Ati Nurbaiti, Jakarta – A young East Timorese once inquired, "Do you people also experience atrocities?" I said, "What? Of course not." Where did she get such an idea? Youngsters in Indonesia's big cities were not only free of "atrocities", they were out blissfully shopping and loitering in malls, and moaning about the traffic.

A few years later, third president BJ Habibie led the controversial move to allow East Timor's referendum, and we teased our colleagues among the Dili press, asking, "So, what are you going to vote for?" And they would just give their gentle, mysterious smiles. East Timor became free; life was tough, but they have never voiced regret.

My Timorese friends came to mind in the wake of the Aug. 15 signing of the historic peace agreement between the government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). I recalled that my Acehnese colleagues would spell "Aceh" – in their emails or text messages – as "Acheh" or "Atjeh", in accordance with the spelling of Aceh used by GAM; a gesture I belatedly figured out was similar to the Timorese.

From these friends' subtle expressions and evasions of "sensitive" issues, it was as if they were saying, "I am indeed your friend, but we may need to become separate from you one day because of circumstances that you may not understand, and I'm not telling you outright because I don't want to argue with you; it's a long story, and we've found that you people never understand – you cannot, or refuse, to see our point of view and you will make me listen to the same lecture all over again."

This quiet attitude reflects the seeming impossibility for an open dialog among fellow Indonesians between, for instance, those from Aceh, or pre-independent East Timor, even when they're of the same age group or profession, with those who grew up in the "center" – mainly Java or the capital – who never seem to have any doubt about the "truth."

Even if you dozed all through your history and civics classes, being spoon-fed government-approved versions of the truth, you grew up with either veteran elders and their heroic stories of defending the red-and-white; or you grew up simply ignorant, with no curiosity, on why any Indonesian could harbor a wish to separate themselves from our republic.

The wider public has thus largely become convinced that the Acehnese are not aware of their own history; that they are an indisputable and integral part of the Indonesian republic. And even if they were aware, any demand for independence and any support for GAM could only be short-lived, even though these people say they suffered atrocities at the hands of the Indonesian military. After all, we think, these are just necessary excesses that occur during wars in order to crush the enemy.

Among those living outside Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, and earlier, East Timor, we indeed knew that much information of history and living conditions were hidden from the public eye for a very long time. But amazingly, the basic views remained – that no part of Indonesia could separate itself because of our "holy legacy" of the "unitary state", fought for with the blood and tears of our forebears. Settling any wrongdoing by breaking away, as in the East Timor case, was a stupid mistake and a betrayal of the nation.

Rare has been the view that we might not deserve the land nor its people who we keep neglecting, extorting and oppressing.

In 1998, the eyes of attendants in a Jakarta conference room were moist when women from Aceh for the first time in public recited experiences under the 10-year military rule, shortly after it was declared to have ended that year.

A few years later, an Acehnese sociologist described how virtually every male, 14 years upwards, had experienced being slapped by Indonesian security forces, a contributing factor to the recruitment of GAM apart from the fact that many youngsters had been witness to violence against family members by police or military personnel.

But knowing of such experiences in Acehnese life did not lead to much reflection and public debate ahead of declaration of martial law, which would include another phase of military operations. Instead, "Crush GAM, uphold the unitary republic" was the main message coming from phone-in calls to talk shows.

Some Acehnese had said they had wanted to make their differing views known, they had tried to join the polls broadcast on television, but somehow they couldn't get through. An Acehnese scholar had said yes, military operations might be the way but why all across the province? Such views were drowned out.

Media surveys such as those from the Institute of Studies on Information Flow (ISAI) strongly suggested that the media shared much of the blame for the absence of Acehnese voices in public discourse; they showed that coverage in the mainstream media became increasingly slanted to the needs of the military while the disputing parties of the government and GAM went back and forth on the earlier peace talks in Geneva, which eventually collapsed.

Today the absence or drowning out of the "Acehnese perspective" in public opinion persists – resulting in a gulf of views between the public inside and outside Aceh (and any other area mulling ungrateful rebellious thoughts like Papua), a gulf molded by both years of comfortable life under the New Order and a mask over real life experiences in Aceh.

Such experiences have only been exposed as occasional dramatic stories, too sporadic to make the wider public refrain from judgment and lecturing, "all Indonesians stick together forever, you've got all our sympathy, now we'll strive with you to make things better; there's no point on relying on GAM anyway, they're led by old men who've been away from Aceh for so long."

So we hector them about local political parties and all the other "concessions" given to GAM: They've done nothing and yet we're bribing them with all this land and amnesty, they get direct access to foreign loans and get to set their own bank rates! But look closer at the MOU, at the potential dangers in the lack of explicit language on GAM dropping their demands for independence.

It is indeed the business of experienced negotiators and concerned patriotic citizens to be aware of all the flaws.

But Acehnese remind us that we haven't really looked at what counts most; what do they want? In the "MOU controversy" we've forgotten that the Acehnese are some hundred thousand short of their original 4 million population figure; they're what's left of the devastating tsunami.

An Acehnese said, "Why all the fuss over local political parties? We might not even consider choosing them! Wasn't it a breakthrough that GAM no longer demanded independence?" In other words, we've forgotten the main actors behind the disputing parties who want to get on with their lives as best as they can, after surviving decades of war, and the pain of losing loved ones to violence, and later the tsunamis.

Ironically it's taken an official to remind us, "Use your conscience when criticizing the MOU; do we really want more of our mothers to become widows, and more children to become orphans, because of the violence?" Justice minister and chief negotiator Hamid Awaluddin may sound defensive, but millions of Acehnese may agree – and they might not be telling us.

[The author is a staff writer for The Jakarta Post.]