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Slow rebuilding in Aceh after peace deal

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Agence France Presse - April 8, 2006

Tiro – Ibrahim looks out toward what was once his modest vegetable farm in Indonesia's Aceh province, before decades of separatist conflict reduced his fields to little more than mud.

"I would like help to get my garden back that I had in the mountains, beyond the rice fields, so that I could grow more cocoa and onions," he says wistfully.

In August 2005, Jakarta signed a historic peace accord with the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami, but the province, one of the poorest in Indonesia, still bears the scars of war.

On the road to Tiro, the birthplace of former GAM leader Hasan Tiro, many fields remain unplanted. The village school is nothing but charred rubble – it was torched in the fighting.

Tiro did not suffer the ravages of the December 2004 tsunami that killed some 168,000 Acehnese, but years of clashes between government forces and separatist rebels have left the local economy in tatters all the same.

"To develop a field, buy seeds, it costs about 1,500 dollars. Where will they get that money from?" wonders Scott Guggenheim, one of the managers of a World Bank rehabilitation program in Aceh approved last July.

Residents say that although their livelihoods have not yet been restored, security is better in the region, as locals are no longer threatened by rebels when they head into the fields to tend to their crops.

But with the return of former GAM fighters and prisoners following last year's peace deal, unemployment has skyrocketed to 75 percent in some areas and some fear economic pressures will shatter the fragile peace.

"Most of the former combatants have come back to their villages and live with their families, but the reintegration process is still too small in scope," explains Muslahudin Daud, who works as a World Bank facilitator. The bank's 64.7-million-dollar program in Aceh, which is funded through June 2007, is aimed at rebuilding vital infrastructure in some 3,000 villages like Tiro.

"We have fruits but no roads to get to the markets where we could sell them," explains one farmer at a town hall meeting with visiting World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, who is on a fact-finding tour of the region.

"Reconstruction and the peace process are two things that will help each other if each of them is going to succeed," Wolfowitz told villagers.

Guggenheim notes: "We don't need transnational investments to come into Aceh. We need a sort of minimum standard of basic economic dignity for the people." But for the time being, even the World Bank official admits the situation is tenuous at best.

"Once the euphoria of the initial peace process has faded away and the people have gone back, if there is nothing for them to do..." he says, trailing off.

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