John Martinkus – In a swamp in North Aceh usually home only to snakes, leeches, and the large biting iguanas the locals call Biawak, the Indonesian military has deployed roughly 3000 combat troops from five battalions backed up with armoured vehicles, three attack helicopters and light artillery.
The troops in the past few weeks have surrounded an 8km-long, 2km-wide area of the swamp. Local journalists who toured the site in November say a squad of seven men had camped out every 50m around the entire perimeter. Rocket attacks from helicopters have taken place and frequent bursts of fire from truck-mounted heavy machine guns have been poured into the area by the Indonesian military.
Inside were the leaders of the local Free Aceh Movement guerrillas, GAM, 200 of their men and a number of civilians, who fled into the area when the Indonesian military began its latest assault. The encircled area is 24km from Aceh's second largest city, Lhokseumahwe, and only 10km from the Exxon-Mobil Arun gas processing plant – the Indonesian state's second largest foreign currency earner.
It has always been an area of high military activity. A unilateral ceasefire was announced by GAM for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Rebels and the Indonesian Government are set to sign an accord in Geneva on Monday to end two decades of violence in which thousands have been killed. International aid donors gathered in Tokyo this week to discuss aid for the province. The meeting sponsored by Japan, the United States, the European Union and the World Bank was intended to offer an incentive to peace negotiators to reach a final agreement.
The peace agreement is being negotiated by the Geneva-based non-governmental organisation the Henry Dunant Centre for humanitarian dialogue. The agreement outlines provisions for the cantonment and eventual disarmament of GAM and the cessation of hostilities against them by the Indonesian military.
The Free Aceh guerrillas' major objection is that the agreement does not reduce the role of the estimated 27,000 Indonesian police stationed in Aceh whose Brimob units act in a combat role similar to that of the military and are fully armed. The guerrilla organisation does not believe that the police will not be used to attack them once they have signed. "This is the main problem we face," says Teuku Kamarazzaman, the main guerrilla negotiator for the peace deal. "The police themselves, they use their weapons to attack GAM."
Teuku says the Indonesian military have used the Free Aceh guerrillas' peace offer to resume operations. "They use the chance of a ceasefire to attack the GAM base ... on our part we want peace, then they start attacking us. It is a double standard, two-faced."
GAM claims military helicopters began strafing villages in the area on October 31 and villagers who tried to flee were detained by the military. The guerrillas say four armoured personnel carriers and six tanks attacked the village of Blang-Jrok, in the area of Nisam, and ransacked 17 houses and burned down two looking for GAM on November 2.
Local women were strip searched and seven were sexually assaulted by regular Army Battalion 401 troops and Kopassus special forces who act in an intelligence gathering role for the Army, as they did in East Timor. Human rights workers and the Indonesian Red Cross are, like all civilians, denied access to the encircled area.
One British and one United States citizen are paying the price for the Indonesian authorities' desire to keep the details of the Aceh conflict quiet.
Lesley McCulloch, a Scottish-born academic doing research on the Acehnese conflict, and American nurse Joy Lee Sadler, who was working with refugees in Aceh, were put on trial last week in the capital Banda Aceh. The pair were arrested on September 11 as they travelled away from an area of South Aceh where there is a high concentration of guerrillas. They were charged with violating their tourist visas, a charge that normally results in immediate deportation at worst. The trial has been adjourned to December 19. The women have been told by their lawyers that they face up to five years in jail.
In a note smuggled from Banda Aceh's police headquarters, Lesley McCulloch told of being confined to a small, airless office with no window, living mainly on rice. Constant sexual harassment prevents her from leaving the room for exercise. Sadler is suffering from a serious illness and her condition is deteriorating. Many NGO and human rights workers in Aceh believe the pair are being punished for their attempts to make public violations carried out by Indonesian authorities in the state, and that their treatment has nothing to do with their visa violation.
McCulloch has written in the Australian and Asian press on the conflict. Military operations continue in the area of South Aceh, where the two women pair were arrested. GAM says the military held and questioned 300 people in an elementary school in the town of Sawory between November 1 and 10. Two hundred people fled to forest around the village of Cluet Utara after the military moved into that area.
A recent report from the Indonesian NGO that documents political killings and disappearances, Kontras, puts the figure of internally displaced people in all of Aceh at 62,000 out of a population of four million in the North Sumatran province at the eastern tip of Indonesia.
GAM information for the whole of the province of Aceh records 27 deaths in first 10 days of November 1 to 10 and attributes 120 deaths in October to the military. GAM says 95 per cent of the casualties in the conflict raging between the guerrillas and the Indonesian military since 1976, are civilians. About 1700 people have been killed this year.
The Henry Dunant Centre, which for three years has tried to broker a ceasefire in Aceh from its office in Banda Aceh, says that the arrival within weeks of the first six foreign monitors to the peace agreement paves the way for a full monitoring team of 150 foreign monitors once the agreement is signed. "We are asking the two sides to refrain from violence so we can build confidence and trust ... " says Dave Gorman, director of the centre's team. Negotiators are confident the agreement will allow foreign monitors, under the umbrella of the centre, into Aceh for the first time.