| Subject: Nairn: A Deal Disarms One Side in
Aceh
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Clarity Achieved, Oppressors Still in Place: A Deal Disarms One Side in
Aceh
By Allan Nairn
Posted at News and Comment, http://www.newsc.blogspot.com/,
August 15, 2005
Today (August 15, 2005) the Aceh Freedom Movement (GAM, Gerakan Aceh
Merdeka) will sign a deal with the government of Indonesia under which
they agree to disarm and accept amnesty, money and farmland. They will be
allowed to form a local political party in exchange for a political vow of
silence: under Indonesian law the party will not be allowed to stand for
what GAM has always stood for -- independence for Aceh, or at least a
referendum vote on independence.
The TNI - POLRI (the Indonesian national armed forces and police),
which has slaughtered many thousands of Acehnese civilians (GAM has also
killed some, but a fraction as many), will temporarily withdraw some of
its troops, but will have the long term right to bring them back at its
pleasure since Jakarta remains Aceh's sovereign.
Even now in the upcoming transition months, when a couple of hundred
foreign monitors will be present, troops from some of the most notorious
military and police units can remain in Aceh: Intel operatives who run the
torture houses, Air Force men who have bombed villages, and BRIMOB police
who abduct and rape at checkpoints can stay so long as they are
technically classified as "organic" elements. And outside and
above the formal terms of the deal -- activists and military people agree
-- the US-trained Kopassus special forces, the most feared of all, can
also stay in Aceh, working undercover and applying the "tactic and
technique" of "terror" and "kidnapping," as one
of their classified training manuals puts it (Buku Petunjuk tentang Sandi
Yudha TNI AD, Nomor: 43-B-01).
This deal has been portrayed as a TNI withdrawal and an Aceh peace
deal. It is neither -- the TNI - POLRI stay, and they get to keep their
weapons and use them at will -- and it is they who have been the main
peace violators, doing the vast majority of civilian killings, tortures,
arsons, rapes, disappearances, thefts, extortions, and arbitrary
detentions.
But the deal does change the situation in a major way in that it puts
armed GAM out of business, and helpfully clarifies the situation: it is
now undeniably TNI - POLRI versus civilians. That has always been the
essence of political life in modern Aceh but the world has never seen it
because the GAM was futilely shooting at the oppressors and drawing away
all outside attention (such as it was) from the TNI - POLRI's killings of
civilians.
GAM deserves credit for disarming. They should have done it a long time
ago. They were only making matters worse, and now that they're gone, there
are possibilities. But their act of self-abnegation should not be
misconstrued as a settlement to the Aceh problem, and their de facto vow
of silence should not be construed as applying to Acehnese as a whole.
In November, 1999 the Acehnese mounted what was, in proportional terms,
one of the largest demonstrations in world history. Perhaps a quarter of
the population turned out in Banda Aceh to peacefully call for referendum.
Caught completely off guard, the TNI - POLRI moved to crush the civilian
movement, knowing that though they could not lose militarily in a shooting
war with the GAM, they could well lose politically if the world got to
hear peaceful Aceh voices.
That didn't happen. Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, the leading international
voice, who had testified before the US congress, was tortured to death
upon returning home (his body was found in September, 2000) (see posting
of October.. 2004). Others were assassinated, jailed or driven into exile,
and the first the world heard of Aceh was when the tsunami struck in
December, 2004.
In legal and military terms the Acehnese are still as subordinated as
they were before. Though the deal contains two references to the UN
covenants on civil and political rights and establishes local institutions
like a human rights court (with no specified powers), the same repressive
laws that bind all Indonesians still apply to them, and, far more
importantly, the TNI - POLRI -- effectively above the law anyway -- still
occupy their region.
But in cold pragmatic terms, with the GAM now out of the way there is
the chance that dissident speech, though still repressed, might now become
politically fruitful. Muhammad Nazar, the best known civilian activist --
who was seen as too big to kill -- was jailed for giving a speech in a
village in which he advocated referendum. Word is that he will be
released, but if he gives the same speech again he can be jailed -- or
worse -- again, but now, post-GAM, there will be a chance for such a
sacrifice to draw some meaningful outside attention.
