BANGKOK: While on paper the Indonesian armed forces have stepped in line with the country’s political reforms since strongman Suharto’s ouster in 1998, the ground reality in the recent months suggests otherwise.

None illustrates this better than the situation in Aceh, the resource-rich province on the northern tip of Sumatra island where the Free Aceh Movement, known by its Indonesian acronym GAM, has been waging a separatist struggle against Jakarta since 1976.

Over the last two months, it has become increasingly clear that the Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI), as the armed forces are called in Indonesian, is making its presence felt across Aceh to crush the independence movement as it did during the Suharto years.

A key means for doing this, critics say, is the re-establishment in January by the government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri of the Iskandar Muda Regional Military Command in Aceh.

Reyza Zain of the Aceh Referendum Information Centre, known by its Indonesian acronym SIRA, estimates the current troop strength at some 70,000 to “guard only 4.5 million people (in the province)”.

The heavy military presence in Aceh — which differs from past government initiatives that at one point included a reduction of troops - is generating worries about the direction of Indonesia’s democratic reforms.

Human rights violations linked to the TNI in Aceh are also fuelling concerns that the defence establishment still has the ability to march to the tune of the old order, where it was a powerful presence in Indonesia’s political culture.

This was among the changes in the military’s role approved by the government of former president Abdurrahman Wahid, Megawati’s predecessor whose appointment of a civilian as defence minister was the first such move since 1950.

Under the reforms to make the military accountable to civilian authority, the armed forces has been limited to national defence and protecting Indonesian territory from outside threats.

However Mohammad Nur Djuli, communications director at the New York-based International Forum for Aceh (IFA), sees the military presence in the restive province from another point of view.

During the first three months of this year alone, more than 300 people have been killed in separatist-related violence, according to human rights monitors, a figure that portends a high number of deaths in 2002.

Last year, Aceh marked one of its bloodiest periods, with close to 1,700 deaths or double that of the previous year. Close to 10,000 people have been killed since the separatist struggle began.

IFA’s Djuli says that there is a marginal difference between the situation in Aceh during the Suhauharto years and now.

This trend does not augur well for Indonesia’s reform agenda, which include the

gradual elimination of the number of seats allotted to the military in the national and regional legislatures and the denial of posts in the bureaucracy to

military officers. The armed forces’ political role in Indonesia is written in the Constitution.

What is most troubling to Withaya Sucharithanarugse, an Indonesian expert at the Institute of Asian Studies at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, is the backing the TNI enjoys from Megawati.

Some attribute Megawati’s willingness to stand by the armed forces to her needing it until she finishes her term in 2004, and to her credentials as a nationalist.

She wants to hold the republic together, prevent any dismemberment that separatism by Aceh or other any province would cause — and keep intact the nation as it was under

her father, Indonesia’s founding President Sukarno.—Dawn/InterPress Service.