Marianne Kearney, Jakarta – Inadequate naval patrolling and officials who can be paid off to turn a blind eye are the weak links enabling a thriving weapons trade through which Thai middlemen supply hundreds of guns, grenade and rocket propellers to the Aceh rebels.
Residents who live along the extensive coastline of the northern Indonesian province frequently witness small shipments of weapons destined for either the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) or other criminal gangs.
"There are lots of guns brought in, especially at night," said Mr Hasan who lives in a small coastal town in East Aceh. The weapons are usually transported via small fishing boats, according to him.
The GAM rebels frequently brandish imported weapons such as AK-47s and M-16s but they also possess many locally made guns, he added. In West Aceh too, residents say they hear of fishing boats making night visits to drop off weapons along the sparsely-populated coast.
Neither the military nor the navy is prepared to say how many weapons are smuggled into Aceh. Over the past year, however, the military says it has captured over 500 weapons, many of which are foreign-made.
Major-General Zainal, a spokesman for military operations in North Aceh, said that among 317 standard rifles captured or found in raids in the last year, 75 were AK 47s and 31 were M-16s, and from 242 captured pistols, tens were foreign made.
According to reports from Thailand, police in the southern Satun province said two suspects were caught with a cache of weapons – which included 68 AK-47s, five handgun kits and hundreds of bullets – and confessed that the arms were destined for a buyer in Aceh.
Indonesia's over-stretched navy, which has just five ships to patrol the Malacca Straits and the North and West Aceh coastline, has failed to stamp out the lively smuggling trade.
First Admiral Sugem Waloyo, the naval spokesman, said it was virtually impossible for the navy to track the smugglers with their tiny force. "Even if we had 20 ships or more it would not be easy to defend that coastline," he added. The navy tries to patrol the North Sumatra and North Aceh coastline, which faces the Malacca Straits, but many other areas such as the beaches of West Aceh are under-patrolled, he admitted.
The smugglers, he pointed out, use small fishing boats which are fast and not easily detected by the patrol boats. And, according to local aid workers, smuggling is easy enough because the military or police officials encountered at road checkpoints can be bribed.
A Western security analyst, however, said he suspected much of GAM's weapons were obtained from the Indonesian security forces rather than from international suppliers.
They can be easily bought, he said, and being locally-made are better suited to the ammunition, most of which is sourced within Indonesia. "It is better to have a commonality of weapons and so then you don't have to retrain your troops on different weapons," he remarked.
The underpaid military and police were often quite willing to sell their weapons to the rebels or else to criminal gangs, he added.
A GAM source claimed GAM preferred to buy its weapons from Java or Sumatra rather than Thailand, saying the price for an Indonesian-made rifle at 20 million rupiah was cheaper than an AK-47 smuggled via Thailand. "We buy our guns from whoever, wherever the price is cheap. But at the moment the best market is in Java," said the source.
The black market price of 20 million rupiah was still 10 times more than the price the military pays to buy the same weapon from the local weapons manufacturer.
But the GAM source also admitted that he did have a contact in Thailand who had claimed that Monday's arms cache was in fact destined for the Tamil Tigers.