How Many Weapons Did the Aceh GAM Have?: The Pathetic Pretense for Indonesian Terror

With the release today of the final Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Indonesia and GAM the fact has now been revealed that the GAM -- the pretense for TNI - POLRI's massive terror in Aceh -- has all of 840 weapons, barely enough to fill one big truck. At least that's the figure they declare in the document, and though the tally may not be totally honest, people familiar with GAM say that it cannot be that far from the truth.

The MOU also says that TNI - POLRI will for the moment openly keep 23,800 troops in Aceh, half or more of what they have now, and a figure roughly equivalent to their troop levels during many recent years. This gives the lie to the widely reported claim in recent weeks that TNI - POLRI would be pulling out, and heightens the question of their rationale for being there at all once the GAM has fully disarmed.

In any event, the troop numbers aren't that crucial, what matters is who's in control (the Indonesian government and TNI - POLRI) and what their policy is (no free speech, repression). As one local human rights monitor put when discussing the MOU clause that temporarily limits troop movements to one platoon (about 100 men in the TNI system): "it only takes one platoon to do a massacre or to start a riot."

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Clarity Achieved, Oppressors Still in Place: A Deal Disarms One Side in Aceh

Today (August 15, 2005) the Aceh Freedom Movement (GAM, Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) will sign a deal with the government of Indonesia under which they agree to disarm and accept amnesty, money and farmland. They will be allowed to form a local political party in exchange for a political vow of silence: under Indonesian law the party will not be allowed to stand for what GAM has always stood for -- independence for Aceh, or at least a referendum vote on independence.

The TNI - POLRI (the Indonesian national armed forces and police), which has slaughtered many thousands of Acehnese civilians (GAM has also killed some, but a fraction as many), will temporarily withdraw some of its troops, but will have the long term right to bring them back at its pleasure since Jakarta remains Aceh's sovereign.

Even now in the upcoming transition months, when a couple of hundred foreign monitors will be present, troops from some of the most notorious military and police units can remain in Aceh: Intel operatives who run the torture houses, Air Force men who have bombed villages, and BRIMOB police who abduct and rape at checkpoints can stay so long as they are technically classified as "organic" elements. And outside and above the formal terms of the deal -- activists and military people agree -- the US-trained Kopassus special forces, the most feared of all, can also stay in Aceh, working undercover and applying the "tactic and technique" of "terror" and "kidnapping," as one of their classified training manuals puts it (Buku Petunjuk tentang Sandi Yudha TNI AD, Nomor: 43-B-01).

This deal has been portrayed as a TNI withdrawal and an Aceh peace deal. It is neither -- the TNI - POLRI stay, and they get to keep their weapons and use them at will -- and it is they who have been the main peace violators, doing the vast majority of civilian killings, tortures, arsons, rapes, disappearances, thefts, extortions, and arbitrary detentions .

But the deal does change the situation in a major way in that it puts armed GAM out of business, and helpfully clarifies the situation: it is now undeniably TNI - POLRI versus civilians. That has always been the essence of political life in modern Aceh but the world has never seen it because the GAM was futilely shooting at the oppressors and drawing away all outside attention (such as it was) from the TNI - POLRI's killings of civilians.

GAM deserves credit for disarming. They should have done it a long time ago. They were only making matters worse, and now that they're gone, there are possibilities. But their act of self-abnegation should not be misconstrued as a settlement to the Aceh problem, and their de facto vow of silence should not be construed as applying to Acehnese as a whole.

In November, 1999 the Acehnese mounted what was, in proportional terms, one of the largest demonstrations in world history. Perhaps a quarter of the population turned out in Banda Aceh to peacefully call for referendum. Caught completely off guard, the TNI - POLRI moved to crush the civilian movement, knowing that though they could not lose militarily in a shooting war with the GAM, they could well lose politically if the world got to hear peaceful Aceh voices.

