Bill Guerin, Jakarta – Tsunami-devastated Aceh, which only a month ago was a war zone, has now become the testing ground for a concerted push to persuade the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM), which has been fighting for independence, to lay down its arms.
A top-level ministerial team from Indonesia left for Finland on Wednesday to prepare for a planned three days of peace talks in Helsinki with the exiled leaders of the guerilla campaign, including self-styled Aceh prime minister Malik Makhmud and minister of foreign affairs Zaini Abdullah.
Although the natural disaster has left at least 95,000 dead and 133,000 missing, presumed dead in Indonesia, the toll in human life from the separatist conflict in that country has also been horrendous, with at least 14,000 people, mostly civilians, killed during 29 years of fighting.
Prior to the tsunami, Aceh had received scant attention, if any, from Washington. But since disaster struck, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a former US ambassador to Jakarta, has indicated that Washington expects the impasse between the government and the rebels to be resolved – and soon. The talks, scheduled to begin as early as Friday, will mark the first time the two sides have come together to discuss a resolution to the conflict since the breakdown of a peace accord in May 2003.
The team from Indonesia is headed by Admiral Widodo Adi Sutjipto, coordinating minister of security. State Minister of Communication and Information Sofyan A Djalil, an Acehnese by birth, and Minister of Justice and Human Rights Hamid Awaluddin, who is close to Vice President Yufuf Kalla, accompany Sutjipto, who commanded the Indonesian Defense Forces (TNI) during the Abdurrahman Wahid administration from October 1999 to June 2002.
Awaluddin is to be the chief negotiator in the talks. Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda and former Aceh military commander Major General Syarifuddin Tippe are also part of the delegation. Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president, will mediate the talks through his Crisis Management Initiative group.
The stakes in Helsinki
Though a GAM official has been quoted as saying that the Helsinki meeting should focus only on reaching a ceasefire, in reality the stakes are much higher. To describe GAM's position as weak would be grossly understating the reality that they now have nowhere to run.
The rebels have been fighting for an independent state for the 4 million or so people of Aceh. But independence is not on the table now, nor is it likely ever to be. The government has long discounted any chance of an East Timor-style referendum, which resulted in the loss of a province and a vast swath of the military's business empire.
Thus, any proposals from Jakarta are likely only to be based on a very special autonomy package, a variation on the existing autonomy given by former president Megawati Sukarnoputri in June 2002, which allows the province to impose Islamic law and keep a greater share of the revenue generated by its vast natural resources. GAM agreed to use that autonomy deal as a starting point, but also said it wanted nothing short of independence.
GAM appears to recognize that its leaders, exiled in Sweden, will be negotiating from a weak position. Their main spokesman in Aceh, Sofyan Dawood, acknowledged on Tuesday that although they were still fighting for their "mission" for independence, they welcomed any means besides violence and armed contact to solve the matter. Any moral high ground the rebels may have held up until now is rapidly disappearing under a massive onslaught of foreign aid being delivered to their beloved province by their mortal enemy, the TNI, whose "mission" is still to "crush" them out of existence.
The army's territorial network, with commands all the way down to the district levels, served in the past to help maintain internal security, but in the last month it has proved to be of immense value as a conduit for distributing aid. Foreign troops and international aid workers also are on the ground in droves helping the Acehnese people. It all adds up to a big loss of face for the separatists, who claim to represent the people of Aceh and to be thinking only of them in these tragic circumstances.
Minister of Defense Juwono Sudarsono, who became the first-ever civilian defense minister when appointed by Wahid in 1999, added to perceptions of the rebels as the bad guys when praising the military. "I see pictures of TNI troops and foreign military personnel where they are working together in foreign magazines. It really made me feel proud," said Sudarsono, who was not invited to the peace talks.
Pursuits to peace in Aceh
The government's commitment to sue for peace has been unwavering since the disaster. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has met ambassadors from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Sweden, Singapore and even Libya, where several rebels were trained in the past, to suss out how best to deal with the Aceh issue.
Legislators are also largely behind the drive for peace. Hidayat Nurwahid, speaker of the country's highest legislative body, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), said on Wednesday that the Aceh problem was one for Indonesia to resolve and he hoped that the Helsinki talks would have a major impact on the chances for peace.
According to Nurwahid, the talks should also aim at minimizing incidents that have increased the chances of aid not being delivered to those in need.
Separately, the leader of the House of Representatives (DPR), Agung Laksono, said he hoped the talks would lead to a momentum that would produce an end to the conflict once and for all. "Not only a temporary halt to the conflict, but also an end to all combat there," he said.
Though he currently enjoys a massive popular mandate from his people and, for the moment, has the support of most politicians, Yudhoyono, dubbed the "thinking general", faces a difficult task persuading the military top brass to go along with his moves to seek a settlement with the rebels.
Army chief General Ryamizard Ryacudu, a staunch nationalist, has been quoted by local media as saying he did not understand the government's call for fresh peace talks with the rebels because the conflict could only be resolved if GAM put down its weapons and abandoned its fight for independence. "If GAM refuse to give up, then we strike them. Why is it so difficult?" the general asked.
Nonetheless, TNI has failed abjectly in its counter-insurgency operations to wipe out the separatists. Though GAM never discusses its troop strength, independent estimates suggest that little more than 2,500 rebel troops remain active on the ground in Aceh.
Should GAM reject the terms of any new peace deal, for whatever reason, it will end up as public enemy No 1, not only in the eyes of TNI, the central government, and the Indonesian people, including the Acehnese themselves, but also, perhaps fatally for the movement, in the eyes of the United States.
While Yudhoyono, one of the last Indonesian officers to train in the US and a graduate of two US military schools, is anxious to improve relations with Washington, many say the US has entered the fray over Aceh far too soon and much too harshly.
Breaching the sovereign privilege of an independent nation by interfering in domestic affairs is nothing new for the administration of President George W Bush, but it seems the height of folly for Wolfowitz, who should have known better than to ruffle feathers and threaten TNI at a time when diplomacy is the order of the day all around.
"If the military gets in the way of that, then the military should be pushed to get out of the way," Wolfowitz said during an interview last week on the Australian PBS network program News Hour, after calling for a political resolution of "that" problem in Aceh.
Still, it could all work out for the bestin the end and, as Wolfowitz commented in one of his more thoughtful moments, give meaning to the tragedy by moving toward a better future.
[Bill Guerin, a weekly Jakarta correspondent for Asia Times Online since 2000, has worked in Indonesia for 19 years in journalism and editorial positions. He has been published by the BBC on East Timor and specializes in business/economic and political analysis in Indonesia.]