TITLE: A Rebellion Picks at Indonesia's Seams

AUTHOR: Rajiv Chandrasekaran

PUB: The Washington Post

DATE: April 18, 2001

Intensifying Violence in Aceh Could Lead to Unraveling of Archipelago Picture: A woman covers her face after she is left homeless when the Indonesian military raided and burned most of her village. (Jacqueline Koch - For The Washington Post) IDI, Indonesia -- The separatist guerrillas took over this hardscrabble farming town just before dusk, felling trees to block the main road and firing automatic weapons into the air as they swept through the market. In a brazen demonstration of their growing power, the rebels laid siege to the police station for 12 hours, pocking the concrete walls with shotgun blasts before retreating into the jungle.A few hours later, Idi was invaded again -- this time by military units that had finally cut through the roadblock. Residents said the enraged soldiers accused the town of supporting the rebels, then went on a rampage of their own, shooting unarmed people, looting homes and torching shops. By the end of the day, witnesses said, the troops had killed 18 civilians and incinerated scores of buildings. It is a cycle of violence that is becoming increasingly common in Aceh, a resource-rich province on the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra where a long-simmering fight for independence is becoming an all-out war between secessionist rebels and government security forces that could spark the disintegration of the world's fourth most populous nation. The fighting has claimed more than 5,000 lives in the past two decades, although it has received scant international attention compared with the violence that wracked the former Indonesian province of East Timor after it voted for independence in a U.N. referendum in 1999. Hundreds of Acehnese have disappeared, thousands of homes have been burned and tens of thousands of people have fled to refugee camps. Should Aceh (pronounced AH-chay) achieve independence, government officials warn, it could lead to the Balkanization of Indonesia, a vast archipelago cobbled together by Dutch colonialists that sprawls across an area greater than the distance from New York to San Francisco. If the rebels succeed, officials and analysts say, separatist efforts are likely to intensify in another province on Sumatra, parts of Borneo island and the Indonesian half of New Guinea island. "If Aceh goes, it will be the end of Indonesia as we know it," said Jusuf Wanandi, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. Indonesia's neighbors fear that escalating fighting will lead to an exodus of people and the disruption of vital shipping lanes that connect the Pacific and Indian oceans. They also worry that rebels of the Free Aceh Movement, known as GAM, which advocates a more conservative form of Islam than most Indonesians practice, might establish ties with Muslim extremist groups around the world. The conflict already has forced a temporary shutdown of one of the world's largest natural gas fields, which generates more than $1 billion a year for the Indonesian government. After its planes were hit by gunfire and more than 50 of its vehicles were hijacked over the past two years, Exxon Mobil Corp., the operator of the fields, decided last month that the province had become too unsafe to continue business. 'There Is No Mercy' Although security forces have intensified their efforts to quash the separatist group in recent months, military analysts say they believe that the guerrillas, fortified with recent recruits and new weapons, have become significantly stronger. The rebels effectively control many of Aceh's villages, where they issue marriage licenses and property deeds, and collect taxes for their own use.The first three months of this year have been the bloodiest since GAM began fighting a quarter-century ago. More than 375 people -- almost 300 of them civilians -- have been slain in the province since Jan. 1, according to a local human rights group. Nearly every day, there are new accounts of killings and destroyed villages, with each side blaming the other. "It's out of control," said Yusny Saby, a professor at the State University of Islamic Studies in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. "In the field, it is a full military conflict. There is no mercy, no law on either side." More than 30,000 police officers and soldiers have been assigned to hunt down GAM members, but many of them are so afraid of sniper attacks that they rarely leave their barracks."At this point, GAM appears to be winning," said a Western diplomat in Jakarta. "The government is losing ground by the day."  Promises Made The rebellion stems partially from a belief among many Acehnese that their history is distinct from that of the rest of Indonesia. Before Indonesia's independence from the Netherlands in 1949, Aceh was a sultanate with its own currency and international trade agreements. In exchange for helping to lead the fight against Dutch colonial rule, Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, promised to make Aceh a special autonomous region.He never followed through, but it was not until 1976, when businessman Hasan di Tiro formed GAM, that the separatist movement began to take shape in this Georgia-sized province. The scrappy rebels never numbered more than a few hundred, but their existence so worried government officials in Jakarta that then-dictator Suharto declared Aceh a special military operations area starting in 1988. For the next 10 years, human rights groups say, thousands of people suspected of belonging to -- or sympathizing with -- GAM were tortured, imprisoned and killed.Acehnese contend that they have been cheated by the national government, which has thrived off the province's vast oil and gas deposits but returned only about 1 percent of that revenue to build schools, hospitals and roads, and to alleviate poverty. "The people of Indonesia want to exploit our natural resources but they don't care about our human