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  The rebels themselves were hard-pressed. GAM leader Nur Djuli was based in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, where he acted as the intermediary between the network of fighters and supporters inside Aceh and the movement’s top leadership, which was based in Sweden and grouped around Hasan di Tiro, a descendant of the most famous leader of the late nineteenth-century resistance to Dutch annexation, Cik di Tiro. With tolerance from the Malaysian police force’s Special Branch, whose British-run antecedents had helped his older brother in the Aceh component of the Darul Islam rebellion against Sukarno’s republic in the 1950s, Nur Djuli had been a low-profile point of contact, always careful not to break any Malaysian laws and, surprisingly, able to keep his Indonesian passport.

  By 2004 the sheer weight of the Indonesian military and intelligence pressure was starting to tell. About a quarter of GAM’s 5,000 armed fighters had been lost. “Not only were we no longer able to support from outside, but unit after unit of our people lost contact,” Nur Djuli recalls. “For the unit in North Aceh to contact the unit in East Aceh, which is very near, it had to go through satellite communication with us, and eventually that was cut off. The provider in Medan was stopped. Usually we paid him, and that stopped. We were also collapsing: complete isolation. Then they sent these special troops that can stay and watch for a couple of days; when you go on an operation, you come back and relax and one by one you are stabbed from behind. This was a deep secret: we pretended we were very strong.”

  Shadia Mahaban had been balancing two of the most difficult and dangerous roles for anyone in the separatist movement. Educated in Jakarta and abroad, and accomplished in the English language, she had secured herself a job as a translator on the staff of the Indonesian general running the Aceh campaign, Bambang Dharmono, who was unaware of her Acehnese ethnicity. For eighteen months she had been a spy inside the military command, reporting to the GAM intelligence chief, Irwandi Jusuf. When Dharmono’s troops had encircled a GAM stronghold at a place called Cot Trieng, near Lhokseumawe, in November 2002, she was feeding out tactical information to Irwandi. “It was a crazy game,” Mahaban says. “I could have been killed.”

  By the time martial law had been imposed, she had left Dharmono’s office and was working for foreign journalists as a local contributor. These included an American, Billy Nessen, whom she married. When Nessen went into the jungle to see GAM in operation (after a trial, Nur Djuli says, to see if he was a CIA or Mossad agent), Mahaban’s position became more precarious.

  Then, as the big army operation started, the Indonesians intercepted a satellite phone call between Irwandi and another GAM operative. Irwandi was pinpointed at Mahaban’s house in Banda Aceh. A security raid found documents identifying her as the woman who had worked for General Dharmono, and a follow-up raid on her mother’s house in Jakarta found incriminating material carelessly left there by another GAM member.

  Mahaban decided to get out. But before that she tried to explain herself to Dharmono. “We’d been close—he’d told me all sorts of stories about his son, his family, his life,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘I can’t betray this person just like that.’ So I went to the military compound. It was insane; they could have killed me. But I felt I needed to see him for the last time. He refused to see me. He sent a note out saying he was busy. That’s it. His adjutant asked for my identity card, the first time I had been asked for ID. I had three or four fake IDs at that time, so I gave one with my address in Jakarta. He photocopied it, and said to leave. My becak [pedicab] was waiting outside. But they didn’t arrest me. Maybe they were not sure who I was working for, perhaps the US embassy.”

  She got on a flight to Bangkok with her two young children and from there obtained political asylum in the United States. Nessen came out of the jungle in a surrender supervised by the US embassy. He was put on trial for visa and other violations and sentenced to eleven years in jail but was deported after just forty-five days in custody.

  In classic guerrilla war theory, setbacks do not necessarily mean a losing game. To hold out is often enough to deny the enemy victory or conclusion. The massive Indonesian military deployment in Aceh had no discernible “exit strategy.” Already the strain was showing: there were firefights between army and police units, suicides of soldiers, and shooting rampages by troops on their way back from war duty. The vicious nature of the campaign was also swelling the rebel ranks, with some recruits being former soldiers or police who defected with their weapons. GAM simply had to hold out in the jungle-covered mountains of the Aceh hinterland and wait.

