Michael Vatikiotism Meulaboh – Indonesia Almost a month after the tsunami, the town of Meulaboh still reeks of death and misery. As I drove down the main street, named after the great Acehnese leader Teuku Umar, images of Dresden and Tokyo after the firebombings sprang to mind, even after some intensive cleanup. Relief workers are still digging out human remains here and there, and swarms of flies remind you of the presence of the dead.

But now there's a new threat to the poor people of Aceh Province as they pick over the ravaged remnants of their lives with the haunted look of trauma victims. Now that the relief operation is well under way, it's pretty clear that Indonesia, nervous about the thousands of foreign troops and aid workers on the ground, is moving fast to reassert its control over a province that until that fateful day in December was closed to foreigners and under martial law.

"I'm in charge here," said Major General Bambang Darmono, the clean-cut military officer who is the regional commander for Aceh, to a group of visiting Singaporean and Indonesian officials on Thursday. Outlining the late-March deadline for normalization – and justifying a polite notice for the army of foreign troops to leave by that time – Darmono said: "From today, we start to put in place a system. No one can go outside this system."

Darmono's three-month plan, counting from the date of the disaster, focuses on restoring infrastructure and managing the relocation of up to some 400,000 displaced people. "We plan to build 24 relocation camps; we will build temporary markets, schools and places of worship," he said. "Our objective is community development."

As good a plan as this sounds, it's hard to see how the Indonesian government, either its civilian or military institutions, can achieve these objectives without sustained outside help. But it was never realistic for the legion of foreign forces, now augmented by 900 troops from Japan, as well as sizable contingents from Australia, the United States and Singapore, to assume they would remain welcome for long.

It's a challenge most acutely felt by the Singaporean commander on the ground in Meulaboh, Colonel Tan Chuan Jin. Here in this most devastated part of Aceh, the Singapore military was the first to hit the ground, five days after the disaster. In an operation that has endeared Singapore to the local people, a combined military force of some 900 personnel brought two amphibious landing ships to the town's picturesque bay, forged a landing so that heavy equipment and supplies could be brought onshore, and used a special plant to distil fresh water from the murky brown soup the local people were wading around in.

"As far as I'm concerned, the Singaporeans can be considered as sons of the soil around here," said an elderly Acehnese man sipping coffee in a recently reopened market on the town's less-damaged outskirts.

But Colonel Tan, who until recently was Singapore's army attachi in Jakarta, has no illusions. "The Indonesian is in control here, so we don't make a move without conferring with them – it's a very sensitive issue," he said watching a Singaporean medical team minister to Meulaboh's sick and needy, while in the next tent, an Indonesian military-run pharmacy looked poorly stocked and just as poorly attended.

On one level, it is understandable that Indonesia's poorly trained and poorly paid conscripts, many of whom lost family and friends in the disaster, are not the best tools for a rapid relief deployment. Even Meulaboh's pugnacious army commander, Colonel Geerhan Lantara, admits that it took a while before he could organize his men into a coherent and effective relief force – though he insists that is now happening.

But local people see a stark contrast between the unarmed and businesslike foreign troops from friendly countries, and their heavily armed and poorly organized Indonesian counterparts. In Meulaboh, I saw Indonesian troops mostly patrolling in trucks, manning checkpoints and lolling around piles of automatic weaponry.

All the same, saving Aceh has to be an Indonesian achievement – if only to elevate the country's badly damaged self-esteem. So as I watched the slick Power Point presentations that promised so many relocation camps and schools and hospitals by the end of the period General Darmono outlined, I was hoping that at least some of it can be achieved, and that foreign help will continue to be welcomed.

If not, as Geerhan implied, the army will have failed the people of Aceh – and that only means that the tsunami's legacy will be more war, and not peace.