Guests: Prof. William Liddle, Prof. Jeffrey Winters

Jim Lehrer: Next, politics and aid in the devastated Indonesian province of Aceh. We start with a report from James Mates of Independent Television News.

James Mates: In the aftermath of all this, perhaps the worst natural disaster in living memory, it's been largely forgotten that until Boxing Day 2004 the province of Aceh was being fought over in a bitter civil war between separatists and the Indonesian government.

These soldiers, now so vital to the rescue efforts, were here to fight a growing rebel insurgency. Westerners have been banned entirely from the province for close to two years.

Those rebels have not gone away, and today, amid reports that an Indonesian health worker had been kidnapped, the government here announced restrictions on where the international agencies can now operate, restrictions that mean outside the main population areas there must be full coordination with the local military.

Alwi Shihab, Indonesian Welfare Minister: The military will go first and safeguard the area before the foreign mission reach that place.

James Mates: International agencies have already been struggling to deliver the aid that's poured in to Aceh. Broken roads and bridges, shattered infrastructure already impose their own restrictions, but tonight they were diplomatically accepting of the new rules.

Margareta Wahlstrum, United Nations Special Envoy: What they have asked is that we organize ourselves a bit better to operate in this environment, which, as you know, has had a conflict for many years.

James Mates: But they are trying to convince the Indonesians that this is far from being a unique situation for the aid agencies.

Bettina Luescher, World Food Program: We operate in many areas where there are civil war situations. Often what we do is that we inform both sides where we're going, where our convoys are going, what team's on their way, so nothing happens to them.

James Mates: The Indonesian government are also demanding that all foreign military personnel leave the country by the end of March. Most western governments, frankly, have hoped to have their troops back by then anyway. But the bluntness of the request suggests that despite this disaster the Indonesians are much more concerned about a resumption of civil conflict here than anyone had quite realized.

Margaret Warner: To explain more of what is behind these new restrictions on foreign aid workers and foreign troops and how that relates to the civil conflict in Aceh, we turn to Jeffrey Winters, an associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University; he specializes in Southeast Asia and spent the last five months in Indonesia.

And William Liddle, a professor at Ohio State University specializing in Indonesian, Southeast Asian and third world politics; he was in Indonesia this past July. We invited the Indonesian embassy to participate but they declined.

Welcome to you both. Professor Liddle, give us a little more context to understand why the Indonesian government, Indonesian authorities are imposing these restrictions now.

William Liddle: Well, it certainly is expected because Indonesia has a long history of nationalism. And nationalism in this kind of third world context means opposition to foreigners especially westerners. From 1945 to '49 the Indonesians fought a revolution against the Dutch. And ever since that time, they thought that they had to defend their independence against all comers.

And of course the United States for most of this time, and especially since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the principal world power. And so Indonesians see themselves as possibly under siege from the United States, so the larger background here is that there are many Indonesians who take nationalist ideas very seriously. And then I think you have to connect that to the Indonesian army which is the most nationalistic within the country.

And then of course the Indonesian army operating here in Aceh which is the most sensitive or one of the two most sensitive areas in the country, so it's certainly quite expected that the Indonesian army and presumably with the government behind it would act to try to limit aid workers and American troops.

Margaret Warner: Professor Winters, would you attribute this to? To nationalism?

Jeffrey Winters: Well, partly I agree with that brief history from Professor Liddle. And I would also add that there's an additional sensitivity regarding the United States military and specifically regarding the island of Sumatra where Aceh is located.

And that is, in the late 1950s when the United States didn't like the government under Sukarno, we actually assisted a rebel movement there.

We had US Naval submarines off the coast. We had supplies being flown in under CIA operations. And while this is not a piece of history that's very well remembered by Americans, it's very well remembered by Indonesians, so they are, one aspect is that they are extremely sensitive about foreign troops on their soil.

And I think another element of it is that this tsunami has blown the Aceh situation wide open. And it exposes the country, the government as well as the military, to a lot of potential embarrassment if reporters, which had up till now not been able to even go into the province, are able to snoop around and go beyond the boundaries of the disaster itself.

Margaret Warner: All right. Professor Liddle, back to you; pick up there. Give us some background is what the state of play was between the government forces and the rebels before the tsunami hit. And what is it that they might not want foreign observers – whether they're reporters or aid workers – to see now?

William Liddle: Well, there had been a cease-fire for about six months until May of 2003 between the independence forces in Aceh, GAM, they're called the Aceh Independence Movement. There had been a cease-fire between GAM and the Indonesian government for about six months that ended in May of 2003.

And since that time, almost two years, the Indonesian military has been in there in force. The martial law was declared in the province. And what martial law means of course is that the Indonesian military can do whatever it likes in the area. And so undoubtedly they have engaged in brute treatment of their own people, of the Acehinese people in the area because they have a history of doing that in Aceh and other places as well.

So as Professor Winters said, it is certainly true that the Indonesian military doesn't want people coming in and finding out what's been happening in the last couple of years. I think there's probably another element in this though as well that I was thinking about in connection with the aid workers in particular.

I suspect that the Indonesian military thinks those aid workers probably, many of them, are in favor of Acehinese independence. If they get back there in the interior and start dealing with GAM forces and so forth, they will cause the Jakarta government a lot of headache. Again, I'm thinking about Timor where something very similar happened before.

Margaret Warner: We're talking about East Timor where, in fact, they ended up having to hold an election under UN auspices and they got independence.

William Liddle: That's right. And that's not likely to happen in Aceh.

