Wrong prescription can kill the 'Unitary State'

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.