That didn't happen. Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, the leading international voice, who had testified before the US congress, was tortured to death upon returning home (his body was found in September, 2000) (see posting below, "Other People's Hands," of September 22, 2004). Others were assassinated, jailed or driven into exile, and the first the world heard of Aceh was when the tsunami struck in December, 2004.

In legal and military terms the Acehnese are still as subordinated as they were before. Though the deal contains two references to the UN covenants on civil and political rights and establishes local institutions like a human rights court (with no specified powers), the same repressive laws that bind all Indonesians still apply to them, and, far more importantly, the TNI - POLRI -- effectively above the law anyway -- still occupy their region.

But in cold pragmatic terms, with the GAM now out of the way there is the chance that dissident speech, though still repressed, might now become politically fruitful. Muhammad Nazar, the best known civilian activist -- who was seen as too big to kill -- was jailed for giving a speech in a village in which he advocated referendum. Word is that he will be released, but if he gives the same speech again he can be jailed -- or worse -- again, but now, post-GAM, there will be a chance for such a sacrifice to draw some meaningful outside attention.

It was such attention that made it possible for East Timor to win independence in different circumstances, but for Aceh that is more difficult since it is historically part of Indonesia, and indeed predates it, while Timor was a foreign land that was invaded by Indonesia, with US backing, in 1975. The loss of a third of their population to TNI - POLRI slaughter gained nothing for the Timorese until the Dili massacre of 1991 drew some outside attention and the acknowledgment that this was an unjustified case of a military killing civilians.

Aceh is also such a case, and the Acehnese have also been dying in vain. If they continue to speak for referendum they will likely continue to die, but they may now get something for it, since the fog of two-sided combat will presumably no longer obscure the one-sided repression by TNI - POLRI.

What they might get is publicity that weakens the TNI/POLRI, and the repressive Indonesian state apparatus generally, and such weakening is the only hope for any substantial democracy, freedom, or justice in Aceh, and in Indonesia as a whole. But those harmful institutions will only be weakened on balance if the US, Europe, Australia and other outside powers can be stopped from using this deal as yet another excuse to try to push through a restoration and/or increase of foreign military and police aid. It was after all the cutting of that aid, in response to grassroots pressure, that cleared the way for the ending of the Timor occupation and, prior to that, the downfall of the US-backed dictator, Gen. Suharto.

So whether this deal helps or hurts will in important part depend on the behavior of outside parties, and it is just such risks and complexities that have made some TNI - POLRI generals reluctant to accept it. Much press coverage and grassroots speculation in Aceh has centered on whether TNI - POLRI and, for that matter, the GAM field fighters, will follow the deal. For many GAM people it is a bitter pill. It is they, and not the big-time killers who will have to lay down their arms, renounce their goal, and prostrate themselves before the enemy state. But at the same time they will get amnesty and will be ostensibly free to return to their homes. For the TNI - POLRI it looks like victory: they get the guns and the right to rule, while Aceh gets a local flag. But this sparring with GAM has been very good to the Jakarta generals. It has helped to justify their dominance of Indonesia and it has made many of them millionaires. It is easy to see why many of them will be sorry to see the armed GAM go.

But Indonesia's President, Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono -- who supervised the Aceh repression and martial law under the previous President, Megawati Sukarnoputri -- takes a more strategic view. He seems to recognize that though TNI needs a two-sided shooting war for self-justification to Indonesians, it doesn't necessarily need two or three of them (The military recently sent 15,000 new Kostrad troops and Kopassus into harshly-repressed Papua in Indonesia's east, which has a lightly-armed rebel movement, and continues to stage violent Christian vs. Muslim provocations in the country's north - central islands), and that the loss of surplus money to be stolen from from a combat-zone Aceh can be more than compensated for by the money to be stolen from increased tsunami aid flows, and the power to be regained by the TNI - POLRI as a whole from new foreign military and police aid. (The military and police can also expect to continue running their rackets in Aceh and nearby North Sumatra, which have included illegal timber, marijuana, prostitution, hijacking, extortion, protection and offshore fishing platforms staffed by press-ganged under-aged boys). It was Gen. Susilo who said that "to demand a referendum" in Aceh "is considered a crime against the state" (Jakarta Post, December 24, 2003), and that principle will still be imposed by force, but he evidently hopes that this deal will now enable Jakarta to be seen from overseas as having somehow changed its stripes.

