The threats of other top officers seem far more credible. Although Widodo said he would send no new military reinforcements to Aceh, his pledge did not apply to the national police, who are not under his command. Last week the national-police chief, General Roesmanhadi, deployed 900 fresh riot troops to crush any uprising in Aceh. Meanwhile, the military’s chief spokesman, General Sudrajat, warned that his soldiers are ready to kill anyone trying to lower the Indonesian flag and replace it with the Free Aceh colors. “There will be two options,” he said. “Either Indonesian soldiers die, or they [the separatists] will die.”
Can Indonesia keep itself together? East Timor won independence earlier this year, and now Aceh is trying to follow suit. Decades of dictatorship, graft and brutality have given rise to secessionist movements all over the country, a vast ethnic, religious and linguistic collage stretched across some 6,400 kilometers and more than 13,000 islands. Indonesia’s newly installed civilian president, Abdurrahman Wahid, is praying that by pursuing justice for the victims of state-sponsored violence, he can earn back their loyalty–and possibly keep the country from breaking into a mess of blood-soaked ethnic fragments.
The question is whether Wahid is too late. Many of the country’s deepest and cruelest splits are the result of atrocities committed by and for the military in places like Aceh and East Timor. Wahid and his vice president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, have already authorized prosecutions of accused human-rights offenders up to the level of major general. Reformist military leaders, including Widodo and his predecessor as armed forces chief, General Wiranto, agree that the public must have a full accounting. Even if the military’s top ranks continue to resist the temptations of a coup, however, there is no guarantee that their faith in civilian justice will be enough to hold the country together.
Aceh’s nightmares have already come true in East Timor. After an August referendum in which the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence, gangs of military-backed thugs ran wild in the streets. Now, two months after the arrival of U.N. peacekeepers, nearly 200,000 refugees remain huddled in makeshift camps just outside the separatist province, not daring to go home. The terrorized refugees reflexively hide from strangers, including U.N. relief workers who come bringing food, medicine and drinking water. Megawati visited one of the camps last week. Inside a ragged tent, a trembling cluster of women and children cowered in a corner as the vice president came near. Megawati knelt and reached out to a whimpering child, and both of them burst into tears. Soon the vice president was practically buried in a swarm of refugee children kissing her hand and begging her to help them go home.
The refugees’ fears are anything but imaginary. Last week, on a desolate beach only a few kilometers from the camp, human-rights investigators exhumed a shallow mass grave. It held the remains of more than two dozen people, including three Roman Catholic priests, who were shot and knifed to death last September inside the cathedral of the East Timorese town of Suai. Human-rights activists and U.N. forensic specialists are still trying to piece together an accurate account of how many hundreds of civilians were murdered in East Timor, and by whom. Meanwhile the survivors can only wait for their own lives to resume. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, met with independence leader Xanana Gusmo last week and toured the camps the day before Megawati’s visit. “The Indonesian Army tells me they are trying to arrange the refugees’ ‘orderly return’,” Holbrooke complained. " ‘Orderly’ seems to mean slow."
Unlike the country’s other separatist hot spots, East Timor was forcibly annexed after independence. Political differences aside, though, East Timor’s victims are hardly alone. Four separate human-rights groups last week accused the Indonesian Army of rape, torture and mass killings, all the way from Aceh in the west to the New Guinea highlands of Irian Jaya in the east. In Aceh alone there have been at least 5,000 documented cases of murder, rape and human-rights violations in the past decade of martial law, according to a new report by the official Indonesian Human Rights Commission. “This is a test of our new government,” says Marzuki Darusman, Wahid’s attorney general and the commission’s chairman. “The Acehnese demand justice. Senior officers will have to be held accountable.” This year alone more than 500 people have been killed, including 65 students who were shot dead at a Muslim boarding school.
Wiranto and other generals testified before Parliament last week on the military’s conduct in Aceh, East Timor and elsewhere. “It is not true at all that the central government and the military engineered any atrocities,” insisted the straitlaced former armed forces chief. (He now holds a civilian post in Wahid’s cabinet as coordinating minister for Politics and Security.) Hardly anyone thinks Wiranto is directly responsible for his troops’ misdeeds. It’s less clear whether he did everything possible to stop the crimes. A year ago he visited Aceh, apologized for the military’s past misdeeds and promised an end to the violence. Within a few months the killing resumed. Outside the Parliament building last week, Acehnese protesters unfurled a banner addressed to Wiranto: don’t forget your promise.
No one in Jakarta is forgetting Aceh. The province may be the key to stopping the disintegration of Indonesia. Wahid has met with leaders of the Free Aceh movement, and this week his emissaries are to begin talks with local religious leaders on how to resolve their differences. “There is still a chance that Aceh will agree to remain part of Indonesia, providing it receives wide local autonomy and control over its resources and security,” says Rosita Noer, secretary-general of Jakarta’s official human-rights inquiry. “But action must be taken now to court-martial senior officers.” The military’s top ranks, now purged of most holdovers from the Suharto dictatorship, are expected to cooperate. The officers in the field may not be so compliant. Their sense of military discipline has always been shaky at best. Indonesia’s cemeteries are filled with reminders of that.
