STOCKHOLM: In a grim Stockholm suburb, a group of men meet daily to plot the strategy of a guerrilla war fought 10,000 kilometres away in separatist Aceh, where Indonesia launched a military campaign two weeks ago.
The mobile phones of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) leaders bleep as they receive text message reports from Aceh, the oil- and gas-rich province on the northern tip of the Sumatra island enveloped in a war after peace talks broke down.
Sweden is home to GAM’s top commanders headed by Mahmood Malik, whom the rebels consider their prime minister, and Abdullah Bakhtiar, the chief spokesman. Both were part of GAM’s negotiation team at the latest unsuccessful peace talks in Japan.
Bakhtiar lives with his wife, the daughter of a former GAM commander killed in battle in 1982, their two children and his mother-in-law in a drab apartment complex housing mainly immigrants.
He said he recently heard that his brother-in-law had been arrested on the island of Pulau Nasi on the northern tip of Aceh, and there had since been no news of him.
Malik himself was a warrior before coming to Sweden.
“We have fought them (Jakarta) for 27 years, and we are fighting for a just cause,” he said. “We ask for independence to rule our land. We don’t want anything else from Indonesia.”
Even though Aceh is staunchly Muslim, the separatists say they do not plan to build an Islamic state.
More than 10,000 people have been killed in the conflict in Aceh since 1976, and the separatists vow to continue the battle until they win independence for the former Dutch colony.
There are around 50 Acehnese living in Sweden. Many arrived as political refugees in the early 1980s and are now living and working as Swedish citizens.
The separatists say 70 civilians and hundreds of government soldiers have been killed, but there has been no visible evidence or independent confirmation of this.—Reuters
