Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (35 page)

The riches of Aceh attracted the attention of European traders once they reached these waters, but they resolved not to fight over the territory; the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 recognized the Sultanate of Aceh as a sovereign, free-trading state. When the Europeans changed their minds and the Netherlands East Indies moved in to take over, the Acehnese fought them off. Over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the Acehnese killed 15,000 Dutch troops and crippled another 10,000 in a war that was cast as a conflict of Muslims against the
kafir
infidels. The colonists finally got the upper hand in 1903 and the Dutch ruled Aceh until the Japanese invaded thirty-nine years later. These details were passed over in rebel leader Hasan di Tiro’s version of history. He claimed that Aceh was always an undefeated sovereign state, and that it could not therefore become part of the Indonesian nation when the Dutch handed over sovereignty. He ignored other inconvenient facts too: that Aceh had invited the republican government to set up shop in the province when Indonesia was fighting the Dutch, that wealthy Acehnese merchants pooled their gold to buy the fledgling country its first planes, breaking the Dutch blockade. The way di Tiro and his GAM rebels saw it, Aceh’s future grew inevitably out of its glorious, independent and undefeated past, and it would fight for it to the last. As the exiled rebel said in his autobiography,
The Price of Freedom
: ‘Either we live free or we die free.’
*

As I travelled the province in the early 1990s, I recorded plenty of death, on both sides. My reports on the shadowy rebellion in Aceh and on the Indonesian army’s brutal response to it drew angry responses from di Tiro as well as from the Indonesians. After one series of reports on Aceh, I was called in and ticked off by the military spokesman General Nurhadi, who accused me of giving the rebels undue importance. When I got back to the office, there was a fax from Stockholm, from Hasan di Tiro himself, berating me for the same stories but for the opposite reason. On the Reuters wire I had described the anti-government fighters as ‘an apparent mix of vengeful soldiers sacked by the army, separatists and discontented Acehnese . . . [Though] savagery has exploded in the year-long conflict . . . it is still unclear what the rebel goals are.’ In his fax the separatist-in-exile took exception to this: ‘Achehnese political prisoners . . . are being misrepresented by the Javanese as “rebels without a cause” and you, ladies and gentlemen of the Reuter, should be ashamed for disseminating Javanese propaganda!’

Now, less than twenty-five years later, all that earlier confusion had evaporated. A decade and a half of carnage has been rewritten as a chapter in a thirty-year struggle for justice. In the coffee shops of Aceh, the issue of Acehnese sovereignty was rarely mentioned and the self-proclaimed former rebels who were now fighting on the hustings for positions of power within the Indonesian state never spoke of it at all. In a Medan newspaper I read as I travelled to Aceh for the first time in over two decades, I saw a photo of the Javanese general Soenarko – one of the Indonesian army commanders who had done most to crush the rebels in Aceh – embracing Muzakir Manaf, the former guerrilla commander of GAM. Muzakir was now running for vice governor of Aceh, alongside another former rebel. Soenarko was supporting their ticket. That really did my head in; it’s like a senior Israeli general becoming campaign manager for Hezbollah. As the former rebel welcomed his old enemy into his party’s campaign team, he declared that they also shared a single aim, vision and goal:
Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia
– ‘The Republic of Indonesia, Indivisible!’

My bus trundled on past more campaign posters, and several huge green billboards reading ‘
NKRI Harga Mati!
’
Harga mati
literally means ‘dead price’. It’s what you don’t want to hear if you’re bargaining in the market: the bottom line, non-negotiable. These ‘Indonesia, Indivisible: Non-negotiable!’ signs had a non-identical twin, also in green, which read:
Damai itu Indah!
– ‘Peace is Beautiful!’ I don’t remember either of these slogans from earlier times. But as I travelled around Indonesia in 2011/2012, I realized they were a sure sign that I was in a trouble zone. There are no
Damai itu Indah!
signs in Jakarta. You don’t see
NKRI Harga Mati!
in the buzzing Central Java port of Semarang or around the beach resorts of Bali. I didn’t see the signs in Sumba or up through NTT. They began to appear in the small islands opposite East Timor, which voted to leave Indonesia in 1999 and which was set alight by militias backed by the Indonesian army in revenge. There were plenty of green signs in Maluku and Central Sulawesi and I later saw them in West Kalimantan. They were spread thickly across Papua. And here they were in Aceh. Though the signs tend to be paired, there’s more Beautiful Peace in places where the population make a habit of taking to one another with machetes – Maluku, Central Sulawesi, West Kalimantan – and more Non-negotiable Unity in the parts of Indonesia that have most openly expressed a desire to break away from the motherland – Papua, around East Timor, Aceh.

The threat of separatism has hung like a thundercloud over the nation since the earliest days of the republic, when Sukarno prevailed over fellow nationalists who sought either a federal or an Islamic state. Several parts of the new nation revolted in the 1950s. Rebels wanting an Islamic government fought Jakarta in West Java, South Sulawesi and West Sumatra as well as in Aceh, while at the other end of the country, Maluku tried to hive off a Christian state. The republican army squashed all of those rebellions; their grip on the nation tightened even further when Suharto came to power. But his rule fertilized another type of resentment. Jakarta is stealing the riches of our land and using it to build highways in Java, complained people in Riau, Sulawesi and Kalimantan as well as in Aceh and Papua. Meanwhile, we have to host thousands of transmigrants, the detritus of Suharto’s overcrowded homeland. Our adat is being scrubbed up for tourist brochures, and we’re force-fed national ideals based on a foppish and compliant Javanese culture that has nothing to do with us. By the late 1980s, several parts of Indonesia were disgruntled. But there were active rebel movements in only three of those areas – East Timor, Papua (at that time called Irian Jaya) and Aceh.

