Mafoot Simon – In an apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Alby a year ago, a leader of the movement that has fought a violent struggle with Jakarta authorities for a separate state in Aceh, Sumatra, told an interviewer that he hoped Sweden would not buckle under Indonesian pressure.
Only weeks earlier, Sweden had rebuffed Indonesia's request to extradite GAM leaders, including its ageing founder, Mr Hasan di Tiro, to face trial in Indonesia for acts of violence "as long as they do not break Swedish law or violate international law".
This Tuesday, however, Swedish authorities announced the arrest of three GAM leaders who had been residing in Alby for "grave breaches of international law". They were not named.
But the Indonesian government named them as Mr Malik, 64, Dr Zaini Abdullah, 63, and Mr Hasan, 80. The first two are prime minister and foreign minister respectively in GAM's shadow Cabinet, while Mr Hasan was the first to internationalise the struggle in 1976.
Clearly, Swedish prosecutors found enough evidence from investigations in Aceh in March this year to change their minds about GAM leaders on Swedish soil. Their visit to Aceh followed a formal complaint from Jakarta that GAM leaders were using Sweden as a base to organise armed operations in Aceh.
The Swedish investigation team interviewed 23 people, mostly Aceh separatists, to trace links between the exiles and violence in the province.
The arrests led Jakarta to praise Stockholm's "steadfast commitment to ending armed rebellion, acts of violence and acts of terrorism perpetrated by GAM in Aceh and other regions of Indonesia". Jakarta also said on Tuesday that it was ready to provide more evidence to Stockholm.
Will the arrests cripple GAM though? Some analysts believe not.
Dr Kirsten E. Schulze of the London School of Economics and Political Science is author of The Free Aceh Movement (GAM): Anatomy Of A Separatist Organisation. Replying to The Straits Times, she said the Stockholm arrests were "a blow to the morale", but will probably not affect the armed struggle on the ground "dramatically" as GAM's senior command structure in Aceh remains fully intact and supply lines have not been severed. She added: "And Acehnese culture is not one of surrender."
The Acehnese have had a history of fighting for their independence since the first Dutch force of 3,000 men landed on Aceh shores in April 1873, launching the Aceh-Dutch War which lasted more than 40 years.
Though the Acehnese were defeated, "the spirit of freedom was still alive among its people, as was manifested again in the 1940s", Acehnese academic Teuku Ibrahim Alfian noted in a recent conference paper.
In the 1950s, some Acehnese rebelled against Jakarta's rule and declared Aceh part of the Islamic State of Indonesia (NII) that had been proclaimed by a leader in West Java several years earlier.
But the latest arrests do have some impact. Many GAM activists used to see their leaders as "untouchable" because they were abroad, and also believed the movement had considerable international support and sympathy. "Both those beliefs will have been shaken," Dr Schulze said.
Supporters fighting back
Academic Muhammad Isa Sulaiman of the Universitas Syiah Kuala in Aceh, who is currently with the Asia Research Institute in the National University of Singapore, agreed that the arrests, "if so proven", might have some impact on GAM fighters in Aceh, but there was a "huge GAM network" worldwide.
Mr Hasan restructured GAM's leadership in 2002, he noted. Aside from the trio arrested in Alby, there were other key figures like Mr Bakhtiar Abdullah and Mr Yusra Habib Zen. GAM's network can also be found in Kuala Lumpur, the United States and Australia, he said.
There are believed to be some 10,000 Acehnese living outside Indonesia, mostly concentrated in Malaysia, Australia, Holland, Canada, the US and the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Most have become citizens of their host countries.
Meanwhile, GAM supporters and leaders are fighting back with words. Mr M. N. Djuli of the New York-based International Forum for Aceh, which styles itself as a non-profit organisation but is widely seen as a front for GAM, said he was surprised by the "timing" of this week's arrests.
"The Swedish investigating team has returned from Aceh quite some time ago and I haven't seen any special thing happening to prompt the action at this point in time," he said. "We will have to wait and see what transpires."
GAM's chief of staff in Aceh, Mr Ishak Daud, told wire agency AFP that the arrests were politically motivated. "We will continue to fight for independence of Aceh. The arrest of our leaders in Sweden will not dampen our fighting spirit." He said that GAM's military commander, the Libyan-trained Muzakkir Manaf, has promised that if the legal process in Sweden drags on "we may decide to pick new leaders of the Aceh nation".