Peace in Aceh was Tengku Hasan Muhammad di Tiro last wish before he died at the age of 84 on Thursday, his trusted aide Farid Husain said. "He asked for peace to be developed in Aceh. That was the main reason he returned to Indonesia and wanted to be a citizen," Husain told Metro TV.
Hasan Tiro's condition had deteriorated since Wednesday night. He had breathed with the help of a respirator for the past 10 days at Aceh's Zainul Abidin Hospital. "Hasan Tiro's health continued to drop. His blood pressure was very low," said Dr. Andalas, the hospital's deputy director.
State officials, including former Vice President Jusuf Kalla, expressed their grief over his death. "I send my deepest condolences to Hasan Tiro's family," Jusuf Kalla said. Kalla had a close relationship with Hasan Tiro, stemming from peace negotiations between the government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), which Kalla led.
More than 25,000 people were killed in the nearly 30-year armed conflict between GAM and the Indonesian military. Tiro himself was injured in 1977 and went abroad, landing in Stokholm, where he lived for almost 30 years. In the first years of Suharto's New Order, violence seemed to lull in Aceh, but vague reports of an increasingly intense conflict between the government and rebels continued to emerge.
The province was virtually shut off from the outside as armed conflicts took their toll not only on the lives of many Acehnese, but also on the Sumatra's economy. Suharto's downfall brought change to the province as President BJ Habibie halted military operations.
Later, however, President Megawati Sukarnoputri would resort to using the military once more to stamp out smoldering anti-government sentiment in the province. It was under Abdurrahman Wahid, known to the public as Gus Dur, in 2002 that the central government initiated peace talks with GAM leaders. Kalla, who was then state minister for people's welfare, led the negotiations, but made little progress.
While efforts to create peace continued, a powerful earthquake and tsunami brought Aceh to its knees on Dec. 26, 2004. More than 200,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of others injured. Both sides agreed to a cease-fire to allow humanitarian work.
As aid poured into the province, Tiro proposed new rounds of talks, to be mediated by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, a 2008 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and UN diplomat who helped end the Kosovo war. Ahtisaari brokered a peace deal that was signed in Finland, and in 2005 Indonesian soldiers left Aceh as independence fighters laid down their weapons.