JAKARTA: Four months after the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) signed a peace pact ending their 26-year-old conflict, evidence is tumbling in from the troubled province that the agreement is falling apart.
Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political and security affairs Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has given GAM’s leadership until Tuesday to decide whether or not they will attend a Joint Council in Jakarta to salvage the quickly unravelling peace process in Aceh, failing which the government will resort to its old method of dealing with Aceh’s troubles — military might.
Yudhoyono has claimed the GAM’s leadership already refused to attend the planned Joint Council, a claim refuted by sources in Banda Aceh — 1,750 kms northwest of Jakarta — the province’s capital.
The Henry Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (JHC), which brokered the peace deal last December 9, this week called in its monitors from Aceh’s districts after receiving numerous threats.
“We all knew there were going to be problems,” said HDC spokesman Steve Daly. “Now it’s really up to both sides to salvage it.”
While GAM leaders such as Hassan Tiro, living in exile in Stockholm for the past two decades, may agree to meet with Indonesian representatives outside the country, they would never agree to come to Jakarta “in a million years”, sources said.
Tiro and his close associates fled to Sweden in the late 1970s shortly after setting up GAM to fight for Aceh’s independence in December, 1976. They risk arrest if they return to Indonesia on charges of treason.
The December 9, 2002, peace agreement was signed in Geneva, not Jakarta.
While the agreement was then welcomed by the international community and most Acehnese, the majority of whom are tired of war, it was fatally flawed from the start.
“The problem is the December 9th agreement papers over a whole range of disagreements,” said Sydney Jones, head of the Jakarta office of the International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based think tank.
One of the main disagreements was that GAM had no intention to give up its struggle for independence, while the government made clear that independence was not in the cards, only special autonomy status.
“I think the root of the problem is that it’s very clear that GAM used the first two months of the accord to tell people that this was the first step towards independence,” said Jones.
The Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) has no intention of allowing Aceh to go the way of East Timor, which opted out of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia in 1999. The TNI has been livid with GAM’s efforts to consolidate power.
General Ryamizard Ryacudu, TNI army chief of staff, has accused the GAM of boosting troops from 3,000 to 5,000 over the past four months, and of expanding arsenals from 1,500 weapons to 2,100.
“Any army in the world would give them an ultimatum: surrender or we will strike. America is doing the same thing in Iraq,” he added.—dpa
