[Indonesia's Secret War in Aceh. John Martinkus. Random House Australia, 2004 326 pp.]

Emmy Fitri, Jakarta – Using the word "secret" as a book title is bound to be a magnet for curious readers, the tease to draw them in to find out more about its promise of providing more information.

It's what we expect from John Martinkus, an acclaimed Australian journalist who wrote the tremendous accounts of the strife in East Timor, A Dirty Little War, and Paradise Betrayed: West Papua's Struggle for Independence.

His revealing account of his journey through the province fills in the gaps for Indonesia's long ambivalent press, as well as the increasing lack of attention paid by the international community to what is going on in Aceh.

The area's story is a long, violent and tragic one, marked by pitiful accounts of orphaned children, widows and traumatized villagers in remote corners of the province.

It includes the elderly whose sons and daughters take up arms for war and who are tortured and jailed for their parental connection. It is also the story of the mysterious mass graves found in the province.

Who has the most blood on their hands, the so-called rebels or the Indonesian Military (TNI)? In Martinckus' view from his travels and data, it is the latter in the effort to stamp out the independence movement.

Indonesia first made Aceh a designated area of military operation (DOM) from 1988-98, keeping the province under virtual martial law, sealing it off from the rest of the country and leaving the military to its own devices. President Megawati Soekarnoputri imposed martial law last year.

The Indonesian media, although championed as "free" in the reform era following Soeharto's fall in 1998, has not shown that boldness in its reports (or lack thereof) about Aceh. Martinkus' own "journalistic trip" can be an eye opener for the public and especially fellow journalists in reporting on the situation.

In one of his bus trips, Martinkus talks to one of the passengers, who boldly said: "Eighty, no, 90 percent of the people here support GAM." His source was not a prominent figure nor a vocal student activist, but the proverbial man in the street, experiencing the trauma for himself on a daily basis.

While the world's media is occupied by "hot" news stories, from Baghdad to Kabul, and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Indonesian media devotes a shamefully meager amount of space to the drama going on in its own backyard.

It would have been quite understandable during the repressive Soeharto era, but it appears incongruous today in the "anything goes" climate of journalism.

Perhaps, the lack of understanding about what is really going leaves media vulnerable to accepting and parroting the one-way directives and strong appeals made by the Indonesian government and its apparatus to revisit and redefine the word "nationalism and patriotism" in their daily reports.

What Martinkus writes are, in fact, the same type of field reports that Indonesian journalists also collect. He mentions numerous meetings with Indonesian journalists, but it's ironic that he presents such honest and clear reports, most of which never make it to the front pages of Jakarta's dailies.

Early in his narrative, Martinkus begins his descriptive stories about the ongoing armed conflicts between the armed wing of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the TNI along with the National Police.

Martinkus writes that one must first be familiar with the history of Aceh, and its long history of conflicts, from resistance to the Dutch in the 19th century to the Darul Islam rebellion of the 1950s, to understand its present situation.

He makes it clear how the GAM liberation movement in their struggle to reclaim their identity as a free, independent nation. It rejects the long-standing contention of the Indonesian administration that the movement was fueled by injustice and the imbalance in revenue sharing between the local and central governments.

GAM fighters have shown, in Martinkus' view, a high resilience and growing tactical skills – itself a legacy of the fighters against the Dutch colonists.

The TNI, shadowed by economic and political interests, is more concerned in beefing up its numbers.

No one knows what will happen next in Aceh but Martinkus astutely devotes his final two chapters to the independent East Timor and Papua, with its own burgeoning separatist movement.

Although opinions may be split about the value of the book according to the reader's own perspective of Aceh, with some pointing to the "partisan" view of an "outsider", Martinkus has definitely given a voice to thousands of Acehnese whose stories have been denied by the Indonesian media.

His parting hope is that there will be those brave enough to stand up and be counted, reporting on the reality of the situation in the province.

In his words, the international community has put Aceh on the back burner of priorities long enough. For this moment in history – with a tragedy going on far from the eyes of the world – may not seem very long to us, but is an eternity to those caught in the crossfire.