Wrong prescription can kill the 'Unitary State'

Endy M. Bayuni, Deputy chief editor, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Was Indonesia really about to lose Aceh to the Free Aceh Movement (GAM)? Was Indonesia's territorial integrity really under any serious threat from GAM's actions?

Hearing top officials in Jakarta explaining the government's decision to launch the military operation in Aceh on May 19, it was hard not to get this impression.

Senior government and military officials have repeatedly stressed that nothing less than the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI) was at stake.

They said the government was compelled to launch the country's largest military operation - with over 45,000 troops involved, it was actually bigger than any military campaign ever launched in East Timor during Indonesia's 1975-1999 occupation - not only to defend Aceh, but also to prevent Indonesia from breaking up.

This has been the line used time and again in the run up to the imposition of the martial law in Aceh this month after the government abandoned the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement that it signed with GAM in Geneva last December.

Critics of the war plans were quickly given strong verbal reprimands about Jakarta's sovereignty rights to do what it deems necessary to protect its territorial integrity, particularly in quelling the rebellion in Aceh.

One by one, foreign governments were asked to pledge their support for Indonesia's unitary state, or the NKRI, as if this was really under serious threat, from outside interference or from internal forces, like the separatist movements.

At almost every opportunity, President Megawati Soekarnoputri or Minister of Foreign Affairs Hassan Wirayuda would ask their foreign counterparts for their pledge of support, as if there was ever any doubt about it in the first place.

Territorial integrity, which also goes by the Indonesian acronym NKRI, has become an obsession for the government and military leaders. Defending it has become the overriding goal for them, subordinating everything else, including democracy, human rights and, as in the case of Aceh, peace.

The threat to NKRI, however, is more perceived than real.

The "loss" of East Timor in 1999 has left such a stigma that the nation's leaders vowed never to cede another inch of the country's territory again, and any insurgency must be dealt with harshly before it grew too large to handle.

Ever since Indonesia lost East Timor (although we never really owned it in the first place), talks about defending territorial integrity or the NKRI have become fashionable among politicians of all colors, particularly Megawati's own staunchly nationalist Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan). It has become the weapon that politicians use to attack one another.

Unfortunately, it has also become the weapon of choice by the government in Jakarta in quelling insurgencies, in Aceh and in Papua, although the problems in Aceh and Papua are certainly very different from the one we encountered in East Timor.

Of course like all lies or half-truths -- and the threat to NKRI is a half-truth, if not an outright lie -- if you say them repeatedly, you start believing in them.

Sadly, the Indonesian public too has come to believe that we were losing Aceh to GAM. The general public has accepted, uncritically, that, unless we launched a full-scale military operation in Aceh, Indonesia would soon cease to exist.

A closer and more sober look at Aceh tells us a completely different story: GAM is not that serious a threat, and the people in Aceh in general remain staunch supporters of the republic. In other words, NKRI is not being seriously threatened.

The separatist movement GAM may have gained more influence and supporters in recent years, and it has the TNI to thank for that, because the atrocities our soldiers committed, especially during the military operation of 1989-99, have driven more and more people to the rebels.

But to suggest that GAM has become a serious threat is to grossly overstate its strength. And to send nearly 50,000 troops to deal with the 5,000 members of a rag-tag army is not only overstating the problem, but worse than that, the government is grossly oversimplifying the problem.

What is hard to understand is that this oversimplification happens even though the government and the military have a deep understanding of GAM's strengths or rather, weaknesses.

The government will tell you that it distinguishes between the few hundred real hardcore, independent ideologues in GAM, and the thousands of GAM members or supporters who joined the movement because they had directly felt the brunt of Jakarta's injustices, especially during the 1989-99 military campaigns. And there were the few opportunists and criminals in GAM.

You would have thought that the government's solution to the Aceh problem would follow on this diagnosis: If the majority of the people joined GAM because of the injustices, then the solution would be to uphold justice in Aceh.

The few opportunists in GAM can be bought off economically, and the few criminals in GAM can be dealt with through professional police work.

That leaves us with a few hundred die-hard independence fighters to deal with.

Is a full military campaign, involving close to 50,000 troops, still justified given that the real threat to NKRI is only coming from a few hundred die-hard proindependence people?

Jakarta's strong obsession with defending NKRI appears to have totally blinded it from finding a more effective, and less violent solution, and one that stands a better chance of success than a military campaign.

Given Jakarta's own poor track record in dealing with insurgencies, in Aceh, in East Timor and in Papua, we fear we will only be sending more people in Aceh into the GAM fold with this military campaign.

Subjecting the entire Aceh province under a martial law, and putting just about every Acehnese inside and outside Aceh as terrorist suspects, are sure recipes to lose the hearts and minds of the people there.

Aceh is a classic example of a government making the right diagnosis but prescribing the wrong cure.

The massive military campaign looks more like an unnecessary major surgery, when what Aceh really needs is probably some simple medicine, like antibiotics.

The danger with this approach is that in performing the wrong surgery, Jakarta may end up having to amputate Aceh altogether, and going by the government's own logic, we ourselves -- rather than GAM or anybody else -- may end up killing NKRI altogether.