JAKARTA, 1 February 2005 — Talks to end a decades-long conflict in Indonesia’s tsunami-stricken Aceh province could be on a fast track to nowhere unless there are changes in positions and negotiating approaches, analysts said yesterday.
Senior Indonesian and separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) officials had said after weekend meetings in Helsinki — the first such talks between the sides in nearly two years — they agreed to work toward a lasting peace to help rebuild Aceh, which took the brunt of the Dec. 26 tsunami.
GAM leader Malik Mahmud, in self-exile in Sweden, spoke of “differences that need to be ironed out” but said the two delegations had formed “a close relationship”.
Little else that was concrete emerged from the negotiations, however, and political analysts agree that as there appear to be no changes in the two sides’ positions on issues of autonomy and independence, how they can break a deadlock is not clear.
“I’m pessimistic in the long term because there are some nonnegotiable issues. GAM insists on independence. The government insists Aceh will never be allowed to secede. It’s hard to get around that and see how you are going to have a dignified solution,” said Ken Conboy, country manager at Risk Management Advisory in Jakarta.
The tsunami disaster left more than 230,000 of Aceh’s four million people missing or dead, and devastated major sections of its infrastructure.
The tragedy helped bring about the Helsinki talks with both sides under pressure from the international community, which is pouring aid into the province, to try to reconcile the differences behind a simmering civil war.
More than 12,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the war and the prospect it will continue raises questions about the safety of aid workers and the incentives for investors and donors to provide the billions needed for reconstruction in the gas-rich province at Indonesia’s extreme northwest corner.
The Helsinki meeting would not necessarily do any harm, said Wimar Witoelar, a commentator and former presidential adviser, “but I fail to see how some people living in Stockholm and some government officials without real power in Indonesia can meet in a place like Helsinki and produce anything significant”.
“I think the further you leave Aceh for a conference table in Scandinavia, the less probable a solution will come out.”
Although the fighters in Aceh pay lip service to their officials halfway around the world, experts say in practice some factions consider the Swedish leadership out of touch with realities on the ground and tend to go their own way.
Similar comments on the importance of negotiating in Aceh itself came from Indonesian Parliament member Suripto, a leader of the Prosperous Justice Party, a conservative Muslim party that is a rising political force. “GAM has many factions and none of them are dominant, especially those that are based abroad. If they achieve an agreement, it would not be implemented by the groups in Aceh.”
“We should talk with GAM members who are in the field, those who carry weapons, not the elites who like to talk on TV or radio,” said Suripto. GAM issued a declaration of independence for Aceh at the end of 1976. As military efforts to crush the rebellion intensified in the late 1970s, top GAM leaders left for Sweden, where they hoped both to find refuge and generate international support.
Suripto said he thought both sides had common goals after the tsunami, but it was not clear what the government would be willing to offer the rebels politically.
A preliminary peace deal reached in 2002 fell apart partly over the issue of autonomy.
The government view was that autonomy could not give way to full independence. GAM officials see autonomy as an interim step toward just that.
Proposals for a referendum on independence, meanwhile, run aground on the government’s bottom line, since to accept holding such a referendum, even years into the future, would be to accept in principle that an independent Aceh is at least a possibility. The autonomy Jakarta has offered Aceh is not visibly different from its past positions, which included major concessions toward self-rule, Islamic law, and a bigger piece of the economic pie from the province’s resources — but not independence. A government offer of amnesty for GAM rebels appears to amount to saying if they yield their weapons they will not be imprisoned, leaving their political demands hanging.
