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Aceh
Primary Researcher:
Damian Grenfell
Across the late 1990s and into the new millennium, Indonesia has come
to be seen as a land of violence, awash with machete-wielding militias
and marauding jihadic warriors. Instead of a serious recognition of
the complexity of these conflicts, they are continuously drawn back
into a reductionist framework of anarchy, perpetual revenge, and the
reassertion of primordial identities as expressed through the violence
of one ethnic grouping against another. For authors such as Colombijn
and Lindblad, their investigation into violent conflict in Indonesia
is solved by a reductive fusion of nation and condition, with their
opening sentence reading 'Indonesia is a violent country' (Roots
of Violence in Indonesia, p.1).
A range of writers take a similar though sometimes more subtle approach,
effectively still rolling the origins of violence in Indonesia into
one source, namely the reassertion of ethnic identities. Taking the
decades-long dispute over Aceh as a point of departure, this aspect
of the Sources of Insecurity project analyses the ways in which the
conflict across the northern most tip of Sumatra has been represented
as a revival of beliefs in Islam, and as a localised conflict seeking
to re-establish social custom and religious practice.
Aceh is so often referred to as the place in which Islam entered the
Indonesian archipelago some thousand years ago. In understanding the
conflict, there is no doubt that factors such as identity, ethnicity,
a sense of place and of course history all need to be considered in
terms of the current conflict. This project however extends this analysis
and examines the ways in which this conflict in Aceh is constituted
in the present as much as it is in the past, finding its origins in
modernizing development programs and commodity markets, in communication
technologies and bureaucratic forms of governance, and in the legal
and illegal global flows of the weapons trade. Such extensions to
common analyses of the conflict in Aceh raise the prospect that this
site of dispute cannot be singularly treated through the lens of the
past. Instead, it is important to take account of different expressions
of 'being in the world' as the call is made for the creation of a
new nation and modern economy alongside kinds of claims for religious
expression.
The current period conflict over Aceh can be formally dated to the
declaration of Achenese independence on 4 December 1976. Hasan di
Tiro, the self-appointed leader of the Aceh-Sumatra National Liberation
Front (ASNLF), proclaimed that Aceh would no longer be part of Indonesia.
The ASNFL, more commonly known as Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM), has
since been fighting the Indonesian military in a war that has ebbed
and flowed between low-level guerrilla warfare and periods of intense
conflict. As with East Timor, the economic upheaval across Indonesia
in the late 1990s changed the political prospects for Aceh and brought
into broad public view wide-ranging manifestations of discontent with
rule by Jakarta. However, numerous attempts to broker peace between
the two sides has continuously failed, with the Indonesian armed forces
mounting its largest military operation since East Timor in 2003 in
an effort to finally break the nationalist resistance of GAM.
The horrific impact of the tsunami in December 2004 brought both the
capital Banda Aceh and the province of Aceh to world attention. With
the greatest impact of the disaster felt along the Northern and Western
coasts, Banda Aceh, along the towns such as Meulaboh, were devastated
by both the earthquake and then the subsequent tsunami. As with the
Solomon Islands, of long-term interest is the way a natural disaster
impacts upon a human disaster. In this case the long war that has
killed and injured many tens of thousands of people, caused widespread
resettlement and created many internal refugees. One of the aims of
the study over the coming years is to counter the tendency to treat
recovery as restricted to that first phase of removing rubble and
burying the dead. The impact of large-scale disasters needs to be
examined well after the political glow of aid packages has dimmed.
Following the destruction in East Timor for instance, whole suburbs
in Dili were vacated by Indonesians and then subsequently filled by
East Timorese refugees from a range of provinces. Without established
long-term relations or ways of mediating social problems, these suburbs
have often seen increased crime which has in turn placed a new system
of governance under increasing stress. Yet such important consequences
tend to fall beyond the data collected on how many houses have been
rebuilt, what micro-credit loans have been dispensed, or how many
people have been repatriated from refugee camps.
Recovery in Banda Aceh could conceivably follow a similar form, albeit
with very different outcomes. There are already indications that people's
own relations to the natural geography, particularly the ocean, has
changed in such a way that they are no longer willing to live directly
along the coast. Equally, there are accusations that inland resettlement
is being encouraged in order to encourage tourist development along
the coast, a source of both immediate corrupt income and conceivably
a longer term strategy to undermine resistance. Further, there are
already signs that the impact of a cash-infused recovery program is
changing social bonds, such as community reciprocity around the building
of a home. Of interest is how such social changes intersect more generally
with the conditions of long-term insecurity. Upheaval, mistrust, trauma
and alienation within communities can have any number of potential
impacts of a broader claim for national independence.
Potentially, communities affected by the earthquake and tsunami may
leave political aspirations aside for a time being. However, given
that within weeks of the tsunami there were firefights between GAM
and Indonesian military and claims from both sides of attempts by
the other to profit from the disaster, this appears unlikely. The
security situation is of course central to much of the international
humanitarian aid effort. Countries such as the US and Australia have
explicitly stated that they see recovery as essential to longer-term
security interests by ensuring that Aceh develops materially and doesn't
become a centre for 'extremism'. On the ground, the impact of such
dynamics upon the recovery process will be examined, identifying how
people respond to broader political questions peculiar to Aceh and
how these dynamics fold back onto the patterns of social integration
that underpin the following years of recovery and continuing violence
in Aceh. How the past is treated in such circumstances will be central
in this study, and is considered particularly important in critically
evaluating the longer-term opportunities for peace in the region.
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2004 |
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