John Aglionby, Takengon – The last thing Suprianto heard before he passed out was his wife shrieking as she burned to death, locked inside their home by five masked gunmen. "It was horrible, her screams will live with me for ever," said the coffee farmer from Takengon. Mr Suprianto could do nothing to help; the attackers had sprayed bullets into his feet. He is now confined to a hospital bed.
The attack on November 24 took the whole community by surprise. The district in the central highlands of Aceh, the Indonesian province on the northern tip of Sumatra, had managed to avoid the separatist struggle and the brutal efforts to quell it which have wracked the resource-rich region for the past decade.
"It appears there is now a concerted effort to drag the whole province into the conflict," said Humam Hamid, a human rights activist. But no one seems to know who is responsible for the majority of the attacks over the past eight weeks.
The military blames the Free Aceh Movement (Gam), claiming that the guerrillas are taking advantage of the security vacuum left by the army's withdrawal to barracks, which was ordered to dissipate the fear the soldiers' presence created.
"Gam is terrorising the population into supporting them," said Colonel Syarifudin Tippe, the military commander in provincial capital, Banda Aceh.
But the separatists say they only use their arsenal of rocket launchers, automatic rifles and explosives in self-defence or in retaliation against the authorities. "Why would we attack the people, our natural constituency of support?" asked Ayah Sopian, a Gam spokesman in Banda Aceh.
He says the perpetrators are elements of the military trying to exacerbate the violence to such an extent that the generals can justify reimposing martial law.
"They know Aceh is slipping away from them and that it will have huge implications for the rest of the country," he said. "This is the only way out they have left."
It is difficult to disagree. Since East Timor won independence in August, separatism has become Jakarta's No 1 concern. It is universally accepted that if any other provinces follow East Timor down the road to freedom then national disintegration will be all but inevitable.
The new president, Abdurrahman Wahid, known as Gus Dur, said after taking office that if East Timor could have a referendum, Aceh should have one too. But he did not appreciate how the Acehnese's feelings have changed in the past three months.
In August many people said they would be content with autonomy and the withdrawal of the Indonesian soldiers based in the province. But in September it became clear that the then president, BJ Habibie, was not going to grant autonomy.
"So now we have lost all faith in Jakarta," said Sabirin, an Islamic youth leader in the central highlands. "Even though Gus Dur is a devout Muslim we cannot trust him either. He is still a Javanese colonialist. We want nothing more to do with Jakarta. What everyone wants is independence."
Once Mr Wahid realised this he backtracked rapidly. But his statement that any referendum would offer only a choice between autonomy and the status quo did not go down well in Aceh.
Hundreds of thousands of people descended on Banda Aceh on November 8 for the province's biggest referendum rally. To loud acclaim the organisers said they would not be content with anything less than independence.
The consequences have been electrifying. "We are now in a state of anarchy," said Col Tippe. "In most areas the government cannot function at all, the police are too afraid of the people to impose law and order and we are not allowed out of our barracks because the government wants a political solution."
The chances of finding a lasting, peaceful solution are fading by the day. "Gus Dur said in November he would solve the Aceh crisis in seven months," Mr Sabirin said. "If we have not got what we want by then I can see thousands of people taking up arms with Gam. We will move from peace to war and it will then become very bloody indeed."