Aceh will remain a part of Indonesia: GAM
Tiarma Siboro The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
Leaders of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) have agreed to a demand by the Indonesian government that the tsunami-hit province should remain a part of Indonesia, but they spelled out conditions that the Acehnese must be allowed to govern the territory under a system of self-government.
"Self-government is a political system, which provides genuine democracy for all of the Acehnese as we put aside our demand of being independent.
"And the establishment of local political parties that enable the Acehnese to participate in direct local elections as the key point of the system," GAM spokesman Bakhtiar Abdullah said on Monday.
Such conditions were crystallized during a two-day consultation meeting involving dozens of representatives of Acehnese civil society, including activists from the Aceh Referendum Information Center (SIRA), and GAM's leadership in Sweden, over the weekend.
During the meetings, which were facilitated by the Sweden- based Olof Palme International Center, most attendees agreed that "the only way to a comprehensive and sustainable peace in Aceh was through a negotiated agreement that gives to the people of Aceh the right and capacity to determine their own affairs within the context of the Republic of Indonesia."
"The Acehnese must feel free to talk about politics without being interfered with by the central government (in Jakarta)," Bakhtiar told The Jakarta Post from Sweden.
The Indonesian government and GAM leaders will meet in Helsinki this week for a final round of informal peace talks to end the three decades of bloody conflict in Aceh, the hardest hit region in the Dec. 26 tsunami disaster.
The Indonesian government team arriving in Finland on Monday included a major-general who previously led a military crackdown against GAM armed rebels.
Indonesian Information Minister Sofyan Djalil said Maj. Gen. Bambang Darmono, who led an offensive against GAM after the imposition of martial law in 2003, and two other officers had come to discuss "technical security arrangements".
Their presence reinforced hopes that a draft agreement could be signed to pave the way for a formal truce in August to stop the fighting that has cost more than 12,000 lives in the devoutly Muslim province at the northern tip of Sumatra.
"By bringing them, all those technicalities can be discussed at once, so that (if) the final solution or final MOU (memorandum of understanding) can be reached in August and right after that we can start to implement it," Sofyan Djalil, who himself is from Aceh, was quoted by Reuters as saying in Helsinki.
Malik Mahmud, GAM's "prime minister", said on arrival he was confident of reaching a deal: "I think the chance is good."
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has said the government could accept demands that former GAM rebels be allowed to run in local elections for the positions of mayors, regents and vice governor.
Vice President Jusuf Kalla met last week with some leaders of political parties, calling on them to allow GAM members to participate in local elections through their respective parties.
The peace talks in Helsinki had been strongly criticized by some lawmakers, who claim that the Aceh issue is solely a domestic problem. They also criticized the proposed involvement of foreign monitoring team in Aceh.
Kalla responded on Monday to the criticism by saying that a "peaceful solution will be the only way to stop the bloodshed in the conflict-torn province," where over 15,000 people have been killed since the GAM began its independence bid in 1976.