'Martial Law' in Aceh, and tsunami notes. posted by Richard Seymour

December 25th, 2004, the Indonesian military cheerfully announced to the world's press that it had killed eighteen guerillas in Aceh, a province on the north-west tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. I don't think this made British television news. It would have spoiled the Queen's Speech (for those who missed that particular barnstormer, Her Majesty defied convention, calling for tolerance and pleasantness).

At any rate, 18 corpses was quite an inauspicious achievement by the standards of the Indonesian military (TNI). Previously, General Sutarto had told the Jakarta Post that since martial law was imposed in May 2003, TNI had successfully killed 3,216 Acehnese rebels. Amnesty International, for their part, reported that TNI had engaged in torture and extra-judicial killings as well as "rape and other forms of sexual violence" . (I don't know about you, but I can't imagine and don't care to imagine what those "other forms of sexual violence" might be.) The report also mentions the destruction of homes and property, the expulsion of residents, the conscription of children and adult civilians into military operations.

'Martial law' (in reality a military occupation) was imposed in the first place as the necessary prelude to a ferocious assault on the GAM, who control large swathes of Aceh. The GAM had gained in strength during the brutal Suharto years, and in 1998 - when the dictatorship was overthrown by an uprising of students and the poor - evidence emerged of 'rape centres' and torture used by TNI. (This was familiar from East Timor - Jose Ramos Horta smuggled out photos of Indonesian troops hanging prisoners by chains, shoving steel poles down their throats, forcing them to eat dirt, applying electric shocks to their genitalia, and burying bodies in unmarked graves at night.) While a limited 'peace process' had been attempted by the former president Abdurrahman Wahid in 2000, the military had moved to sabotage any rapprochement, in particular by arresting five GAM negotiators. Wahid's successor was his vice-president Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose priority was the preservation of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia - a popular stance among the country's political and military elite after the loss of East Timor. Megawati began to severely curtail press freedom , explaining that:

We, the government, feel very grateful and respectful of press freedom. But now it is the obligation of the press to maintain and guard this freedom.…[T]he responsibility of the national press lies in its professionalism to protect and promote national unity.

There followed not merely legal restrictions, but also physical attacks on journalists . The military, of course, took a keen interest in ensuring that all news was published "in the spirit of nationalism" .

As 'martial law' began, Indonesian hawk fighter jets (guess where they bought those from?) were pounding GAM bases . About 40,000 troops and police, backed by aircraft, warships, armour and artillery were deployed, according to Agence France Press . Eye-witness reports on life under the military speak of beatings meted out to farmers suspected of giving food to rebels. Others would just "disappear" . The Indonesian military, it was said, found it difficult to tell the difference between civilians and rebels - so they murdered both.

In May 2004, 'martial law' was transformed into a 'civil emergency', in which the region was nominally put back under the control of a civilian administration. This was largely a cosmetic change. Troops remained. Neither the checkpoints, nor the house searches ceased. For that matter, torture, rape and murder (there's a triptych to decorate TNI headquarters) didn't absent themselves either.

Since the tsunami struck, there has been some detail emerging about TNI control hampering the delivery of aid , while refugees from Aceh report that Indonesian troops have executed several tsunami victims . And now the Indonesian government has announced that it would like all foreign military troops assisting aid to withdraw by the end of march - to be replaced by three more battalions of Indonesian soldiers and one battalion of "mobile brigade" police, which the New York Times reports is "generally the force most feared by civilians in Aceh. The brigades are regularly described by civilians as being the most brutal of the array of forces here."

After the tsunami, the stormtroopers. The GAM has offered another ceasefire , but it is being ignored. Part of the reason for this escalation is that the military occupation has not achieved its end - quite the reverse. A perceptive article in Dissident Voice reports that while only a few hundred GAM activists had been operative in Aceh before 'martial law', "Gen. Sutarto stated that GAM had 10,000 guerrillas by May 2003":

Human rights activist Muhammad Isa noted last year that “when Aceh was declared a military operations zone, there were only a few hundred GAM insurgents in Pidie, North Aceh and East Aceh. Now, there are a lot more throughout Aceh.” Indonesia specialist Edward Aspinall wrote: “Many journalists and others who interviewed new GAM recruits in rural Aceh in 1999 noted that many of them were motivated by a desire to exact revenge for family members who had been killed, tortured or sexually abused by security forces earlier in the decade.”

The first lesson of war: the more one murders and maims, the more one is obliged to murder and maim. This is a war that cannot be won by the Indonesian military without butchering thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Acehnese. Once again, we know who these purveyors of perverse violence can rely on for support .

(Acknowledgements: The above is a very rough first draft of an article that may see the light of day. Since I won't be able to later, I'd like now to take the time to acknowledge the assistance of Tim Shorrock who has his own excellent blog and has written a great deal about Aceh. Bat also provided several useful links.)

Tsunami notes...

It would be remiss not to remember the plight of the oppressed Christians in America at this tragic time. A missionary group based in Virginia has kidnapped about 300 Muslim kids from Aceh and taken them to Jakarta. Describing them as 'orphans', they hope to raise them in a Christian children's home in the Indonesian capital. According to the website of the group, WorldHelp :

"These children are homeless, destitute, traumatized, orphaned, with nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. If we can place them in a Christian children's home, their faith in Christ could become the foothold to reach the Aceh people."

It is worth pointing out that the page on which these words appeared has been removed , but luckily Google has it cached .

And some good news! Natural disasters often destroy productive capacity and send share prices skittling downwards, but the Asian stock market has been largely unaffected by the tsunami.