Reid looks back to Aceh's glorious past

Reid looks back to Aceh's glorious past

Emmy Fitri, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra
Anthony Reid
National University of Singapore
439 pp

Historical awareness and knowledge can be treacherous if it is contradictory to the established "facts" of the day: this is one theory that rings through Anthony Reid's An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese & Other Histories of Sumatra.

For a living example, Reid needs only point to the young Hasan di Tiro -- who knew that the father of the Acehnese independence movement, Hasan, now safe in Sweden under a self-imposed exile, was once a devoted fan of the newly formed republic of Indonesia and its iconic founding father, Sukarno.

However, through the long course of Hasan's personal journey, his thoughts were altered and shaped by an awareness that arose from a zealous study of the history of Aceh -- once a vibrant, independent state. He also came across abundant stories that Aceh was never conquered by the Dutch colonial administration.

Inspired by this historical consciousness, Hasan made a clarion call to his fellow Acehnese to wage a war to reclaim their past identity and freedom.

Apparently, Hasan mentioned little about the lucrative natural resources of the province -- although he must have been aware of it -- and instead he replayed the old victory songs against the invading Dutch forces and resurrected stories of the diplomatic ties old Aceh had established with foreign countries as far away as Turkey and Britain.

In 1976, he regained the old glory and even led a guerrilla force to regain Acehnese independence -- a little belatedly, because by then Aceh was part of Indonesia as its northernmost province. Then president Soeharto quelled the newly kindled spark of insurgency to such an extreme that until today, we have been witness to the unfinished killing spree launched against Aceh.

In his delicate and subtle way, Soeharto and his regime tried to bury the old history of Aceh that fueled Hasan's spirit of Acehnese nationalism and concealing it from the following generations -- and a subliminal nationalist propaganda was communicated through history textbooks for more than three decades to breed out any secessionist sentiments.

On the other hand, the death of a nation is imminent when its indigenous history is overlooked and a historical account is written in favor of its oppressors -- many of us are aware that history has always been an effective conduit for scrapping a nation's identity or for embracing a false hero.

Soeharto has provided a great many examples on how to deny the unique value of indigenous cultures and independent traditional states to unite them under a banner of national history. Through textbooks written under the guidance of military historian Nugroho Notosusanto -- who was his education minister -- Soeharto explicitly sought to exploit Indonesia's struggle against the Dutch in pursuit of national unity: the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia, the country's formal name.

However, as soon as Soeharto stepped down, the people grappled with the emergence of other versions of history that revealed different truths about their identities.

Apart from William Marsden's great 1783 study on Sumatra, there have been few serious works that have dealt with Sumatra's complex history, and even fewer have attempted to describe that history as a coherent whole. Although this study was not carried out in particular with regards to Aceh, historian Reid reveals different angles on the vast, understudied island of Sumatra.

Reid knits together the bittersweet dynamics of Sumatra's regions from the 16th century to the present. Detailed and descriptive, Reid is able to reconstruct the past eras and recreate them vividly to readers: Sumatra's fertile lands, rich mineral resources and enterprising people have made it the prosperous frontier of the archipelago.

Reading Reid's book is like watching a tremendous, colossal period film on the 1600s and onward, filled out with descriptions on the fashions of the day as well as high local customs. The long course of its bloody history is also captured, mostly in the 1800s with the impending threat of the imperialist Dutch, who had already conquered the great kingdoms of Java.

Reid presumably highlights the discourse on Aceh because its people fought the most wars against the Dutch -- and were never defeated.

True to his scholarly background, Reid systematically pours out and knits together his findings and facts cultivated from many sources. An Indonesian Frontier is certainly not bedtime reading, but for history enthusiasts, this book is a must-read.

And Reid deserves a thumbs-up for bringing together the scattered pieces of Sumatra's forgotten -- and unforgotten -- histories into a single study.

Interestingly, Reid unwittingly proved his own theory in the course of researching and writing An Indonesian Frontier: Reid's growing understanding of the past atrocities and ongoing violence proliferated by excessive military presence in Aceh -- that is, the pre-tsunami military operation -- was a major trigger that caused him to restate his analysis on Aceh's future.

As he writes: "During most of the period I was studying Aceh I believed I shared the view of my Acehnese friends and contacts that this was a part of Indonesia, albeit a restive and troubled part. Brief visits in 2000 and 2003 obliged me to rethink my assumptions about Aceh's future."

He then added a final chapter that seeks to explain why many Acehnese no longer feel themselves to be Indonesians, and which places the events of 1945 in a somewhat different perspective.

Now, who can stop the Acehnese's growing distrust of the Indonesian government, when it was responsible for the perennial trauma of past generations, and the arrogant, Rambo-style national soldiers maintaining a deployment in their homeland and who treat them the way the Dutch kafir (infidels) treated their great-grandparents?

Reid closes this paragraph by saying that one window of opportunity for resolving the century-long problem of Aceh's place within Indonesia had been closed: At the time of writing, Aceh was still closed to outside observers and press freedom was drastically curbed, so that it would be a considerable time before the effects of the military crackdown were made known.

The tsunami of Dec. 26 has taken off the virtual embargo and international eyes are now all on Aceh -- it has taken less than the considerable time Reid predicted would be needed to see the mess the military has made and keeps creating in the territory.

As the April 12 peace talks in Finland approaches, it is worth noting that the Acehnese people have paid dearly for their forgotten history -- and they must not pay more.