Alienating the Acehnese

Alienating the Acehnese

The government's announcement that Acehnese working for the
administration must undergo special screenings is the latest in a
series of measures, introduced since the imposition of martial
law, that will only further alienate the people of Aceh.

A joint operation -- combining security restoration,
humanitarian assistance, empowering the local administration and
law enforcement -- was launched in Aceh following the May 19
presidential declaration of martial law in the province. But if
the objective is to improve the lives of the people of Aceh, the
experience of the last four weeks has shown that the combined
operation has had just the opposite effect.

Scores of civilians have been killed, some caught in the cross
fire between the Indonesian Military (TNI) and the separatist
Free Aceh Movement (GAM). There have also been unconfirmed
reports of the targeted killing of unarmed civilians by both
sides.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced because of the
armed conflict. Many children are unable to go to school because
their schools have been burned down; many people have lost their
livelihoods and are now dependent on government handouts for
their day-to-day survival. Road blocks and ID checks hamper their
movement.

Life has turned for the worse, not the better, for most
Acehnese. The people of Aceh are living in constant fear and in
great uncertainty.

And as if the government has not caused enough havoc, it has
issued a number of other measures that are making life even more
difficult.

There was the requirement that all Acehnese apply for new
identity cards, which literally means lining up for hours if not
days. Acehnese who live outside Aceh are under constant
surveillance; in Jakarta, for example, residents have been told
to keep a close eye on their Acehnese neighbors for any
suspicious activities. All Acehnese now, wherever they live, are
terror suspects as far as the government is concerned.

And last week, the government announced that thousands of
Acehnese who work for the administration must undergo a "Litsus"
(short for penelitian khusus), a screening process used during
the Soeharto era to weed out communists. This time, the goal is
to rid the bureaucracy of any GAM elements.

It is interesting to note that the government, or the TNI,
simply took a page out of Soeharto's playbook in bringing back
the widely discredited Litsus. The least they could have done was
to have given it another name.

Historically, Litsus was synonymous with the suppression of
people's basic rights. From the 1970s to the early 1990s, it was
used to screen out communists in the bureaucracy, military,
politics, education, journalism and other professions considered
to be strategic. The offshoot of the Litsus was Bersih
Lingkungan, another military phrase to denote a person as "pure"
from any possible communist influence.

The Litsus was used not only to interrogate subjects for hours
to detect their ideological leanings, but also to trace their
family histories, checking for close or distant relatives who may
have been tied with the communists. The extended family included
the relatives of the subjects' spouses, married long after the
"communists" were dead and gone. During the time that the Litsus
was used, many people lost their careers and livelihoods through
no fault of theirs, only because the military considered them to
be "impure".

Now it seems that this old concept, which was clearly a
violation of people's basic rights, is about to be reintroduced
by the government in Aceh, specifically to weed out possible GAM
ties -- however they are defined -- among government employees.

One thing that has to be said about the martial law
administrators in Aceh is that they are consistent. Their
policies, including the Litsus, are consistently alienating the
people of Aceh.

This combined operation in Aceh was launched out of the
government's concern for maintaining Indonesia's territorial
integrity. It seems that the government, or the TNI, which is
administering Aceh today, takes the word "territorial" literally.

They are only concerned about keeping Aceh's territory and its
rich natural resources under the control of the republic. They
are not concerned about the people of Aceh, even though their
contribution to the nation since independence 58 years ago has
been widely recognized.

Going by their policies and actions in Aceh, the authorities
in Jakarta are not even trying to win the hearts and minds of the
populace.