Transitional Justice in the Asia-Pacific (18 page)

Such behaviour indicates that security sector reform has a long way to go if it is to transform Indonesia's security agencies into truly professional organisations that are fully subordinate to civilian authority. However, it should also be pointed out that they make Aceh little different from other Indonesian provinces, where petty abuses and illicit economic activity by security personnel are also rife.

Aceh still retains a lively civil society sector, with a large number of organisations oriented specifically to human rights, most of which can trace their origins to the immediate post-Suharto period of 1998–2001. In the absence of formal government initiatives, several such local NGOs and victims’ organisations, with support from national and international bodies, have tried to launch their own activities to push forward the transitional justice agenda.

In pursuing these activities, local groups have had to confront the two-sided nature of the conflict in Aceh. The conventional understanding
of the conflict was that it pitted members of local communities, and the GAM rebels in particular, against the central government and its security agencies. In this Aceh-versus-Jakarta ‘vertical’ struggle, many ordinary Acehnese citizens became victims of the state's security forces. Yet at the same time, the conflict also involved considerable violence
within
Acehnese society itself, even if this is not often acknowledged today (especially by former adherents of GAM). Such violence could involve threats and retribution by GAM fighters against citizens who assisted the security forces, or in some parts of the province abusive behaviours (theft, extortion, kidnapping for ransom, etc.) by GAM fighters against ordinary citizens. It also involved violence by members of pro-government militias against individuals who were believed to be sympathetic to GAM. These conflicts within Acehnese society were especially severe in ethnically mixed parts of the province, where GAM was often understood in ethnic terms and seen as representing the ethnically Acehnese sector of the population, rather than the various minority groups, and where the conflict sometimes took on the character of a ‘horizontal’ conflict between ethnic communities.

During the early post-conflict years, there were many symbolic actions designed to facilitate community-level healing in the wake of such intra-community conflicts. In particular, at many events in which former GAM fighters were welcomed back to their communities, local religious leaders held
peusijeuk
ceremonies in which participants were sprinkled with water and flour and clasped hands as signs of reconciliation.
⁴⁶
Most of these events did not thus involve truth telling, even if they sometimes implied that participants forgave one another for past sins. In most places, however, reconciliation efforts ended with such one-off events, such that ordinary members of the community are sometimes still required to live
side by side with individuals who once perpetrated serious abuses against them or family members.

One example of a more recent and sustained initiative to pursue grassroots reconciliation has been organised in the central highlands district of Bener Meriah by Kontra Aceh and the Peace Loving Women's Group (
Kelompok Perempuan Cinta Damai
, KPCD). This multi-ethnic district was a site of serious communal conflict and gross abuses committed by GAM, the security forces and pro-government militias during the conflict years. The reconciliation program is designed to involve all three major ethnic groups in the district – Acehnese, Gayo and Javanese – which used to be in conflict during the years of violence, to work together in livelihoods programs, such as in vegetable production, fish farming and handicrafts, as well as in discussion groups on various aspects of transitional justice. This program began in 2008. At first it targeted only the women in the three communities. Later on, it was supported by many prominent people in the area, and has extended its activities to target various other community groups as well as ordinary villagers throughout the highlands.

In an example of what John Braithwaite and colleagues have des-cribed as bottom-up reconciliation characteristic of post-conflict regions of Indonesia (which happens ‘as a micro-politics massively dispersed among thousands of leaders of villages, clans, churches, mosques and sub-districts’
⁴⁷
), this program appears to have achieved significant results. For example, former GAM combatants and their enemies in the pro-government militia group PETA have been working together in the same caucus in the district's local parliament, in part a product of the cooperation fostered by this and similar programs. Participants have also noted that interethnic mixing and communication have also increased, spreading from the formal settings of the program, such as in seminars, classes and trainings, to informal settings such as markets, schools or other public places.

