Military intervention in Aceh should lead to peace

Andi Widjajanto, International Fellow, National Defense University, Washington D.C.

When conflict occurs within states, the problems of the peace process are not clear-cut. Internal conflicts usually have deep underlying causes rooted in structural, political, socio-economic and cultural causes.

These underlying causes will manifest themselves into an open and violent conflict only if they interact with proximate causes such as bad leadership, political mobilization of the masses and foreign intervention. One dependent variable -- such as ethnicity, political turmoil, economic crisis or environmental degradation -- would not be sufficient to shape the nature of internal conflicts.

The threats and crises in Aceh seem much more likely to be diverse in its source, nature and scale.

Identifying with another intervention by the Indonesian Military (TNI) to deal with the conflict in Aceh may therefore prove highly problematic. The complexity of internal conflicts challenges the idea that there can ever be a military solution to a multidimensional problem, and this in itself may prove highly contentious for certain national military forces.

A starting point for constructing a military strategy in dealing with an internal conflict is by defining the parameters of a military intervention and identifying the phases of military intervention. As a military concept, military interventions are usually linked to coercive interference.

However, "coercive interference" in this sense should be defined as the use of the threat of force to influence an adversary's decision-making process, but it may also include the limited use of actual forces.

In the context of Aceh, the differences among various kinds of military interventions go to the heart of the question as to whether the TNI should be used in a given situation, and how it can be used effectively. Military interventions deal mainly with a decision-making process, especially with the justification of potential or actual use of force to deal with internal conflicts.

The decision to deploy the TNI to resolve the conflict in Aceh should be bound up in a complex web of local, national and international considerations. This political interpretation of intervention is intertwined with the legal aspect.

This aspect becomes crucial, since effectiveness in the use of the TNI is not only a matter of numbers; political legitimacy is credibility's necessary counterpart. A military intervention with legitimacy can win broad-based political support; but without credibility, it may be unable to achieve its objectives.

A credible force might achieve short-term results, but without legitimacy, it may be unable to sustain long-term support. An essential prerequisite to gain political support is the TNI's acceptance of respecting the rule of law and human rights.

The TNI should develop its rules of engagement, which must then be mastered by soldiers before they are dispatched to areas of conflict. These rules of engagement should be based on doctrines related to international humanitarian law and customary international law, as have been put forth by several international conventions.

Based on these conventions, the TNI should create an internal directive of its rules of engagement that will embrace the six principles of a just war doctrine -- i.e., last resort, authority, iusta causa, recta intetio (self defense by a state against an armed attack pursuant to UN Charter is just, and the intention is honest when it is genuinely a matter of tackling a threat to peace) proportionality and discrimination. These definitions of military intervention indicate that the complexity of intervention begins long before military troops were deployed.

The TNI must take the military, political and legal aspects of military intervention into their consideration before designing the phases of military intervention.

The phases of military intervention should be designed in conjunction with the overall peace process. It is generally accepted that a military intervention can only be deployed effectively during the first phase of the peace process -- the other phases are political settlement, problem solving and peace- building.

During the first phase of the peace process, the conflicting parties are in active pursuit of their goals through violent means. Only the decisive implementation of military force can counter the conflict until the parties determine the existence of sufficient contributing factors to end military action.

These factors can include: (1) emergence of a winning side; (2) exhaustion of all parties in their ability and willingness to continue fighting; (3) lack of further gains to be made through force; and (4) political, economic or tactical risks, or continuation of force outweighs any tactical or strategic advantages.

Thus, in the first phase of the peace process, military intervention is applied to serve a single objective: To mitigate conflict. If the TNI is to be deployed in Aceh, its main function is peace enforcement -- to forcibly restore peace.

Military intervention enters the conflict cycle near the zenith of violence with the intended effect of facilitating mitigation. Unfortunately, due to the level of active conflict, it is combative in nature.

However, the potential deployment of the TNI in the current context in Aceh is almost entirely a function of short-term strategic interactions between the TNI and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). The internal conflicts are protracted in nature, and will most likely result in a no-win situation for the military.

In this context, success is understood as the capacity of the TNI to break the cycle of violence and create the appropriate environment for peace. This will require a political recognition that the TNI can create space, but not solutions. Thus, inherent to the military strategy is an element of pragmatism that recognizes its limits and the extreme difficulties and uncertainty inherent to an internal conflict environment.

This suggests that military interventions must be coordinated in certain ways in order to identify the key elements of conflict and to provide proper responses to address these elements. A military intervention is the proper method to control the possibility of a further destructive development of conflict.

The main problem for the TNI at this stage is not only how to conduct a power intervention designed to assist in the separation of the control of violence, but also to restrain long-term instabilities to enable a more constructive conflict resolution.

Thus, eliminating military confrontations means nothing without any further attempt to reinstate the peace-making approach, which tries to settle different interests and also to conduct the peace-building approach that tries to improve relationships, as well as to start efforts to remove the underlying causes of conflict.