Aboeprijadi Santoso, Amsterdam – As the debate on the law on the Aceh administration enters a critical stage, the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) is preparing ground to establish a political party. Never in the history of Indonesia has an armed separatist movement taken such a turnabout, helping to preserve the existing nation-state – a unique chance all sides involved should not miss.
The return of Sweden-based GAM leaders to Aceh last week, including the former designated prime minister Malik Mahmud and his foreign minister Zaini Abdullah, two witnesses to the Aceh independence declaration by GAM top leader Hasan Mohammad di Tiro in 1976, sends an important signal.
Their visit to Aceh has been prepared as a celebrated homecoming of national leaders. GAM sources in Europe indicated that their leaders were set to prepare moves to support the implementation of the Helsinki memorandum of understanding signed by GAM and the Indonesian government.
The deadline for the new law has passed, but the House of Representative has only just started to discuss hundreds of proposals to amend the draft. The MoU agreed to last year was a compromise that Jakarta now has to finalize. "There should not be a compromise on that compromise," legislator A. Farhan Hamid warned upon his return from a meeting with GAM leaders in Sweden recently.
In other words, the message the GAM leaders have brought home seems to be an endorsement of the version of the bill that has been agreed to by virtually all sectors of society in Aceh, which accommodates the MoU, rather than for the draft now being debated in Jakarta.
The latter, as is now known, is a "corrupted" version of the Acehnese draft that some ministers put to the President while Vice President Jusuf Kalla, the Helsinki peace initiator, was abroad last January.
This new momentum is important for a number of reasons. If the final draft, in particular the links to Jakarta that define the scope of the local authority, does not reflect the MoU, it may imply a credibility matter for Jakarta vis-a-vis the international community; i.e. the European Union, the Finnish government and Crisis Management Initiative mediator Marttii Ahtisaari, who made the agreement possible.
By the same token and, perhaps, even more important, any serious violation may endanger Jakarta's credibility as the Acehnese have thrown their full support behind the Acehnese draft. Jakarta's promises have often been sensitive and crucial to turns of events in Aceh.
Many of these promises have been unkept ever since president Sukarno pledged special status for Aceh to Acehnese leader Abu Daud Beureu'eh – a "treachery" that, coupled with injustice and repression, has provided a justification for armed struggle.
Now, with the apparent consensus on the Acehnese draft for local government, Acehnese are in effect saying, we again hear Jakarta's words. This is all the more important as one fundamental factor dramatically entered the scene: The tsunami.
GAM leaders have explicitly admitted that the impact of the disaster changed their cause. Asked what pushed GAM to relinquish its demand for independence, GAM key figure M. Nur Djuli plainly replied: "The tsunami." "The scale of the disaster has been so extraordinary that we could not cope with it, we had to set aside our ideals to deal with it." "How could we continue fighting when hundreds of thousands of our people are dying and desperate for international aid? That would be very cruel," he told Radio Netherlands last week. The disaster thus imposed imperatives to successfully implement the peace accord.
The tsunami also became an effective pretext to end the war, as military fatigue, financial and logistical strains imposed heavy burdens on both sides. Indeed, Jakarta intensified the peace efforts only after two periods of full-scale war.
As for GAM, it decided to accept Ahtisaari's invitation for talks just a week before the tsunami. In the end, though, Ahtisaari's strategy of "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" made GAM's new course and the peace accord possible, including GAM's two key demands: local political parties and self-government.
To seize the hearts and minds of the Acehnese in post-tsunami Aceh means no more war plus economic recovery. It's an attempt to preempt the other side to achieve that aim. At the same time, it forced the Army to pull out of an Indonesian province.
But only by consolidating their ranks and winning the elections of local chiefs can GAM seize local offices and realize "a new democratic Aceh" – albeit within the state of Indonesia.
It follows the Sweden-based GAM leaders should change their structure-in-exile, which was designed in a time of war, and transfer its decision-making process to Aceh. A local committee will have to prepare a convention, to be held mid-May in Banda Aceh, to create a new political party. This and the elections for local chiefs will be GAM's litmus test to prove its claim of popular support – a means to legitimize its new course.
It is mainly for these reasons that GAM leaders are now returning home. Hasan M. di Tiro will only come home as Wali Nanggroe (a non-political head of state and culturally the most dignified position, according to the MoU). The Helsinki deal, Nur Djuli claimed, would mean the end of GAM's official body, the ASNLF (Aceh-Sumatra National Liberation Front) and the "government" they installed in Stavanger, Norway, in July 2002, but not of GAM itself. GAM – being Indonesia's partner in the Helsinki accord – will and should remain, leaving the ASNLF as the state that never was.
Just as the tsunami has been decisive for Aceh, as was former president B.J. Habibie's decision to offer a referendum (given the Army's past atrocities and Indonesia's declining credibility in the late 1990s) to resolve the East Timor conflict.
There will be no Habibie or tsunami for Papua. But there is still for any conflict area the basic predisposition of the security apparatus to treat their constitutional mission (to maintain the unitary state) as carte blanche for repression and killings.
[The writer is a journalist with Radio Netherlands.]