[One of the details of the peace deal, which is yet to be negotiated, is the inclusion of international monitors. It's an idea which has never before been accepted by the Indonesian Government. Outside monitors are a crucial ingredient because neither side trusts the other.]

Presenter/Interviewer: Graeme Dobell, Canberra

Speakers: Professor Anthony Reid, director of the Asia Research Institute at Singapore University

Reid: "The key obstacle is certainly the Indonesian army, I don't believe the Indonesian army is ready to withdraw from Aceh, I'm not sure that many Indonesians expect that to be the outcome, but for Acehanese that will be the central issue. Will they continue to be under the boot as it were, or the arbitrary danger of arrest and intimidation from the army, or will there be some alternative peacekeeping body? And I think this is always going to be critical, one shouldn't exaggerate it, one shouldn't say I mean obviously everybody knows that that is there and in signing an agreement they plan to work with it. But it is a major problem there's no doubt."

Dobell: What lessons has Indonesia taken from East Timor? Is Indonesia able to avoid the Timor mistakes in Aceh?

Reid: "It depends which Indonesians we're talking about. There's no doubt that some Indonesians have taken a lesson from Timor that you cannot rule by force alone, that it simply isn't worth the price of what it does to Indonesian freedoms to persevere with an occupation by force of an unwilling part of your country. Some people certainly have taken that lesson but others, including many in the military have taken the lesson that you shouldn't ease up, you shouldn't be soft or you know you lose it. So I think you'd have to say there is much division and on the whole I mean I'd like to say that Indonesian opinion is deeply divided, I mean at least to say that, but I think probably Indonesian opinion is more united in wanting to hang on to Aceh than it ever was and wanted to hang on to it."

Dobell: Why?

Reid: "Because Aceh is central to the myth of Indonesian unity and Indonesian identity, which was created initially by the nationalist movement and then perpetuated in fact embedded very deeply in the education system under Suharto."

Dobell: Is your caution, your scepticism about a settlement driven by this reality that history and the world looks so different from Aceh to what it does from Jakarta?

Reid: "Yeah that's definitely the case, I mean at least with my own perception of things. I'm I guess you could say a historian of Aceh I have never had much sympathy for this kind of Aceh Merdeka ideas, which seem disruptive and so forth. But the last time I was in Aceh I mean one could not ignore the extraordinary extent to which opinion had shifted, to which people really had bought the essential message of Hasand tiro, that Aceh had its own history and that being part of Indonesia was not a fulfillment of that history but rather a travesty of it and a demeaning of it. So I mean that, there's a lot that's crazy about Hasand tiro and extremely eccentric from a Acehanese point of view, and he's a very westernised man. But that message that this isn't destiny that you're part of Indonesia, it's rather the opposite on destiny, but you know you're Acehanese and you have a history and you should be proud of it. That seemed to have become very widespread. Through the years of an open press in 99, 2000, 2001 when these things could be widely said, things that had previously been I suppose whispered and carried by the guerillas, but they started to be openly said by everybody and to my astonishment they were very widely felt. I don't think they will go away."

Dobell: How many Acehanese then, how many Acehanese in the street see the military as an occupying force and not their national army?

Reid: "How can I know, but I my very limited experience says there's many, that this is the basic perception even though many would see GAM, the Aceh independence movement as bad or worse."