It was such attention that made it possible for East Timor to win
independence in different circumstances, but for Aceh that is more
difficult since it is historically part of Indonesia, and indeed predates
it, while Timor was a foreign land that was invaded by Indonesia, with US
backing, in 1975. The loss of a third of their population to TNI - POLRI
slaughter gained nothing for the Timorese until the Dili massacre of 1991
drew some outside attention and the acknowledgment that this was an
unjustified case of a military killing civilians.
Aceh is also such a case, and the Acehnese have also been dying in
vain. If they continue to speak for referendum they will likely continue
to die, but they may now get something for it, since the fog of two-sided
combat will presumably no longer obscure the one-sided repression by TNI -
POLRI.
What they might get is publicity that weakens the TNI/POLRI, and the
repressive Indonesian state apparatus generally, and such weakening is the
only hope for any substantial democracy, freedom, or justice in Aceh, and
in Indonesia as a whole. But those harmful institutions will only be
weakened on balance if the US, Europe, Australia and other outside powers
can be stopped from using this deal as yet another excuse to try to push
through a restoration and/or increase of foreign military and police aid.
It was after all the cutting of that aid, in response to grassroots
pressure, that cleared the way for the ending of the Timor occupation and,
prior to that, the downfall of the US-backed dictator, Gen. Suharto.
So whether this deal helps or hurts will in important part depend on
the behavior of outside parties, and it is just such risks and
complexities that have made some TNI - POLRI generals reluctant to accept
it. Much press coverage and grassroots speculation in Aceh has centered on
whether TNI - POLRI and, for that matter, the GAM field fighters, will
follow the deal. For many GAM people it is a bitter pill. It is they, and
not the big-time killers who will have to lay down their arms, renounce
their goal, and prostrate themselves before the enemy state. But at the
same time they will get amnesty and will be ostensibly free to return to
their homes. For the TNI - POLRI it looks like victory: they get the guns
and the right to rule, while Aceh gets a local flag. But this sparring
with GAM has been very good to the Jakarta generals. It has helped to
justify their dominance of Indonesia and it has made many of them
millionaires. It is easy to see why many of them will be sorry to see the
armed GAM go.
But Indonesia's President, Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono -- who
supervised the Aceh repression and martial law under the previous
President, Megawati Sukarnoputri -- takes a more strategic view. He seems
to recognize that though TNI needs a two-sided shooting war for
self-justification to Indonesians, it doesn't necessarily need two or
three of them (The military recently sent 15,000 new Kostrad troops and
Kopassus into harshly-repressed Papua in Indonesia's east, which has a
lightly-armed rebel movement, and continues to stage violent Christian vs.
Muslim provocations in the country's north - central islands), and that
the loss of surplus money to be stolen from from a combat-zone Aceh can be
more than compensated for by the money to be stolen from increased tsunami
aid flows, and the power to be regained by the TNI - POLRI as a whole from
new foreign military and police aid. (The military and police can also
expect to continue running their rackets in Aceh and nearby North Sumatra,
which have included illegal timber, marijuana, prostitution, hijacking,
extortion, protection and offshore fishing platforms staffed by
press-ganged under-aged boys). It was Gen. Susilo who said that "to
demand a referendum" in Aceh "is considered a crime against the
state" (Jakarta Post, December 24, 2003), and that principle will
still be imposed by force, but he evidently hopes that this deal will now
enable Jakarta to be seen from overseas as having somehow changed its
stripes.
If Gen. Susilo proves to be right, and the deal brings fresh resources
and strength for TNI - POLRI, then his generals' grumbling will have been
groundless, and it will be a catastrophe for Indonesia and Aceh. But the
officers do have at least one secondary reason for concern: An adviser to
Indonesia's businessman vice president, Yusuf Kalla, a principal broker of
the Aceh deal, says privately that Kalla will also now become the personal
financial broker for newly opened-up international arms deals (the adviser
says post-Aceh-deal deals are in sight with Europe, China, and Israel,
among others), a lucrative role traditionally played by retired TNI and
POLRI generals.