If Gen. Susilo proves to be right, and the deal brings fresh resources and strength for TNI - POLRI, then his generals' grumbling will have been groundless, and it will be a catastrophe for Indonesia and Aceh. But the officers do have at least one secondary reason for concern: An adviser to Indonesia's businessman vice president, Yusuf Kalla, a principal broker of the Aceh deal, says privately that Kalla will also now become the personal financial broker for newly opened-up international arms deals (the adviser says post-Aceh-deal deals are in sight with Europe, China, and Israel, among others), a lucrative role traditionally played by retired TNI and POLRI generals.

As this is being written -- a couple of hours before the deal signing in Helsinki, Finland -- people are gathering in Aceh's mosques and churches and praying publicly for peace, and perhaps privately for freedom and justice. This deal will deliver none of those things. They are still condemned to live under their oppressors. But it does scramble the situation and open up the outside chance that if they are still brave enough to speak, this time when they are shot down or put in chains, someone on the outside might hear the rattle.

The Things that Terrorists Do: "Kill(ing) and Maim(ing) Defenseless Men, Women and Children," in this Case, in Aceh

In Indonesia's westernmost province of Aceh, an army helicopter has just gone down, undoubtedly stirring mixed reaction among villagers in the area.

On the one hand, the crash -- reported by Jakarta's Metro TV as a shootdown -- killed officers of the hated Indonesian armed forces, TNI, the force that, in effect, occupies Aceh, a historically distinct region that wants independence. But on the other hand it is sure to bring the most terrible retribution if the TNI decides to say that rebel fire brought down the copter.

Day-to-day the TNI abuses Acehnese for fun (the rapes), for profit (the extortion and theft), and to break them (rape, torture, murder, school burning and reeducation camps), and to provide an excuse for their own existence in an Indonesia with few external enemies. But on those occasions when the outgunned Aceh rebels (GAM, the Aceh Freedom Movement) actually attack the army or police, the security forces strike back disproportionately, sometimes at the spouses and children.

Last week Amnesty International released a report on Aceh noting that "human rights abuses ... are so pervasive that there is virtually no part of life in the province
which remains untouched" ("New Military Operations, Old Patterns of Human Rights Abuses in Aceh," Amnesty International, October 7, 2004). They spoke of recent "extrajudicial executions of civilians by the military" -- local activists say hundreds of them -- including "the unlawful killing of women and children," a fact which is not surprising, given that the Indonesian army commander has said that anyone who criticizes military rule is GAM, and that the national TNI chief has said of GAM: "hunt them down and exterminate them" (Anatara, the government press agency, quoted Gen. Ryamizard Ryacudu as saying, on December 8, 2003: "People who dislike the military emergency in Aceh are GAM members. So if they have the same voice as GAM members, this will mean that they are the younger brothers of the separatist movement." Amnesty quoted Gen. Endriartono Sutarto at a May, 2003 military briefing).

Aceh is actually one of the worst cases of repression of civilians in the world, but, for various reasons the world doesn't see it even though the scale is comparable to that of, say, Palestine. The economy is based on the revenues of a vast Exxon/Mobil-run natural gas field -- or, it would be if those revenues found their way back into the hands of poor Acehnese (2001 central government statistics said 21.6% of Aceh toddlers were malnourished; a later internal World Bank estimate put the percentage twice as high).

