Neighbors recall incessant screams and gunshots from inside, and the sight of prisoners being hanged by their thumbs from a tree in the garden. “I saw and heard the terrible things that were happening, but I didn’t have the power to do anything,” says Rukiah, 38, who lives next door. “I prayed.” (Like many Indonesians, he uses a single name.) Syahkubat, a 45-year-old neighbor, tells of being imprisoned and tortured in the house for three months in 1997. He was leading his buffalo out to graze when troops seized him on suspicion of aiding the guerrillas. His captors interrogated him with electrical shocks and knocked out his front teeth. He says that between torture sessions he was put to work gathering coconuts and watering a marijuana patch belonging to the soldiers.
The Army pulled out of the village a year ago, and a mob of furious townspeople quickly destroyed the abandoned house. Human-rights investigators later found several dead bodies buried on the property, along with the remains of various severed body parts. A coconut palm had been used as an execution stake. Its trunk is still black with dried blood and pitted with bullet holes. Many villagers say they felt scant sympathy for the guerrillas before military rule began a decade ago. Now the villagers, blaming the Indonesian government for the Army’s atrocities, are rallying to the separatists’ outlawed Free Aceh flag. “I support GAM,” declares Syahkubat. “If I had a gun I would join them.”
Aceh is only the bloodiest spot on a disintegrating map. Separatist rage, fed by decades of economic exploitation and military repression, is erupting across the country. “Indonesia is the next Yugoslavia,” says Rampagoe Kleng, a GAM political organizer. From 1967 until 1997, President Suharto kept the country together by brute force. After his fall last year, it now seems doubtful that any leader can unite the nation’s 210 million ethnically and religiously disparate inhabitants, scattered across 13,000 islands and five time zones. On Aug. 30, after a 23-year war for independence, some 450,000 East Timorese will vote in a U.N.-supervised independence referendum, but no one is quite sure Jakarta will respect their choice if, as expected, they vote to secede.
The Aceh separatists boast that their best recruiter is the ham-fisted Indonesian government. “Our biggest problem used to be how to get people to support a Free Aceh,” says Zakaria Ahmad, deputy commander of a rural guerrilla unit. “But Jakarta’s troops are convincing them for us.” The independent Aceh Human Rights Forum has compiled a tally of the war’s victims from 1989, when Suharto put the natural-gas-rich province under virtual martial law, through August 1998, when his successor, B. J. Habibie, vowed to stop the bloodshed. During that nine-year span, the forum says, government forces were responsible for the confirmed deaths of 1,300 Acehnese, mostly civilians, the disappearances of nearly 2,000 others and the torture of some 3,500. Since then, the military says, about 450 people have been killed despite Habibie’s promises. Clementino Dos Reis Amaral, a member of Indonesia’s independent National Commission on Human Rights, warns: “If the Army and police continue their daily human-rights offenses, they will push everyone into supporting separatism.”
The unrest keeps spreading. Resource-rich provinces such as oil-producing Riau, also on Sumatra, are threatening to follow Aceh’s lead unless Jakarta grants them more autonomy and a better share of the profits. In the small multi-island province of Maluku, the original Spice Islands, sectarian fighting between Christians and Muslims has killed more than 400 people this year, destroying whole villages and inadvertently helping local separatists defy central rule. Even blowgun-wielding tribesmen in Irian Jaya, on the island of New Guinea, are waging a small but growing war against Jakarta’s troops.
The disintegrating country is planning to swear in a new president by the end of the year. The leader, as yet unnamed, is expected to be a living national symbol: opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri. She will need all the help she can get from the public’s reverence for her father, Sukarno, the independence leader and first president of Indonesia. Although Megawati has said she opposes the East Timor referendum, she has promised to abide by its results.
She rejects the very idea of such a vote on Aceh’s future. But somehow she promises she will stop the killing in the province, which was a bastion of resistance to the return of Dutch colonial rule after World War II. Indonesia’s history texts honor the patriotic devotion of Aceh’s people, who sold their gold and jewelry to buy the fledgling Indonesian Air Force its first plane. In one emotional speech recently, Megawati swore: “I will not let even a drop of blood touch the soil of Aceh, which has sacrificed so much for an independent Indonesia.”
The guerrillas may not let her keep that promise. Habibie tried to roll back the conflict last August. He and his armed forces chief, General Wiranto, declared an end to military rule in Aceh, apologized to the province’s people, announced a pullout of some combat troops and promised to investigate the military abuses. The effort fell apart late last year after seven off-duty soldiers were dragged off a bus and murdered, presumably by GAM. Within a few months troops were pouring back to the war zone. In late May, soldiers opened fire on a crowd of several thousand peaceful protesters in Aceh’s largest town, the natural-gas center of Lhokseumawe, killing 42 and wounding more than 100. Many victims were shot in the back as they scrambled to escape. More than 150,000 Acehnese have fled the inland villages, taking shelter in squalid camps.
The refugee centers, mostly crowded inside the compounds of coastal mosques, provide perfect enlistment centers for the guerrillas. The fearful inhabitants, huddled with their families under makeshift plastic tents, have little to do all day besides mull their grievances against Jakarta and listen to speeches by GAM’s ubiquitous organizers.
Meanwhile Jakarta is offering no plausible alternative. Last week General Wiranto jetted to the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. He spoke of a possible amnesty for the guerrillas and threatened in the next breath to impose a state of emergency if they don’t stop attacking his soldiers. He said Habibie’s entire cabinet would visit Aceh this week to hear people’s complaints. Most Acehnese shrugged. Habibie himself paid a visit earlier this year. He offered a lot of promises, and 112 student protesters were arrested and beaten. The abuses–and the war–didn’t stop.
Aceh’s moderates, a dwindling breed, cling to hope. Maybe this time Jakarta will take their demands seriously. They want an immediate withdrawal of the government’s combat troops and a serious investigation of past abuses. They want Aceh to get a much bigger piece of its natural-gas earnings. They want open talks on the future of the province. The guerrillas don’t look worried. There seems little risk Jakarta will come to its senses and put them out of business.
