Before the tsunami, Banda Aceh was a ghost town at night except for patrols of feared paramilitary police. In the mornings, corpses scarred by torture would turn up in the paddy fields down the coast where the brutal guerilla war between GAM (Free Aceh Movement) insurgents and security forces was fought in the jungle.
Yesterday, as the last Indonesian counter-insurgency troops pulled out of Aceh province as agreed under the post-tsunami peace deal timetable, it felt like the 29-year conflict had happened a long time ago.
"People are disappointed with tsunami reconstruction, it is slow," said Mirzan, a young Acehnese who goes by just one name. "But we are very happy with the peace deal. At first, nobody thought it would work. They didn't trust the army. Now we think the war really is over."
The image of the final batch of 3,350 departing combat troops boarding ships in Lhokseumawe yesterday was a powerful one in Aceh, and so was the sight last week of guerillas giving up the last of their 840 guns to EU monitors.
Most Acehnese never thought they would see such sights. Many were sceptical when a peace deal was thrashed out between the separatist GAM and the Jakarta government last August. They remembered the peace deal of 2003, which collapsed into bloodshed when the Indonesian military decided an offensive was a better way to solve the Aceh problem than talks.
This time, with both sides desperate to see reconstruction after the tsunami and intense international pressure, the peace process has worked far better than even the wildest optimist had hoped.
The International Crisis Group, which has long monitored the conflict, was resoundingly upbeat in a report issued this month which announced: "The Aceh peace process is working beyond all expectations."
The group's president, Gareth Evans, described an "extraordinary, almost exuberant optimism" in the air. Everyone involved agrees that the tsunami provided the opportunity to end a conflict that all were tired of, but nobody knew how to bring to a close.
Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, widely praised along with Vice-President Jusuf Kalla for seizing the chance to make peace, singled out the tsunami as the vital factor when he marked this week's one-year anniversary of the disaster in which more than 160,000 Acehnese died.
GAM fighters, many of whom emerged from the jungle for the first time in years to see the destruction, desperately wanted their homeland rebuilt. The Indonesian government, listening to a chorus of woe-sayers warning of the potentially dire political repercussions of the disaster, desperately wanted the province rebuilt. There was even a common belief among the stunned survivors that the tsunami had been sent by God as punishment for a conflict in which brother had slaughtered brother.
Real international pressure was also applied for the first time. The outside world had shown little previous interest in the obscure jungle conflict; but aid donors didn't want to pour billions of dollars in reconstruction money into a hot-war zone.
Most parties now think the process has gone far enough, and smoothly enough, to be irreversible. Banda Aceh has changed out of all recognition. Even late at night its streets are full of people and there are no more corpses in the paddy fields.
Mr Mirzan said: "People are happier and life is so much better. Even the price of oranges has gone down since the army took down its checkpoints. Businessmen don't have to pay their 'taxes' any more."