  According to Nur Djuli and others, however, there was a realization that the settings in both Indonesian and world diplomacy had made the chances of support for independence as remote as victory in the field. Since 1977, when Hasan di Tiro had declared his rebellion to restore a successor state to the Aceh sultanate that had preceded Dutch conquest, his movement had attracted no foreign support, apart from the tacit sympathy of some elements in Malaysia (where some states had historical links to Aceh) and a period of military training for 300 cadres in Gaddhafi’s Libya during the late 1980s.

  “We in GAM understood very well that it was not possible to fight militarily to win,” Nur Djuli says. “But we were waiting, although the term came later, for the ‘Balkanisation’ of Indonesia. A Singapore think-tank at that time thought Indonesia would break up into six components. So we had this war of attrition, a problem here and there and it would collapse. Indonesia was being described as a pariah state. It could not maintain the war anymore because investment was not coming and so on. We were waiting for that. Then something happened: Suharto fell, and then: decentralisation.”

  As we have seen, one of several reforms introduced by Suharto’s successor, B. J. Habibie, was to devolve financial powers and government responsibility to provincial and third-tier district and municipal governments, whose leaders after 2005 were chosen by election rather than appointed by Jakarta. “It was decentralisation that killed our theory of Indonesia collapsing,” Nur Djuli says.

  The post-Suharto reformasi period also brought forward political figures from South Sulawesi, historically a region of independent-minded seafarers and traders of strong Islamic faith, where an Islamist rebellion under Kahar Muzzakar allied itself with Darul Islam in Aceh and West Java. Habibie was one of them; Jusuf Kalla, a Bugis businessman turned Golkar politician, was another. “The south Celebes [Sulawesi] people, the traditional ally of Acehnese people, the Kahar Muzzakar people, they are still there, but no longer interested, because they have enough for them,” Nur Djuli says. “They can build up their economy, they have their Kalla, their Habibie, they are no longer interested. So Aceh is left alone to fight. With Papua, East Timor, Maluku, but there’s no strength in that.”

  In addition, Jakarta had adroitly played the “religious card” to outflank the GAM on its home ground. Aceh had long had internal rivalry between its hierarchies of Islamic scholars, the ulema and the ulèëbalang, a class of local rulers who controlled the coastal trading ports and other sources of wealth. After the Dutch’s disastrous seizure of Banda Aceh in the 1870s, which cost them 30,000 deaths from fighting and disease, they had taken the advice of a savvy “native affairs” adviser, Christiaan Snoucke Hugronje, and suborned most of the ulèëbalang aristocratic class, putting them on the payroll and ceding local administrative powers to them. In early 1942, as the Dutch East Indies surrendered to imperial Japan, the ulema mounted an uprising against the ulèëbalang and welcomed the invaders. After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the ulema repeated the bloodbath, achieving what the scholar Anthony Reid calls the “most profound social revolution anywhere in the Archipelago”—in contrast to the rise elsewhere of many elements of the aristocratic classes, such as Java’s priyayi, to republican leadership and elite circles.

  Aceh was the only region the Dutch did not attempt to reoccupy over the years 1945–49, remaining a bastion of support for the distant Indonesian l
eadership. It even bought two DC-3 aircraft, which became vital links to the outside world for independence leaders. Its nineteenth-century anti-Dutch heroes were appropriated by the new republic, being used in street names from city to city, despite their struggle having nothing to do with the future Indonesia.

  In 2000–1, the government in Jakarta, under Abdurrahman Wahid, a hereditary ulema from East Java who headed Indonesia’s biggest mass Islamic organization, borrowed the Snoucke Hugronje formula, but in reverse. He elevated the Aceh ulema’s role by applying Syari’ah law in the province and conferring the traditional name of the old sultanate, Nanggroe Aceh Darussalaam (State of Aceh, Abode of Happiness). “GAM lost that game, and the national parties and the ulama won it, the campaign game of Islamisation in Aceh,” Mahaban says.

