Only democratic approaches can end regional conflicts

Only democratic approaches can end regional conflicts

Aguswandi, London

Honest and open-minded talk about Aceh and West Papua is rare
in Indonesia. Yet some Indonesians recently came together in
London to have just such a conversation. Students from the
Indonesian Student Association organized an event to discuss both
conflicts. It was a kind of people-to-people discussion. The
conclusion reached was that only democratic and peaceful
approaches, not military ones, would find solutions.

An appropriate and apposite conclusion will always be found
when discussions of conflicts reach beyond established and
orthodox thinking. In the Aceh and Papua cases, this orthodoxy is
mainly reflected in the idea that the conflicts embody threats to
Indonesia's national integrity. It is also the case when people
sit and talk about the problems and find many areas of common
ground, instead of simply differences. They can look at the
problem substantively, and get beyond the headlines and media
reports.

One fundamental aspect of the Aceh and Papua conflicts is the
dreams of both peoples to create a new society; a better society.
This notion of a new society shows that the Acehnese and Papuans
are looking forward to their futures, not simply their long-gone
pasts and histories as some have argued they are trying to do.

In the case of Aceh, it is often said that the Acehnese merely
want to rebuild a replica of their past kingdom. They want to
rebuild a golden era in time. Yet while it might be true that
they want to build a new golden era, it is absolutely not the
case that they want to build a replica kingdom of old. This is
especially true of the majority of civil society groups and the
social movements in Aceh. They consider history to be important,
but recognize that history could have been better and that the
most important thing is the future. In Aceh this has become even
more apparent in the aftermath of the tsunami.

Some Acehnese who tend to draw heavily on references to
history in discourse about Aceh only do so because there is
something wrong with the present. If there were nothing wrong
with the present, history would be little more than a memory, a
lesson, a quiet nostalgia for years gone by.

The ideas around a "new" Aceh and a "new" West Papua have much
in common with the social movements in Indonesia that likewise
talk about a new Indonesia; an Indonesia that is better.

However, many of us fail to see this common ground because we
are divided by the rhetoric of the enemies of the would-be new
Indonesia, the new Aceh and the new Papua. These enemies are from
the bad-old Indonesia who would like to maintain Indonesia in its
old centralized, corrupt and oppressive form.

To manufacture divisions within society they usually call on
emotive, self-aggrandizing simplification of the problems in Aceh
and Papua. "We are there to wipe out the separatists." "The
separatists are the problem; we are here to defend the integrity
of the motherland." This rhetoric has no substance beyond
emotion, and makes an easy abstraction of a complex and detailed
problem. Indeed, it discourages us from looking at the details.

The details show the awful life of the Acehnese and Papuans.
The military presence there is extremely oppressive. In some
districts of Aceh there are more military posts than schools or
medical centers. The Acehnese are still required to hold a
personal identity card that distinguishes them from the rest of
Indonesia. In Papua there will soon be one soldier for every 45
Papuans. In both places there is little freedom of expression.
Those who oppose Jakarta's role or strategy in their homeland can
easily be eliminated with heavy legal penalties and jail
sentences.

This heavy-handed and old-school Indonesian way of dealing
with the two areas is not working. The late, prominent human
rights activist Munir criticized the government fiercely for
maintaining a military approach to solving the problems of Aceh
and Papua. He became hugely popular among Acehnese and Papuans
because of this.

Munir advocated another kind of Indonesia, one that would deal
with the problems of Aceh and West Papua peacefully. If there
was one person who could make the Acehnese see themselves as
having a real place within Indonesia, and consequently have a
belief in Indonesia, Munir was definitely that person, but even
Munir was killed.

The simplistic, emotive and violent approach, on the other
hand -- the one taken, for example, by the military -- means that
despite all the rhetoric about ensuring the Republic of
Indonesia's territorial integrity, the opposite result is
achieved. In reality, those who claim to defend Indonesia are
those who, in practice, encourage separatism by their actions on
the ground. Their actions serve only to further alienate Acehnese
and Papuans from the country the military claim to be defending.

It is critical for the success of this new era that Indonesian
civil society groups speak out more against the military approach
to deal with the problems in Aceh and Papua because another more-
peaceful Indonesia is possible.

The writer is an Acehnese human rights activist working for
TAPOL in London and Kontras in Jakarta, he can be reached at
agus_smur@hotmail.com