Aceh reflects new thinking in Asia

Anthony Reid, The Straits Times, Asia News Network/Singapore

The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), signed in Helsinki on Aug 15, marks a refreshing innovation for Indonesia and for nationalist thinking in Asia.

If the terms are successfully implemented, it will represent a victory for pragmatic common sense, and for democratic inclusiveness, over the "unitary state" mentality which has dominated Indonesian politics since 1945.

Since its foundation in 1945, the Indonesian state has been premised on a single sovereignty and source of legitimacy -- "one state, one nation (bangsa), one language". Because the Dutch strategy to oppose the revolutionary Republic of Indonesia was a complex federal one, any attempts to qualify a single Indonesian sovereignty had a ring of treachery for the revolutionaries. The Indonesians who supported anything like federalism were silenced through the period of revolutionary populism under Sukarno and of the military-dominated bureaucracy under Soeharto.

In the exhilarating democratic climate since Soeharto's fall in 1998, new flexibility seemed possible.

The referendum permitted to East Timor was a dramatic product of that democratic flexibility, but its outcome unfortunately appeared to confirm the logic of a single sovereignty.

East Timor was either 100 percent in the unitary state and subject to the domination of a centralized military, or it was 100 percent out and obliged to construct all of its own expensive autonomies in language, education, finance and so forth. This confirmed for many Indonesians that sovereignty was indivisible. The former Indonesian province of East Timor is now the Republic of Timor Leste.

Aceh had to remain 100 percent in because the only alternative was 100 percent out, threatening the eventual break-up of Indonesia.

Elsewhere in the world, where sovereignties have evolved through pragmatic compromise rather than rationalistic revolution, some variations on single sovereignty have been possible.

Significantly, it is Britain, with the longest experience of the democratic nation-state, which has preserved the fullest example of an asymmetrical state. Its four nations, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, each have a different and unique relationship with British sovereignty. Scotland has its own currency, Parliament, established church and international football team, and Scots have no difficulty considering their nationality Scottish while carrying a British passport.

Canada has also proceeded far along the route of accepting one unique place for the Quebec nation and another for indigenous nations within the Canadian state.

As the Cold War post-colonial dogmas of indivisible absolute sovereignty looked less secure in a globalising unipolar world, there has been much new analysis of what Michael Keating (Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations In A Post-Sovereignty World, 2001) calls "asymmetrical government" for "plurinational" states.

The Catalans and Basques in Spain, the Flemings in Belgium and the Kurds in Iraq are among the "nations" whose situation has prompted lively new thinking, drawing on older literatures about the nature of sovereignty. Keating argues persuasively that "we need to separate the concepts of nation, state and sovereignty, so often conflated in political analysis"; that "people can well have multiple national identities"; and that "if national communities are asymmetrical, then asymmetrical Constitutions can be defended on liberal and democratic grounds".

Surprisingly, little of this advanced thinking about sovereignty has been brought into the debates in Asia, although one would have thought the relations between Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei would call for it.

In reality, Asia has an even richer diversity than Europe of pre-modern multinational states and sovereignties, as well as contemporary examples in Malaysia and India of both plurinational and asymmetrical Constitutions. Sarawak has different constitutional rights than Negri Sembilan, the sovereignty of the sultans coexists with that of the state, and most Malaysians believe their nation (bangsa) is Malay, Chinese, Iban etc, in addition to Malaysian.

As in the British case, these seemingly anomalous arrangements have evolved through pragmatic compromise between the needs of different nations. Although they have been relatively little analyzed by the theorists, they have proved more compatible with democratic freedoms than the "rational" single sovereignties of the post-revolutionary Asian states.

So, what chance the Aceh agreement?

The eight-page MOU is encouragingly pragmatic rather than declamatory, even if many of its terms cry out for clearer definition. It consistently refers to "Aceh" without clarifying whether it is a province, a nation or a state. "Aceh has the right to use regional symbols including a flag, crest and a hymn", "Aceh has the right to raise funds with external loans", to raise taxes, to have unhindered access to foreign countries, etc.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono seemed ready to be flexible on the symbolic issues of intense emotional importance to both sides, while bargaining hard about practical security issues.

Most intriguingly, there is provision for a kind of head of state, a Wali Nanggroe (the title GAM leader Hasan Tiro has sometimes adopted), "with all its ceremonial attributes and entitlements".

In return for committing themselves to "a fair and democratic process within the unitary state and Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia", GAM has potentially acquired most attributes of "nation" that they sought.

Immense difficulties of distrust and vested interest on the ground may well still make this agreement impossible. The Indonesian military will remain in place under the agreement, with a reduced force of 14,700 men (and 9,100 "organic" police), and will be the only armed force under the terms of the agreement. If the soldiers on the ground wish to wreck the agreement, they have the capacity to do so.

For its part, GAM was probably persuaded to commit to the peace in the belief its allies could win the promised elections for officials in April 2006 and for the legislature in 2009. The real test will be how fair and transparent these elections can be, and how far a defeated side will accept them even if that could be achieved.

The international community, and particularly the ASEAN countries participating in the Aceh Monitoring Mission, should be in no doubt of the importance of this enterprise.

If the agreement proceeds well, it will be a model for defusing other trouble spots around the region, and for broadening the understanding of democracy and sovereignty in the region. If it goes badly, it will set these issues back for everybody, and confirm the intransigence on all sides.

The writer is director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and author of An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese And Other Histories Of Sumatra (Singapore University Press, 2004).