Acheh Support Group: Tsunami tragedy in Acheh increases suffering

Ethnic cleansing?

The most inflammatory charge against GAM is that it has engaged in ethnic cleansing. With its image of bloodied families heaped and scattered across the ground, this charge is intended to set off alarm bells. Here it rings hollow.

Of the many ethnic groups in Acheh, GAM has had conflict with one only, the Javanese. The several hundred thousand Javanese differ from the other minority groups in three ways.

First, they are not indigenous to the region, having all come in the last hundred years, most as part of Suharto’s transmigration program, many during Dutch colonisation.

Second, they are from the country’s dominant ethnic group. Third, and most critically, for years thousands of Javanese men have acted alongside government soldiers as village militia forces and anti-GAM combatants.

As proof of the deep-seated enmity toward the Javanese, critics point to GAM’s view (widely shared in much of Indonesia) that Java merely replaced Holland as the ruler of the archipelago, to the anti-Javanese invectives of GAM founder Hasan di Tiro and to GAM’s conception of a sovereign Acheh, which critics say is backward-looking and even racist.
GAM’s nationalism does look back - but only to a past sovereignty. And it looks forward not to a purified ethnic nation-state, but to a multi-ethnic country. GAM includes many members of minority groups, including at the highest levels.

The top commander in Central Acheh is a Gayo, and in Tamiang, two of the four district GAM chiefs are Javanese, with numerous Javanese fighters under them.

Still, it helps to hear the critics. A 2002 report of the International Crisis Group states that in Central Acheh, where the bulk of long-term Javanese settlers live, ‘there were raids by GAM guerrillas and local sympathisers on Javanese communities in which people were killed, houses looted and burned.’ In fact, the situation was far more complicated.

Coordinated by the TNI, armed Javanese ‘self-defence’ groups gathered intelligence on GAM, manned checkpoints, patrolled roads, and participated in offensive actions against Achehnese villages.

Army units and Javanese militias reportedly killed at least several hundred Achehnese civilians during the first months of 2001. Tens of thousands of Achehnese fled northward, their valuables looted and homes razed.

No one has accused GAM of violence against Javanese women, children and the elderly.

Honestly or not, GAM has said that Javanese are welcome back after independence.

A right to secede?

Many people think Acheh doesn’t have a right to separate from Indonesia because the Achehnese were part of the Indonesian independence struggle against the Dutch in 1945–49. Once having agreed to join, they are forbidden to leave. Foreign governments and observers insist this is a basic principle of international law.
But there’s another view of international law that has the backing of a solid body of scholarly literature. In this view, peoples do have a right to secede from an existing state, so long as they are persistent, the crimes against them are great, and they meet certain criteria.

Those criteria boil down to two sets of points. First, secession can’t make the original country more vulnerable to external aggression, leave it in disconnected pieces, block its access to the sea, or remove its economic base. None of these apply to Acheh.

Second, the future country must be a viable entity, in which the majority of people support separation. They must share a strong sense of identity (based on language, religion, traditions, or history) and have exhausted other courses of resolving their problems.

International recognition of the secession of four Yugoslav republics was contingent on additional criteria: a democratic government and protection of minorities.

In addition to the ex-Yugoslav republics, there have been several notable instances of secession, including Bangladesh and Eritrea.

Most suggestively, the Papua New Guinea government and the people of Bougainville agreed in 2001 to allow the province progressively greater autonomy during a ten-year period, culminating in an independence referendum.

Independence was the ultimate solution for people suffering under European colonial domination. Why shouldn’t it be available for people, like the Achehnese, experiencing a similar lack of political control, economic exploitation and intolerable human rights abuses?
My guess is that after a few years, it won’t matter much to anyone but the Achehnese that Acheh is independent.