Though Aceh is officially part of Indonesia, in May of 2003 the TNI launched a full-scale invasion of the place, explicitly modeled on the then-recent US invasion of Iraq. The invasion featured much talk from Jakarta authorities about "shock therapy," "embedded" journalists, and the political "blessing of September 11" (as the Indonesian president's main political aide, Rizal Mallarangeng, put it [Jane Perlez, "Indonesia Says it Will Press Attacks on Separatists in Sumatra," New York Times, May 23, 2003]), as well as "numerous extra-judicial executions of civilians by the Indonesian military (TNI)" ("Aceh Under Martial Law: Human Rights Under Fire," Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper, June 2003). The Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda was quoted by the BBC (May 9, 2003): "Honestly, what we are doing or will do in Aceh is much less than the American power that was deployed in Iraq."

The TNI sealed the point with bombing runs from US supplied F-16s, and low-level strafing from US OV-10s, a plane that also figured prominently in Vietnam and in occupied East Timor.

But TNI has had to be sparing with those Aceh raids because they are hurting for spare parts. US military aid and sales were severely curtailed due to US grassroots activism in the '90s, but now the Bush administration is pushing to restore training and subsidized weapons sales to Indonesia and Attorney General Ashcroft wants to formally classify the Aceh GAM rebels as "terrorist."

President Bush senior once gave a good, objective definition of terrorism. In his Vice Presidential foreword to a Pentagon/State Department report on the subject, Bush the elder wrote: "terrorists deliberately target noncombatants for their own cynical purposes. They kill and main defenseless men, women and children ... Freedom fighters, in contrast, seek to adhere to international law and civilized standards of conduct. They attack military targets, not defenseless civilians."

Unfortunately, though, the Bush definition is not currently in use. If it were, US allies like the TNI would be targeted for US action rather than aid, and the old president's son would be facing trial -- or worse -- for sponsoring terrorism.

Peaceniks in the Pentagon: Paying a Price for Killing People

The current thrust of US Democratic criticism on Iraq is that Bush has been too soft: he didn't send enough troops in the beginning and now he's too timid with insurgent strongholds. Thomas L. Friedman says there is a Rumsfeld Doctrine: "just enough troops to lose."

This characterization of the Bush team as peaceniks is partially true in a tactical sense. Though their goal is to provoke and use violence in a spectacular way to enhance their power, they are smart enough to know that they have to take some precautions in how they do it.

There are at this point in history only loose, minimal political constraints on the number of foreigners they can kill -- when asked after the 1991 Gulf War how many Iraquis the US had killed, then - Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell replied "It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in." (Patrick W. Tyler,"Powell Says US Will Stay in Iraq 'For Some Months'," New York Times, March 23, 1991) -- but they do have to avoid sacrificing too many US troops.

Vietnam was a fiasco for the US establishment not just because they lost the war, but also because a substantial portion of the US public rose against it. Its rightly assumed that two major reasons for that rising were the fact that the draft was still in place and the fact that roughly 58,000 US troops were killed (the more than two million Vietnamese dead were a contributing, but less politically important factor). The solution to these problems was to abolish the draft and then to alter tactics, using foreign surrogates and long-range bombing and shelling as substitutes for US ground troops, and trying to henceforth only attack countries and armies that couldn't defend themselves. If US ground troops had to be used, the rule was to get it over with quickly, before activists and those close to the victims had a chance to mobilize.

Now Democrats criticize the Republicans' tactics because the Democrats are out of office, but they will face the same problem if they win: how do you go around staging wars in a political environment where the public has inconveniently decided that they will place a high value on at least one kind of human life -- in this case the lives of US soldiers? It is a fundamental constraint -- and also a fundamental accomplishment of the anti-war movements that began in the '60s.

But imagine if the progress toward civilization continued and the fair-thinking people of today were able to engender an environment in which all human life was valued? That wouldn't and shouldn't abolish war -- sometimes, unfortunately, violence is necessary for self-defense or justice -- but it would make it vastly more difficult for rulers to stage war for insufficient reasons. Imagine if Colin Powell didn't have the luxury of saying he doesn't care, and the political price paid for, say, killing an Iraqui civilian equaled that for losing an American soldier.