resources," said Hazballah Saad, an Acehnese who served until recently as the country's human rights minister. After Suharto fell, there were new hopes that the conflict could be resolved peacefully. His successor, B.J. Habibie, and the nation's current president, Abdurrahman Wahid, repeatedly promised the Acehnese that the government would return a greater share of the province's natural resource revenue and that soldiers would be held accountable for rights abuses. Officials in Jakarta also decided to transfer responsibility for security in the province from the military to the police, who are seen as less aggressive. And last year, the government and GAM entered peace talks that produced a cease-fire agreement. Both sides now acknowledge that those steps have largely failed. There has been only one human rights trial, which involved only low-ranking soldiers. Legislation to grant the province special autonomy status is languishing in parliament. The government jailed Aceh's most prominent nonviolent independence activist on sedition charges. Even if the government had followed though on its promises, GAM leaders say they are not willing to accept anything less than full independence -- something the government has said it will never grant. "We don't trust them," Adnan Adami, a top GAM official, said as he sat in a hide-out a few miles off a main road. "They've tricked us too many times." Despite the cease-fire, neither side has kept promises to put down its weapons. The military has accused GAM of using the cease-fire to grow its ranks and engage in sniper attacks, while GAM has accused the military of continuing rebel manhunts. The result has been a wave of killings and human rights abuses that aid workers in the province say is worse than the worst years of Suharto's military operations."Before, the government would arrest people and put them in prison," said Nurdin Abdul Rahman, director of the Rehabilitation Center for Aceh Torture Victims. "Now there are no more court cases. They just kill people right away." Nurdin and other aid workers say the pattern of violence across Aceh is similar to what unfolded in Idi last month: GAM guerrillas will ambush a security patrol or firebomb a military installation. Then frustrated security forces will set upon the nearest village, looting and torching homes and killing residents they suspect of being rebel sympathizers. Diplomats and analysts believe that security forces have expanded their targets in recent months to include aid workers and human rights activists, several of whom have been executed. Fearing the Military The government's violent response has caused much of Aceh's population, which never had clamored for independence in the past, to side with GAM, whose members used to be regarded by locals as a fringe group of troublemakers. "We don't really want to be independent, but when we see the security forces acting like they do, beating people and killing people, that makes us support GAM," said Ahmadi, the owner of a small coffee shop in a town near the Exxon Mobil natural gas facility. Ahmadi's shop was burned to the ground earlier this month by out-of-uniform soldiers. Sentiments are the same in Idi, where almost all of the residents have left their homes for makeshift refugee camps because they fear a repeat performance -- not by GAM, but the military. After the attack last month, Idi has turned into what one resident called "a dead town." The streets are empty. Stores are boarded up. Schools are closed. "People here never used to be big GAM supporters," said Muchtar. Hasan, 47, the owner of a food stall who, like 366 of his neighbors, is now living in the town's mosque. "But the military has been very rough with us." Military officials deny they have systematically targeted civilians and their property. Instead, they argue, many villages are attacked by GAM fighters masquerading as soldiers. "They're trying to put the blame on the security forces to win the support of the population," one senior army general said. But the general acknowledged that frustrated soldiers and police officers have been responsible for some human rights abuses. The security forces, he said, are "threatened 24 hours a day by rebels who can just blend back into the civilian population." "It's worse than what the Americans felt in Vietnam," the general said. The GAM fighters are a motley assortment of several hundred camouflage-clad guerrillas hiding in the jungle and several thousand ordinary villagers who take up arms at night. Seeking Vengeance Although a few hundred of the older rebels were trained in Libya in the 1980s, the movement's most committed fighters are young men like Jamal Uddin, who lost family members during Suharto's military operation. Ten years ago, Uddin's parents were executed in front of him by soldiers. Now the lanky, weathered 22-year-old is a full-time GAM warrior in eastern Aceh who has participated in four firefights with security forces."I'm not scared to die," he said. "All I want is vengeance." After intense lobbying from military officials, President Wahid approved a stepped-up security operation on Thursday that likely will involve special-forces troops and a transfer of command from the police to the military.Wahid has long opposed using additional force in Aceh, favoring instead continued negotiations, but political analysts said he was forced to give in to the military because he is trying to win its support in parliament to fight impeachment charges.Several Acehnese political leaders still are urging the military to back off, arguing instead that the government should push through a comprehensive autonomy package, which they think GAM could be persuaded to accept. "They should think about giving Aceh the same freedoms Britain has given Northern Ireland or China has given Hong Kong," said Rizal Sukma, an Acehnese political analyst. "Nobody will win by continuing to use force. It's only the civilians who will lose. But nobody in the government or in GAM seems to realize that." END top