The end of May saw the Indonesian military launch an all out offensive on Aceh. In a land, sea and air assault 40,000 troops and military police stormed into villages throughout the province. It was Indonesia’s largest military operation since the invasion of East Timor in 1975. The aim is to wipe out the estimated 5,000 guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) who are fighting for independence.
Aceh is a province rich in oil. It has been fighting for independence from Indonesia since the 1950s. Before that it fought the Dutch who declared war on the independent state of Aceh in 1873 and later integrated it forcibly into their empire. During the dictatorship of Suharto in the 1970s and 1980s a new independence movement – the GAM – entered into struggle. The people of Aceh were heavily repressed and thousands slaughtered.
With the overthrow of Suharto and the establishment of a limited democracy various attempted have been made to solve the Aceh “problem". In 1999 following East Timor’s vote for independence, and despite military repression, half a million people demonstrated in Aceh demanding their own referendum. The previous President Abdurrahman Wahid conceded a referendum and then withdrew it.
The current President Megawati Sukarnoputri entered into peace negotiations with the GAM last December. Megawati has never concealed her determination to prevent any more areas of Indonesia breaking away and has offered only autonomy within the Indonesian state. She has increasingly allied herself with the powerful military who are determined to crush the GAM. And in May an ultimatum was issued to the GAM – accept autonomy, disband and disarm. When the GAM negotiators declined the peace talks were abandoned and the assault begun.
Aceh is now under martial law. Within the first week of fighting over 100 people were killed, mostly civilians. 300 schools have been torched while the army has raided villages, rounding up men and boys and marching them off for interrogation. At the end of May the Government ordered all foreign aid workers and Non Governmental Organisations out of the province. Taking a leaf out of the Israeli’s book they want to remove witnesses to the reign of terror being inflicted on the Aceh people.
The repression has spread outside of Aceh itself. Many students and workers from Aceh living in Jakarta are viewed as potential “terrorists” and subject to arbitrary arrest. The Commission for Disappearances and the Victims of Violence which campaigns against the ongoing abuses by the military had its offices attacked by pro-government militias after it denounced the imposition of martial law.
The western powers who went to war “to liberate the Iraqis from tyranny” have made clear that this is an “internal affair". The Australian government declared that the Indonesian government was “right to protect their internal interests” and said they would continue to co-operate with the Indonesian army against “terrorism".
The democratic movement in Indonesia, with honourable exceptions, has been shamefully silent on the attack on Aceh. All the parties in parliament have lent their support to Megawati’s policy which can only strengthen the military which views the parliament with ill concealed contempt.
One exception is the Peoples Democratic Party (PRD). It has issued a statement criticising the democratic movement for failing to condemn the assault and imposition of martial law. The PRD defends the right to self determination and says “The PRD is of the view that a referendum is the best means to resolve the Aceh question, peacefully and without bloodshed."
But the PRD fails to support the GAM against the Indonesian military and government. It couches the whole question in terms of achieving a peaceful solution through a referendum just at the point when the Indonesian state has just launched a bloody offensive to crush the independence movement. Worse still the statement eulogises Indonesia’s founding President Sukarno (Megawati’s father) as someone who struggled for the unity of Indonesia in a “truly democratic” fashion. In fact Megawati is following in the footsteps of her father who sent the military to crush the Aceh independence movement in the 1960s.
The only “unity of the Indonesian peoples” worth having is one based on a voluntary federation. The Indonesian state is currently a “prison house of nations” where Aceh, West Papua, and other areas are held within the state only by force and terror. It is no accident that the “great” powers favour this arrangement since it provides for a local gendarme to enforce imperialism’s rape of Indonesia’s natural resources.
As Marx said, any nation which oppresses another can never itself be free. If the Indonesian army gets away with crushing Aceh it is the limited democratic rights in Java and Sumatra that will be next in the firing line. That is why the people of Aceh must link their struggle not only to that of the other oppressed nations of Indonesia, but also to the struggle to liberate the region from imperialism and its agents through a federation of socialist republics.