide convincing anecdotal evidence that these groups of "unknown thugs" are well-organised and backed not merely by rogue elements of the military, but rather by local commanders.

Their mission is to find and destroy Free Aceh members and their supporters. In addition, there is a systematic attempt to destroy the economic and social fabric of this remote community.

A former militia member, now in hiding for fear of his life, said: "We had orders from the army to make the Acehnese suffer, to show them they cannot win, to destroy their society."

In Aceh a struggle for independence has been raging for the past 30 years. In the past few years the independence movement has been enjoying increasingly widespread support from most of the population. Since 1998 about 5000 have died because of the conflict, more than 500 this year alone.

The number of deaths, disappearances, tortures and rapes that are generally attributed to the military and police, and now to the militia, is one of the reasons for increasing local support for the Free Aceh Movement.

[Lesley McCulloch, an Australian academic, formerly at the University of Tasmania, is an authority on Acehnese politics.]