Margaret Warner: Well, let me just go back to Professor Winter there. On the aid groups, follow up on that. Why do you think the Indonesian military would care so much about aid workers going, say, unescorted by the military? And do you think some human rights groups already today were charging that corruption may be involved in this too? What do you think?

Jeffrey Winters: Right. Well, first of all, the Indonesian government in general, and the military as well, have a reputation for a very extreme level of corruption. In fact, Transparency International which tracks this across countries recently listed Indonesia as number five from the bottom of the most corrupt countries in the world.

And here we have a tremendous amount... I mean just such a generous outpouring of resources, it's coming bilaterally from governments; it's coming multilaterally; it's coming through private organizations on the one hand, but a lot of it, because the Indonesian military is the face of the Indonesian government really in the province, a lot of it is being controlled by or funneled through military channels.

And the military itself, which is a woefully under-funded institution and funds itself through its own businesses, has also been involved historically in smuggling, in skimming of resources. So the generals are very rich so the concern is that a lot of this money could be skimmed off. And so there's a premium on controlling outsiders who could limit their ability to do that, first of all, and report on it if they saw it.

Margaret Warner: Professor Liddle, now let's bring in one other complicating element. Last week the Indonesian government, it's been reported, actually flew in hundreds of Muslim militants into Aceh Province and encouraged them to participate in the relief effort. Now what is that about? Why would they be flying in Muslim militants?

William Liddle: Well, there are a number of different kinds of Muslim militants in Indonesia. I hadn't heard the story that these were flown in as though the Indonesian government or the military in Jakarta had sort of rounded these people up and taken them to Aceh to do these things.

Margaret Warner: They did facilitate it apparently.

William Liddle: Certainly they wouldn't have stood in the way. But anyway, there are a number of Muslim militant groups, most of which are not practicing violence but which do have the ambition to turn into Indonesia into an Islamic state. And Aceh is an area of very strong Muslim beliefs so it would make sense for people in Jakarta to send Muslim organizations that had volunteered to go to Aceh to help with the relief.

As I say, most of these organizations don't practice violence or anything of that sort. But some do. There are some serious problems. There's one organization in particular, the FPI, the Islamic Defenders Front that has a very bad reputation in Jakarta for breaking up bars and so forth. And it has a kind of gangster-ish reputation as well. I've been observing them in Aceh.

So far what they're doing – there are as many as 400 of them in Aceh – and so far what they're doing is mainly evacuating corpses and helping survivors and so forth. So they don't appear to be into any kind of violent activities in Aceh.

Margaret Warner: And, Professor Winters, do you agree with that, that they have fairly benign motives? And then how does it perhaps – first, answer that question and then I have a follow-up.

Jeffrey Winters: Of the groups that have been sent in, including the Islamic Defense Front as well as another organization that is connected to Abu Bakar Bashir who himself has murky connections to al-Qaida, none of these organizations have a humanitarian relief background at all. In fact, all of them have a very violent profile.

Two of those organizations in particular were sent to the Malakas, another part of Indonesia to the east that has a heavy concentration of Christians. And they were directly involved in the violence there in the inter-communal violence between Christians and Muslims. In Jakarta, the FPI, the organization Professor Liddle mentioned, was actually created at the end of the Suharto regime as a thug organization to beat up pro-democracy movements, students and so on.

So what they're doing there is very mysterious. And not only that, it's important to say that Aceh is probably the most orthodox Islamic region of Indonesia and yet they have never wanted anything to do with these organizations. They have no connections to them. Nor have they ever had any connections to al-Qaida.

Margaret Warner: Finally and I'll start with you, Professor Liddle, on the other side of the ledger you have reports that the Indonesian president actually brought in the ambassadors from the US, the UK, Sweden, a couple other countries, on Monday to talk about their ideas for how to resolve the whole civil conflict.

One, do you think there's a split here between the civilian government in Jakarta perhaps and the military on the ground? And do you think that a possibility exists that, in fact, this tsunami may present the opportunity for a resolution of the civil conflict?

William Liddle: Well, I do think that there is probably a disconnect. You know, President Yudhoyono was just inaugurated in October, and so we're only beginning to take the measure of the man. But my sense of him so far – and I think this is backed up by many other people who are observing it too – is that he's very indecisive.

He can't make up his mind about anything. And so his advisors or people who are near him who want a particular policy. They tend to announce publicly that decision and then the president feels forced to go along with it.

And I was thinking about that when Endriartono Sutarto, the commander of the armed forces, made the announcement about foreign troops being out of Aceh within three months. That was probably that same kind of precipitant move on the part of the military, preempting what the president could do so I think we have to watch very carefully.

I started out by saying that the Indonesian military is very conservative, very concerned with Aceh and all of the things that Professor Winters said also are true about Aceh. So this is a very touchy situation as far as the military is concerned, and it's likely to be the case that the president will back off if the military pushes him very hard. But it's reassuring on the other hand that there was a meeting with foreign ambassadors, that people are able to get to him and maybe we will get some movement in a direction of getting peace in Aceh.

Margaret Warner: A brief final word from you, Professor Winters on that point.

Jeffrey Winters: Yes, I think there is a split going on and it's very interesting that the president well, the person from the military who is in charge, the commander of the army itself, is the person who is in charge in Aceh of this relief movement. And he is the same commander who the president has blocked to rising to commander of the entire armed forces. So there does seem to be a split going on there.

If I could add one last thing, it is that although we've talked about corruption and so on, it's very important for people to realize that they should not pull back on the relief effort but pay very careful attention to trying to channel it through means that get it directly to the people as opposed to maybe through the state.

Margaret Warner: All right. Thank you, professors, both. Thanks so much.