Neither East Timor nor Papua was part of the nation at the time of independence. Both felt they had been swallowed up by the Indonesian behemoth against their will. Papuans feel that they were tricked into becoming part of Indonesia in 1969, when Jakarta manipulated a UN-backed referendum by allowing only carefully groomed community elders to vote. The East Timorese never had any choice at all about ‘integration’ with Indonesia. When Portuguese colonists abandoned the territory practically overnight in 1975, Suharto simply marched his troops in. Given their history, it was no surprise that these provinces had produced guerrilla movements. But Aceh had been an integral part of Indonesia at independence (Hasan di Tiro’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding). Its later rebellions were no more or less serious than those in other regions. In fact in many respects, Aceh actually had less to complain about than other provinces on the geographic periphery of Indonesia. The governor, several bupatis and many in the upper echelons of the army and police in the province were Acehnese, whereas in many other provinces they were Javanese. Aceh wheedled more development funds out of Jakarta in 1990 than any other province.

These facts did not deter the young men who had learned from Hasan di Tiro that Aceh has always been sovereign, could only be sovereign, from reigniting their quest for independence. The guerrilla warfare continued in fits and starts for another fifteen years, directed largely by exiles in Sweden, financed by exiles in Malaysia. The Indonesian military’s response came in waves too, exceedingly aggressive in the early 1990s when I was reporting from Aceh, then more brutal still under the nationalist presidency of Sukarno’s daughter Megawati from 2001 to 2004.

It wasn’t until the tsunami of 2004 swept away 170,000 Acehnese lives that the unelected leaders of the movement, most of whom had not set foot in Aceh throughout the decade and a half of fighting, conceded that it may be time for the killing to stop. Virtually everyone I spoke to in Aceh in 2012 pointed to iconic images of mosques standing unscathed in a landscape otherwise flattened by the tsunami as signs of God’s anger at the senseless war. To me, depending on the age of the building, they were signs that the mosque was built by Dutch engineers, or signs that contractors are less likely to cut corners or use substandard materials when they build a mosque than when they build a school or a housing complex. But it is certainly true that the unimaginable tragedy of the tsunami allowed both Jakarta and the rebel leaders to climb out of the trenches they had dug for themselves and to talk peace. The torrent of support from ordinary Indonesians helped too; the rebels could no longer argue that Indonesians wanted only to take from Aceh, not to give.

The tsunami provided an opportunity to start again. And it brought in US$7 billion in aid, and lots and lots of construction work. This meant contracts for former rebel leaders and jobs for the boys; it helped reintegrate the fighters into society, a condition of a peace agreement signed in 2005 between Jakarta and the Stockholm-based separatists. The agreement gave Aceh a bigger cut of mining, logging and fishing revenue than other provinces got. On top of that, there’s around US$1.2 billion a year in no-strings-attached cash transfers from Jakarta to Aceh’s districts, and another US$700 million a year in ‘special autonomy funds’. Most importantly, the agreement allowed former guerrilla leaders to form local political parties in Aceh, though these remain forbidden everywhere else in Indonesia. That meant that men who led the charge for Acehnese freedom in their youth could now, in their greying years, run for office without being seen to join the Indonesian establishment. That in turn meant that the former rebels could get their hands on all the money that flowed from their sworn enemies. Jakarta had found their price, and bought them off.

A similar process of co-option is underway in Papua, a term I use to refer to the western half of the island of New Guinea, formerly Irian Jaya and at the time of my visit in 2012 technically split into two provinces, Papua and West Papua. It’s one of Indonesia’s richest regions, made of gold and copper, covered with precious hardwoods and surrounded with valuable fish. In Suharto’s day, Jakarta didn’t even pretend to do anything for the Papuans. They were lesser beings (they don’t even eat rice, imagine!), capable of working the mines and the plantations but not of governing themselves. Jakarta sent in managers and bureaucrats, and they worked with foreigners to extract the riches and send them back to the motherland. It was a replica of the way the Dutch had treated the Javanese for a couple of hundred years.

Papuans had been fighting a low-level guerrilla war against Jakarta since their land was first ‘integrated’ into Indonesia. When Indonesia decentralized after the Suharto era, Papua was extremely ill-disposed to remain shoehorned into the republic. Losing tiny, unproductive East Timor during the transition to civilian rule in Indonesia had been a blow to the nation’s pride. But losing what many Papuans sourly refer to as
Dapur Java
, ‘Java’s Kitchen’ – that would be a huge blow to the nation’s income. And so the co-option began. Jakarta still sucks in taxes from Papua, but a special autonomy bill similar to Aceh’s now feeds most of the royalties from mining, logging and other resource extraction straight to the new Papuan elite.

This makes some other parts of Indonesia resentful. ‘We try to be good citizens and we get nothing,’ the head of a local government department in Maluku had told me. ‘It turns out it’s only if you run around killing soldiers that you get everything you ask for.’ But the integration-by-bribery makes a lot of Papuans resentful too. In the same way that a small handful of Dutch-educated Indonesians had a lock on power at independence, so a small handful of Java-educated Papuans now control most of the area’s resources. ‘There’s been a straight switch. Papua’s wealth used to be stolen by Jakarta. Now it’s stolen by the Papuan elite,’ a preacher in the Papuan capital Jayapura told me. In his view, they got away with it for two reasons. ‘One: most Papuans are so used to blaming the Javanese for everything that they don’t even look at what is really happening. Two: the elite has been very clever at co-opting anyone who might object.’

The unrest in Papua continues. But in Aceh, around the time of the elections in 2012, it seemed as though Jakarta’s co-option was succeeding.