Though Bush is vilified by Democrats he has actually killed fewer Iraquis than did Bill Clinton (the Clinton era sanctions killed well in excess of 400,000), but he has dramatized a fact that has prevailed in big powers throughout history: wars and mass killings can be staged for marginal reasons, almost for the hell of it. But that won't work if enough people mobilize and start counting every soul.

The Specter of Shared Complicity and Risk: America's War Makers Fear the Draft

When Charles Rangel, the anti-Iraq-war Democratic congressman from Harlem, first proposed reinstating the draft he was widely ignored, but this week the pro-war US House leadership made a point of bringing his bill up for a vote for the explicit purpose of defeating it (The vote was 402-2) ("House Overwhelmingly Stomps Out Bill that Would've Reinstated Draft," USA Today, October 5, 2004).

They wanted to scotch concerns that the draft might be revived because, as they aptly feared, such public belief could hurt the reelection and war plans of President Bush.

It was the influential Republican economist Milton Friedman -- a man with a deep grasp of the theory of self-interest and incentive -- who was among the first to propose undermining the anti-Vietnam-war movement by abolishing the draft. A summary of William F. Buckley's 1969 write-up of Friedman's plan was read with enthusiasm by President Nixon, who ordered his staff to follow up on "this intriguing idea." (Richard Reeves, President Nixon, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001, p. 51).

The draft is a tough issue. On the one hand, it forces people to be ready to kill and die for a state whose leaders are not bound by the murder laws, but on the other hand it makes it politically less likely that the killing will happen in the first place.

What do you think the US campuses would look like today if we had a real, random draft, one in which even the young George W. Bushes of the country could be sent to Fallujah if they got unlucky? Its undoubtedly true that such a draft would be realistically impossible -- the rich would still manage to buy their way out, but much of the middle class wouldn't and that would still be sufficient to put enough campuses into an uproar that Washington would be less able to wage its wars of choice and whim.

Other People's Hands: A World Governed by Zarqawis

The tape of the latest beheading in Iraq -- this time Jack Hensley was decapitated, reportedly by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- exposes the evil of the perpetrators and their appeal to the lowest instincts (they apparently think -- maybe correctly -- that such recordings will rally some people to their side), but it also opens a rare window on how power politics really work.

There are many dozens of armies and security forces worldwide that torture, rape or kill screaming captives. But such crimes -- when known -- are rarely reported with the prominence and feeling they deserve, especially if the perpetrators are agents or allies of a dominant state. When they are reported it is frequently in abstract, sanitized or calming language: "human rights violations" "extrajudicial executions," "prisoner abuse."

But in real life the acts are concrete, rancid, and mind-crushingly agonizing. My friend Jafar Siddiq Hamzah (in Indonesia) was abducted, bound, had his face sliced off, and was stabbed to death. My friend Lukki Orellana (in Guatemala) reportedly had her hands hacked off (I saw Jafar's tormented body, but the report on Lukki was second hand from inside the army since, like roughly 40,000 others, she was "disappeared," her body never found. In neither case was anyone arrested, and in neither case did the US government stop supporting the military in question).

Imagine if all such acts were taped and we were all invited to watch and hear them. There wouldn't be time, of course. TV and the internet would be flooded. But at least we would have a better understanding of how life and politics really are.

Its not as if isolated evil has suddenly sprung up and must now be combated. In fact it is much worse than that. Evil has office and legal protection. We are governed by Zarqawis -- those willing for political motives to cause the torture and death of defenseless people. Its just that most of them are stealthy enough to avoid doing it on screen, and fastidious enough to arrange for other people's hands to do the chopping.

A Minimal-Choice Election: The Killers Win No Matter What

On Monday, September 20 Indonesia is due to hold a presidential election which the country's murderous security forces are due to win no matter what.

