Military intervention in Aceh should lead to peace
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.