  When the tsunami hit, Nur Djuli watched in Kuala Lumpur the news of mounting casualties. He called Hasan di Tiro’s office and got approval for a unilateral declaration of ceasefire. It was only on the third day after the disaster, however, that he made contact with the local commander in Banda Aceh.

  “What am I doing here?” the man asked him. “The enemy was gone: 30,000 Indonesian troops sitting along the coast were all gone.” (Indonesia has never confirmed the number of soldiers it lost, but it would be at least two-thirds of that figure.) The commander’s own village was gone, and he was camped on a hill outside town.

  Nur Djuli told him to wait while he talked with Red Cross representatives and the US military attaché in Malaysia, whom he knew well.

  Three days later the commander reported an attack. The Indonesian army, or at least its surviving elements on the ground, was still operating to instructions that had been issued before the tsunami, in the apparent absence of new orders from above.

  GAM came under heavy foreign pressure to enter into peace negotiations, with the Americans insisting it had to be based on acceptance of autonomy for Aceh within the Indonesian state, but otherwise unconditional.

  The same pressure was being applied to the Indonesian government, which was urged to start negotiations and offer substantial concessions. By this time, the international community had a far more flexible and worldly president to deal with.

  Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came out of the army. In the 2004 direct elections for the presidency, however, he had worn a civilian suit and run at the head of his own newly formed party, the Partai Democrat (PD, Democratic Party), which appealed to voters in a liberal, secular way. In the first round of voting, he emerged as a front-runner, second only to Megawati. In the runoff election, he pushed ahead with the support of the third-running Golkar, which was achieving some success in shaking off its image as the democratic prop of the Suharto regime. Crucially for Aceh, Yudhoyono’s vice president was a Golkar politician from South Sulawesi, Jusuf Kalla.

  Persuaded by the dimensions of the disaster in Aceh, by offers of massive foreign aid for the region’s recovery, and by suggestions that it was an ideal time to put a savage chapter behind Indonesia, Yudhoyono appointed Kalla to supervise peace negotiations with GAM. That, at least, is the official account. Others have Kalla himself issuing a legally dubious “vice-presidential decree” for Aceh relief, which allowed international agencies to be involved on the ground. Later, Kalla seems to have made vital decisions in the peace talks without referring them to the president.

  Even so, GAM negotiators, such as Nur Djuli and Mahaban, credit Yudhoyono with covering Kalla’s back in Jakarta’s prickly nationalist circles. “SBY without Jusuf Kalla: it would not have been possible,” Nur Djuli says. “Kalla without SBY: not possible. SBY controlled the military. He blocked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—there was no intervention from them at all.”

  According to an account by the Indonesian negotiator Hamid Awaluddin, who was reporting directly to Kalla, Yudhoyono covertly met with GAM leaders brought down from Aceh in mid-January 2005. Then, a week before talks (to be chaired by the former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari) opened on February 25 in Helsinki, Yudhoyono abruptly replaced Riyamizard Ryucudu, the hawkish army chief installed by Megawati in the closing weeks of her presidency, who was still pushing for a military solution in Aceh. The new man was a moderate general, Djoko Santoso, who promised to keep the troops under control, in line with the peace initiative.

  Nur Djuli says the talks opened with GAM hiding its weakness. “Previously we had our commander ready to reopen the attack if talks failed,” he recalls. “It was very strong for a negotiator to have that, to know that you have tigers behind you. But this is different. This is really a poker game. Our troops were collapsed. No communications, no logistics.”

  The two sides closed the first round of talks, with GAM insisting on a ceasefire and Indonesia refusing until GAM explicitly abandoned its independence aim and its demand for a referendum. Ahtisaari got them back to the table the next month with a formula asserting that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

  When they returned, the Acehnese heard Ahtisaari talking on television about a solution involving “self-government” for Aceh. Although he first blustered that this was the same as the “special autonomy” the Indonesians were offering, he eventually agreed to switch to this broader notion, which didn’t carry the baggage of East Timor’s and Papua’s experiences of Indonesian backtracking and cheating while offering “autonomy.”

