JAKARTA, 22 July 2005 — Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has ordered the armed forces to halt offensives against separatist rebels in Aceh province to honor a new peace deal, a minister said yesterday.
Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said military chief General Endriartono Sutarto left for Aceh yesterday to make sure the order is enforced.
“The military commander is off to Aceh now to explain to the soldiers that there is a political decision to settle it peacefully and so that the armed forces, in line with the president’s demand, restrain themselves,” he said.
Sudarsono was speaking to reporters after a meeting to discuss the draft peace pact with the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) announced Sunday in Helsinki.
Military chief Sutarto, speaking in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh later yesterday, made no immediate comment on the president’s order but said the military “want to see if GAM can really follow what has been agreed” in the draft peace pact in Helsinki.
The pact is scheduled to be signed in Helsinki on August 15, ending close to 30 years of conflict in the province on Sumatra island that has claimed some 15,000 lives.
He said the military would gradually pull out the roughly 30 battalions if the rebels met their part of the deal. An Indonesian battalion consists of between 650 and 1,000 men.
Details of the peace pact are sketchy and Indonesia’s top peace negotiator, Communications and Information Minister Sofyan Djalil, has said the finer points would be unveiled only once it was signed.
GAM launched its separatist campaign in 1976. The two sides agreed a truce in December 2002 but this soon broke down with both camps exchanging accusations of violations.
In May 2003 Jakarta declared martial law in Aceh and launched a major military offensive against the rebels.
Renewed efforts to make peace were prompted by last December’s tsunami, which killed an estimated 131,000 people in the province.
Listen to Militants, Indonesian President Tells Interfaith Meeting
The voice of the militants should also be heard in inter-religious dialogue, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told the opening of an Asia-Europe interfaith meeting yesterday.
Dialogue should focus on how to cultivate moderate attitudes among people of different faiths but that does not mean that more militant religious followers should be shut out, Yudhoyono said, according to the state Antara news agency.
“The dialogue should involve groups representing all faiths. Every voice including those from the so-called militant groups should be heard,” he told participants of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Interfaith Dialogue in the resort island of Bali.
Yudhoyono expressed hope the Bali meeting would serve as a bridge for people of different faiths to understand each other better and answer the many problems being faced by the international community.
The two-day meeting, organized by the Indonesian and British governments, was attended by officials, intellectuals, religious leaders and journalists from 39 Asian and European countries.
Indonesia has seen sectarian violence pitting Christians and Muslims in recent years.
Muslim-Christian clashes killed more than 5,000 people in the eastern Maluku islands between 1999 and 2002.
A similar conflict has killed more than 3,000 in Central Sulawesi province since 2000. Both regions have balanced Muslim-Christian populations.
The chairman of Indonesia’s second largest Islamic movement, Muhammadiyah, Din Syamsuddin, told the meeting that global injustice was at the root of religious militancy affecting the world.
Syamsuddin said wealth gaps, discrimination and the hegemony of certain powers led to tension and conflicts.
The Bali meeting is expected to result in a set of recommendations to promote interfaith harmony among members of the international community.
Militant Gets Three and a Half Years for Embassy Bombing
An Indonesian district court sentenced to three years and six months in prison yesterday the first of six suspected militants charged in a bombing outside the Australian embassy that left 11 people dead.
The South Jakarta district court found Irun Hidayat, 33, guilty of violating anti-terrorism laws — enacted just weeks after the October 2002 Bali bombings that left 202 people dead — in the suicide bombing last September that also wounded some 100 people in a busy central Jakarta business district.
