Jacqueline M. Koch in Banda Aceh and Lindsay Murdoch in Jakarta – Soldiers patrol villages, their high-powered weapons ready to fire. Tanks rumble along rutted roads. Entire villages suspected of supporting separatist rebels are razed, forcing thousands of men, women and children into crude refugee camps.
Human rights activists are found shot dead, the latest targets in what appears to be a campaign of intimidation and murder against unarmed civilians.
Aceh, the resource-rich Indonesian province at the northern tip of Sumatra, is under siege even before an imminent military operation aimed at wiping out the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), a group with wide support among Acehnese which has been fighting since the 1970s for an independent Islamic state.
Indonesia's parliament last week gave its support to a government decision to launch what President Abdurrahman Wahid calls a "limited military operation" in the province to protect "vital installations".
But human rights groups fear that troops will use the operation to kill civilians opposing Jakarta's rule and destroy villages harbouring rebels.
Government officials argue they had no option but to approve the operation because of the March 13 closure of one of the world's largest natural gas fields, operated by ExxonMobil near Aceh's main industrial city, Lhokseumawe. The fields bring $US2 billion ($4 billion) each year to the government in Jakarta.
Gunmen had fired on the company's aircraft and hijacked the company's vehicles. Buses carrying workers were stopped and burned. Landmines were planted along roads to blow up company buses. The military blames GAM rebels for the attacks and the escalation of violence.
The GAM's spokesman, Abu Sofyan Daud, denies the claim. "If we were to make a threat, it would have been carried out in 24 hours," he says.
Human rights activists, themselves the target of increasing attacks, point to the existence of a shadowy so-called "third force" they believe is behind much of the violence. They believe the group has links to the military, possibly involving recently discharged soldiers now acting as rogue units.
The announcement of the new operation has dramatically heightened tensions in the province, where more than 300 people have been killed so far this year.
As night falls near Lhokseumawe, residents retreat to their homes as truckloads of heavily armed officers with the Police Mobile Brigade speed off to patrol the countryside wearing black balaclavas. Three additional battalions of Indonesian troops have already arrived ahead of the operation that is expected to be launched within days. Warships are stationed off Aceh ready to disgorge hundreds of combat marines.
GAM's leading field commander, Abdullah Syaffi'i, told the Herald: "We are not afraid to defend ourselves. Death is a certainty, but we will take it for our country and our nationality." Civilians in Lhokseumawe and its surrounding area are in the grip of panic.
"This kind of military presence is greater than normal, but with the call for military operations, it will be like DOM, only worse," says M. Rizwan, a 27-year-old resident.
DOM, or Military Operations Area, is the term used to refer to the brutal 10-year military campaign against GAM that Indonesian forces conducted until the 1998 fall of president Soeharto.
Cut Syamsulniati is the Lhokseumawe field co-ordinator of Rehabilitation Action for Torture Victims in Aceh (RATA). In a subdued voice she describes the incident last December that forced her office to suspend its work.
On a routine run to a hospital, four young volunteer staffers, including one woman, were abducted, beaten then driven to a remote location outside Lhokseumawe. Three of the four were executed with gunshots to the head. One escaped. The survivor later identified the killers as 10 soldiers in civilian clothing and five government informers known as cu'ak.
The killings profoundly rattled humanitarian aid agencies throughout Aceh, especially in Lhokseumawe. The local Red Cross says only one organisation is now supplying aid in the area. The international agencies Oxfam and Midecins Sans Frontihres as well as RATA have been forced to suspend their work.
A young lieutenant in the Police Mobile Brigade named Putuh, stationed on a lonely stretch of highway 90 minutes south of Lhokseumawe, takes exception to claims of police brutality. "Our job is to make it safe for civilians, but if they [GAM] shoot at us, we have to defend ourselves."