Aboeprijadi Santoso, Banda Aceh – The top leader of former rebel group the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), Teungku Chik Hasan Muhammad di Tiro, may be the founder of Indonesia's longest proactive separatist movement, but when he came home it was not as a rebel, but still with a cause.
The first time I met him 19 years ago in The Hague, the Netherlands, he was a proud man; he showed me photos of young Acehnese joining military training in Libya; the second time we met, six years later, he was an angry man, explaining why he thought Aceh had the right to independence; and during his recent trip to Aceh, I watched an old man, still proud of his beloved homeland, calling on his compatriots to learn the history of the country and to maintain peace.
Aceh, he said, "has been victimized by Javanese aggressors, using a masquerade named Indonesia. The Acehnese should maintain their freedom or seize it. Every struggle will strive for a victory to be achieved sooner or later. I pin much hope on myself, on the Acehnese nation and on other nations. We have the right, on a legal basis, to independence."
How do you think you will achieve it? I asked. "Jalan apa saja (By any means)," he replied.
Hasan Tiro is a man of strong opinion. Now, 13 years later, we know his former enemy, the central government – in particular the Army – also took jalan apa saja to achieve victory. Hence, the dirty war, misery and the deaths of tens of thousands, especially among local civilians.
In the late 1950s Hasan was a nationalist who dreamed of Indonesian federation. However, he later changed his view and attempted to build new patriotism by transforming his patron Daud Beureueh's idea of Darul Islam (DI) of the late 1950s into a vision of Acehnese nationalism, thus redefining the politico-religious desire into a modern nation-state idea.
For, "to continue the DI would result in a civil war", not freedom, said Suheluddin D. Batubara, a former aide to Beureueh, in 2003.
It was this redefinition into Acehnese nationalism that implied a challenge and demanded a redefinition of Indonesian nationhood. But we also know that this patriotism, which Hasan over time introduced into Acehnese consciousness, has in effect been strengthened and widened by Jakarta's broken promises and violence and the suffering that the war caused. Now, as he traveled from one mausoleum to another, praying before Aceh's endatu or ancestors (Sultan Iskandar Muda, Sjech Abdul Rauf al Sangkili), Acehnese heroes (his great-grandfather Tgku. Chik di Tiro, who is also a national hero) and comrades (Tgku. M. Usman Lampoh Awe, GAM commander Abdullah Syafei'i), we saw him paying tribute, expressing pride and demonstrating his loyalty to Aceh.
His trip thus suggested that Hasan remains loyal to his cause even though his homeland – contrary to his promise not to return home before Aceh becomes free – remains within the republic.
Similarly, although his idea of a "successor state", which was supposed to succeed the Dutch, never materialized, he might have noticed that Aceh has become a significant part of the consciousness of Indonesia's nationhood.
If Aceh means in the first place a point of identity to the Acehnese, and at the same time an important element of Indonesia's nationhood, there is, however, a third factor that could bind the two: democracy.
After all, wasn't it greater democracy for Aceh that Hasan Tiro and GAM said they wanted to realize? Hasan surely remembers that West-Java DI leader Kartosuwirjo resisted Beureueh's idea of a federal Islamic state in the 1950s and recalls that former president Soeharto flatly rejected his federal idea when he met with him in the early 1970s; instead, Soeharto used violence to break any opposition. These were indeed among the reasons that he chose to rebel.
It's important, therefore, that in addition to paying tribute to his Acehnese ancestors, Hasan during his trip stressed a second theme – peace – by calling on the Acehnese people to respect the Helsinki pact of 2005 and thanked the world, the mediator Martti Ahtisaari and the European Union for their contributions to peace and post-tsunami aid.
By praising the Helsinki pact, he indeed accepted not only the republic of which Aceh is part, but also democracy for both Aceh and Indonesia. A salient detail was the irony that it is now the GAM leaders, not Jakarta, that ban the term "separatism". "Peace is now forever," said Malik Mahmud representing Hasan.
What role Hasan Tiro should now play is a matter for the Acehnese to decide. That people celebrated his homecoming with heart and tears suggests that the decades of conflict and suffering changed not only Aceh, but also Hasan's role and image.
To many Acehnese until the early 1980s he was just an anonymous self-exiled rebel leader. But the enthusiasm with which the Acehnese welcomed him last week as a "fighter for the nation" (pejuang bangsa) means that the concept of Wali Nanggroe, a title Hasan claimed and used throughout his rebel years, has changed from its original meaning – the Guardian of the State – into a unifier, a penyatu bangsa Aceh, as one local put it.
Since the Wali is not a sultan and there is no wish to restore the sultanate, to do so would be artificial. Instead, as former GAM negotiator Nur Djuli argued, the Acehnese "should look forward and the Wali (Hasan) should return his mandate to the people, leaving the historic institution of Wali Nanggroe as a symbol to unite the people of Aceh". And with it, Djuli added, "GAM will fade away".
While Hasan Tiro's homecoming may be too late to enable him, at 83, to exercise any political function, his trip has performed an important symbolic role to unite Aceh – in addition to enabling Partai Aceh, the party founded by GAM, who organized the events, to gain momentum going into the 2009 elections.
Now that Hasan the Wali is no longer a famous-but-faceless figure who was far away for decades, he will be just an ordinary human being. With it, the myths surrounding his person will fade away.
[The writer is journalist. He can be reached at tossi20@yahoo.com.]