As this is being written -- a couple of hours before the deal signing
in Helsinki, Finland -- people are gathering in Aceh's mosques and
churches and praying publicly for peace, and perhaps privately for freedom
and justice. This deal will deliver none of those things. They are still
condemned to live under their oppressors. But it does scramble the
situation and open up the outside chance that if they are still brave
enough to speak, this time when they are shot down or put in chains,
someone on the outside might hear the rattle.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Legal Arms for Illegal Purposes: A Note on the
Aceh Militias
In Central Aceh, the TNI has an ethnic Javanese and Gayo militia force
that is estimated to be larger than the Aceh-wide GAM. An investigator who
speaks the local Gayo language puts their strength at 12,000 people and
6,000 weapons -- some homemade, some military issue. The Helsinki Memorandum
of Understanding (MOU) between Indonesia and GAM has a clause (4.9) for the
"decommissioning of all illegal arms" but only those held by "illegal groups
and parties," and under Indonesian law state-organized militias can be
construed as legal.
Arms held by the TNI - POLRI are, of course, implicitly defined as legal,
a privilege which every country in the world grants to its security forces.
Some theorists say that the very definition of a state is its monopoly on
legitimate violence. So the state's arms are always legal, even if routinely
used for illegal acts like murder and theft, or to carry out policies like
illegal invasions or occupations.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Good Cop - Bad Cop Blackmail on Aceh: The Advantages of Seeming Crazy
The TNI - POLRI is now saying that they have about 35,000 men in Aceh,
which, if true, would mean that under the Helsinki deal with GAM signed
yesterday they will be temporarily withdrawing about 32% of their troops,
not much more than a normal rotation.
It is often said that there are more TNI - POLRI bases than there are
schools or mosques in Aceh, and traveling along the roads and counting
suggests that in many zones that might well be true. In populated areas of
the main Medan - Banda Aceh road one encounters a marked base or post
every few hundred meters, not including the unmarked Intel and Kopassus
bases, which are sometimes known to residents. In Langsa, plainclothes
Kopassus officers can be seen smoking in their undershirts outside a
run-down commercial building where local civil servants have been dragged
in and had their faces mauled on suspicion of giving food to GAM.
The Kopassus men have money and are wordly; they move all over the
archipelago, and their foreign trainers have included Americans,
Australians, Germans, and Taiwanese. But it is the TNI's cruder street
level militias -- not counted in official troop numbers -- that are now in
the spotlight since people fear that if the Jakarta generals don't get
enough payoff from the GAM surrender deal, they may unleash the militias
in order to provoke the GAM into taking up arms again.
That scenario may be unlikely, but everyone knows from experience in Timor
and elsewhere that it is not impossible, and that hanging possibility of
supra-normal terror creates leverage for TNI - POLRI, both within Aceh and
in their lobbying for restored aid overseas.
It is a classic good cop - bad cop con: the smooth lobbyists (like the
President, Gen. Susilo, and Juwono Sudarsono, the defense minister) say to
the foreigners: 'Look, these generals are crazy! You'd better buy them off
with aid, or God know what they'll do. And as much as I'd like to stop
them I can't be responsible for their actions. '
So on top of the continuing rule by their oppressors there's an implicit
blackmail hanging over Aceh: if the generals don't get what they want --
like restored US guns and money -- they may take it out on Aceh and burn
it, as they did to Timor in 1999.
Monday, August 15, 2005
How Many Weapons Did the Aceh GAM Have?: The
Pathetic Pretense for Indonesian Terror
With the release today of the final Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
between Indonesia and GAM the fact has now been revealed that the GAM -- the
pretense for TNI - POLRI's massive terror in Aceh -- has all of 840 weapons,
barely enough to fill one big truck. At least that's the figure they declare
in the document, and though the tally may not be totally honest, people
familiar with GAM say that it cannot be that far from the truth.
The MOU also says that TNI - POLRI will for the moment openly keep 23,800
troops in Aceh, half or more of what they have now, and a figure roughly
equivalent to their troop levels during many recent years. This gives the
lie to the widely reported claim in recent weeks that TNI - POLRI would be
pulling out, and heightens the question of their rationale for being there
at all once the GAM has fully disarmed.
In any event, the troop numbers aren't that crucial, what matters is
who's in control (the Indonesian government and TNI - POLRI) and what their
policy is (no free speech, repression). As one local human rights monitor
put when discussing the MOU clause that temporarily limits troop movements
to one platoon (about 100 men in the TNI system): "it only takes one platoon
to do a massacre or to start a riot."
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