Megawati Sukarnoputri, the incumbent president, took power three years ago behind army cannons (her predecessor, undercut by the armed forces, was impeached and she, as vice president, ascended) and later publicly told the military not to "worry about human rights" ("Indonesia's Megawati tells troops not to worry about rights abuses," AFP, December 29, 2001). But she is widely seen as incompetent, and, polls say, may be voted out for a smooth-talking former general, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

As is often the case in minimal-choice elections -- which is to say, most elections in most countries -- this one has turned to an important extent on culturally resonant trivia (in this case, the general's poll ratings soared after he was personally insulted by the president's husband), and on voters being compelled to make fine, far-fetched, often grim, distinctions.

Dewi -- the pseudonym of a resident of a poor kampung in a major city -- says that her family and friends have been thinking that though they fear and loathe the army they might vote for Susilo anyway in order to thwart the police. Their calculation is that bad as the army is, for them the police are worse, and since the army and police are bitter rivals having an army man on top might marginally weaken a police force that has gotten "big heads" under Megawati.

Though its the army that does most massacres of civilians, most of that killing is geographically focused (in pro-independence Aceh and Papua, two of the country's 32 provinces) and most of the army's extortion is concentrated on the rich. It is mainly the police who abuse the poor nationwide. That is the division of labor. Last year the police locked up Dewi's step father and beat him until the family managed to buy his freedom with 2 million rupiah ($180 US dollars) -- the equivalent of four months' wages. A few months later her cousin was beaten to death on the street by a drunken gang of preman police informants. "[O]n a daily basis," a US Marine Corps study concluded, "the Police are the most visible instrument of government oppression" ... "one of the most disliked/hated organizations in the country" ("Indonesia Joint Cultural Intelligence Seminar," US Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, January 14, 1999).

If an Indonesian wants to vote against terror by their country's US-armed-and-trained security forces, they can't. No candidate represents their position. They are instead reduced to arcane calculations about which killer will be less prolific.

Failure to Enforce the Murder Laws: Life in this Pre-Civilized World

Midfielder Ahmed Manajid of the Iraqi Olympic soccer team said of President Bush: "How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?" (Sports Illustrated website, August 19, 2004). The answer is: fairly easily. The Bible is full of massacres, as are the Koran and the Torah. Much religious authority seems based on slaughter: if you don't obey God, God will get you -- or, more precisely, his messengers will. Many aspects of many societies have advanced beyond such barbaric thinking, but the right of authority figures to massacre is still embedded in the modern state.

Bush has said:"The hand of God is guiding the affairs of this nation." (Bush clip in "CNN Presents: The Mission of George W. Bush," August 28, 2004). But he doesn't really need to invoke the Almighty to assume the right to bomb Iraqi cities or to sponsor a local military that assassinates labor leaders in Colombia. He could be a strictly secular president leading a strictly secular nation and his right to cause the death of civilians would still go equally unquestioned.

This is because in today's pre-civilized world the murder laws are not enforced when the crimes in question are committed by people acting in a high state capacity.

Presidents and Terrorism: Using Blood to Heighten the Global Drama

There's a growing body of expert opinion that says that Bush is making terrorism worse, and that this is therefore evidence that his policy is failing. But this criticism, while factually grounded, completely misses the policy point. The increase in anti-US terrorism shows that the President's policy is succeeding. Whether or not he consciously wants to make it worse, more terrorism serves his interests. And perhaps equally important, more terrorism is fun for him: it puts him at the center of a global drama in which he plays a delicious role. Were peace to break out tomorrow, Bush would be a weakened and diminished man. But as long as the pot keeps boiling he only goes from strength to strength.

The rapper and actor Ice-T recently said: ""I'm scared of Bush. We need a peaceful president, not someone who is entertained by war."

But why should we need to depend on a president's character being "peaceful?" A president should be constrained by law. He should be bound by civilization. If he starts killing people for glory he should face charges like anyone else who commits a homicide without a valid explanation of self-defense.

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