Sian Powell, Jakarta – Bullets cracked through the smoke from three blazing vegetable trucks and a flaming bus in the village of Teupin Raya as the battle for Aceh grew more heated yesterday.
The trucks and the bus had been stopped on the bridge at Teupin Raya by gunmen, probably rebels from the separatist Free Aceh Movement. The passengers fled to a nearby mosque as bullets whipped through the air, and soldiers lay on their bellies, ready to fire.
Within minutes, a truckload of Special Forces troops arrived and reversed towards the bridge, where a column of thick black smoke was rising.
Three more trucks pulled up, filled with a mix of soldiers and Brimob – the Mobile Brigade paramilitary police – who fanned out to secure the area. Crouching and running, they took up positions behind walls and under trees, sub-machineguns ready to blast.
This is Aceh – a scene of devastation and destruction, where scores of schools have been burnt, two corpses were found near the road between the provincial capital of Banda Aceh and Siglie yesterday morning, and where gun battles are commonplace.
This is the result of failed peace talks, of a separatist movement unwilling to renounce independence and an Indonesian Government determined to crush the rebels. The conflict has ground on for 26 years, and now it has begun again in earnest.
Anisa, a 24-year-old mother expecting her third child, flinched at the sounds of grenades exploding near the Teupin Raya bridge. The village school was burnt down the night before, and the bridge has been blocked every night with felled coconut trees. On Monday, four tyres of a local bus were shot out.
"We are all afraid," Anisa said, cradling two-year-old Moharram. "We don't know what's happening, and the children will be traumatised." Married to a trader and living in Teupin Raya, in the tense district of Pidie on the main road between Aceh's two main cities – Banda Aceh and Lhoksamauwe – Anisa fears for the future. She wants a quiet life, she says, but everything has gone wrong. Next door, in the village's health clinic, several frightened women crouch by the windows, wanting to go home to their husbands and children but fearing the consequences.
The Banda Aceh-Lhoksamauwe road is strategically important, and it appears the rebels will try to control it. Tiny jungle roads around Teupin Raya, which could provide a detour around the blazing traffic jam on the bridge, were blocked by logs yesterday, and traffic was rerouted in an hour-long loop.
Military officers said the rebels preferred to ambush Indonesian army trucks on small roads where there was less room to manoeuvre. Two tanks were sent to try to shift the debris, but later in the day the road remained blocked.
Villagers, perhaps used to the violence, eventually began to collect the tomatoes, chillies and apples that had spilt from the blazing trucks, while a relay of little boys with leaky buckets threw water on the smouldering bus.
A middle-aged man was led down the road, bleeding heavily from a head wound. He had been hit with a rifle butt in the head and chest – an Indonesian soldier's response to the villagers' failure to report the rebel presence in the village.
The victim, Ilyas, 51, said the Indonesian military commander had reprimanded the soldier for the violence. Still, the indignity remained. "I would prefer to be shot than hit like this," he said.