  Despite wistful references by GAM negotiators to Aceh’s past as a functioning, independent state—with diplomatic links to Europe, the United States, and Turkey for centuries before the 1873 Dutch annexation (and certainly decades before the idea of an Indonesian state covering the entire Netherlands East Indies began to stir in 1908)—the two sides moved toward an agreement in July 2005.

  A last-minute hitch developed over the Acehnese insistence on being allowed to form locally organized and named political parties to contest elections for self-government. Awaluddin woke the vice president at 3 a.m. Jakarta time, after Ahtisaari opined that it was a deal breaker. Kalla and Awaluddin had a relationship of trust from their earlier negotiation of settlements for the Muslim-Christian civil wars that had broken out in Poso and Ambon soon after Suharto’s fall, stirred by thousands of Arab-garbed Laskar Jihad (Soldiers of Holy War) who had been sent in by army black ops circles.

  Speaking in their native Bugis dialect, Kalla quickly came back to Awaluddin with advice from a constitutional court judge that local parties would not necessarily be unconstitutional. Kalla ticked off the concession. The peace agreement was signed in Helsinki on August 15, 2005.

  Banda Aceh became a monument to this switch from force to compromise, although Kalla and Awaluddin later fell out with Yudhoyono over who deserved primary credit in a team effort that might have otherwise earned a Nobel Peace Prize.

  A casual look at Aceh now finds little evidence of the earthquake and tsunami damage, aside from some preserved incongruences kept as reminders, chiefly large boats stranded far inland. Two quiet parks, as large as football fields, cover mass graves for over 50,000 unidentified bodies. In small pavilions, there are people sitting quietly in prayer or meditation. Nearly everyone has missing relatives and friends.

  The experience of self-government has brought the usual compromises and disappointments. Shadia Mahaban’s former spymaster, Irwandi Yusuf, ran for election in 2006 and became the first locally elected governor of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam in early 2007. This former veterinarian set out to run a “green” administration, freezing forestry concessions and introducing a carbon-trading system. By 2011, however, he was enveloped in controversy over a permit for clearing a tract of coastal peat swamp, the habitat of many Sumatran orangutans, for a palm-oil plantation. His good record in public health clinics and repairing roads did not outweigh allegations of cronyism in contracts, which he is contesting. In 2012 he was defeated by former GAM colleagues in their new Aceh Party and, into the bargain, was beaten up by their followers for “splitting” the struggle when
he ran as an independent.

  Hasan di Tiro returned to Aceh briefly in 2008, and permanently the next year, but did not take up the constitutional position of Wali Nanggroe, a formal guardianship of Acehnese tradition that had been created for him. He died in 2010, a day after his Indonesian citizenship was restored. An estimated 4 million people, equivalent to Aceh’s entire population, watched his funeral procession to burial at Indrapuri, a place next to an extinct volcano rising out of the coastal plain near Banda Aceh. The grave, covered by smooth river boulders in a simple concrete enclosure, is scarcely visited.

  The influx of foreign military personnel and aid workers after the tsunami ripped open the shroud of secrecy and propaganda around Aceh. “When I studied in Jakarta, I cried many times because no one would believe what I was telling them about the situation,” Shadia Mahaban says. “It was as if I am telling some kind of propaganda story.”

  When she returned in January 2006, after receiving an amnesty from Jakarta, it was different. The “nonorganic” soldiers and police from outside Aceh were being withdrawn, and civilian Indonesians were getting involved in the decommissioning of GAM’s armory, so carefully built up over nearly four decades. The civilians were listening to stories of the conflict as well as of the tsunami.

  Several years later, Aceh itself was starting to show some risks of slipping back into tension with Jakarta. The Helsinki agreement had not been followed up, or had been distorted, in the eyes of many Acehnese, in some key areas by its supposedly “enabling” legislation. For one thing, the promised truth-and-reconciliation commission to address human rights abuses had not been established, even eight years on. Jakarta was still hostile to the flying of the old crescent-and-star flag of GAM as the provincial colors, alongside the red-and-white national flag, despite having conceded in Helsinki the right to an Acehnese flag and emblem. For Jakarta, it remained a symbol of separatism, not local cultural identity.