As for truth seeking, although various official inquiries and investigations of past human rights abuses were held in Aceh in the brief opening between the collapse of the Suharto government and the intensification of military operations in 2000 to 2001, since the Helsinki MoU there have been no more official investigations.
⁴⁸
Given the stalling of the official TRC agenda, the only serious attempts to investigate past abuses and to allow victims to speak out about their experiences have been organised by local civil society groups. The best known such attempt was initiated by the Association of Victims of Human Rights Violations of North Aceh (KP2HAU) and was a direct response to the government's failure to establish a TRC. KP2HAU set up a series of public hearings around the time of the eleventh anniversary of the so-called Simpang KKA (KKA Junction) massacre in North Aceh, a terrible event in May 1999 when military units opened fire on a crowd of several hundred demonstrators, at a junction close to the PT Kertas Kraft Aceh (KKA) paper mill, just outside the industrial city of Lhokseumawe, North Aceh, killing at least 49 people and wounding 156 others. Those speaking out at the hearing included relatives of those killed as well as individuals who had suffered both mild and serious injuries, though in the end only five persons were willing to speak out given the lack of legal protection they could expect. Several hundred villagers and local officials witnessed their very moving
testimony. Strikingly, those speaking mostly rejected the ‘forgive and forget’ discourse that is prominent when such matters are discussed by cultural and political leaders in Aceh, instead calling for trials of the perpetrators. As one of them (R, a 28-year-old female) put it: ‘I will forgive them, but they have to be sent to court first’; another explained, ‘I will not forgive them, until they are sentenced’ (HS, female, 46). After the public hearing, representatives of the community and the local government set a stone to begin construction of a memorial.
⁴⁹

Civil society groups have taken other actions to keep the transitional justice agenda alive. Several groups have continued to document past acts of violence and other human rights abuses, in preparation for the day when a formal transitional justice process might begin. The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) assists several local NGOs (Koalisi NGO HAM, Kontras Aceh, Relawan Perempuan untuk Perdamaian [RPuK], and SPKP HAM)
⁵⁰
in updating and managing relevant data using the Maltus Program so that it is available in an internationally recognized format and ready to be used for future advocacy. Some of these groups also supported an initiative by a local cultural organization, Tikar Pandan, to establish a Human Rights Museum (an initiative that attracted unwelcome attention from local security forces) and proposed the commemoration of several major human rights violations, as part of the memorialisation of victims of human rights abuses.

Another important step has been the organising of victims’ group. While waiting for the establishment of the TRC, civil society groups started organising solidarity and communication between victims of
abuses. About ten such groups have been established. The most active include Brotherhood Solidarity of the Victims of Human Rights Violations in Aceh (Solidaritas Persaudaraan Korban Pelangaran HAM Aceh, SPKP HAM Aceh) and Community for Missing People in Aceh (Komunitas Ureung Gadoh Aceh, KAGUNDAH), which claims about 200 members. These groups undertake various activities such as writing workshops that enable conflict survivors to record their own experiences systematically; psychosocial advocacy for conflict survivors; focus group discussions on topics such as understanding TRCs and victim-based reparation principles; and building statues to memorialize such events as the Simpang KKA tragedy. Members of these groups have also demonstrated vociferously in favour of government action on the formal TRC process, such as when several hundred members of the Aliansi Korban Pelanggaran HAM Aceh (Alliance of Human Rights Abuse Victims of Aceh) occupied the Aceh parliament building in late 2010, urging its members to pass a regulation establishing a TRC.
⁵¹

Our analysis suggests that the transitional justice agenda in Aceh has been beset by two formidable challenges, both of which relate to the way by which transitional justice has been bound up in the politics of the Aceh peace process and its relationship to the wider political context. On the one hand, transitional justice in Aceh will necessarily take place in a way that is fundamentally conditioned by its Indonesian context. Yet the Aceh peace process, and hence the possibility of transitional justice, occurred at a time when the wider transitional justice process at the national level was already stalling. There are many reasons for this, most of which are beyond the scope of our discussion in this chapter, but one important factor was the continuing political influence exerted at least indirectly by the military. Everybody who counts in Indonesia's official politics knows
that the military would be a major loser in any process of truth telling about the Aceh conflict, and they can see little to benefit for themselves in antagonising the military on this issue. Without a supportive national context, the Aceh transitional justice agenda has therefore stalled, just like the process at the national level.

The second challenge concerns the local context. Aceh's new rulers have been able to point to lack of action at the national level toward (re)establishing a framework for an Aceh TRC. In part, their reluctance to either press Jakarta on the issue or to bypass the centre and establish a local process is a result of a similar attitude of political pragmatism as that exhibited by national politicians: they see little to be gained from antagonising their most fearsome former rivals – and the most potentially dangerous peace spoilers – in the military, when there is so much to be gained politically and economically from securing the peace. At the same time, as already pointed out several times in this essay, former leaders and members of GAM also have reasons to suspect that a formal truth telling process would implicate them in crimes against civilians during the conflict years, crimes that do not fit easily within their narrative of an entirely ‘vertical’ conflict that pitted Aceh against the centre. Indeed, given the political dominance of the movement now in many parts of Aceh – and the thuggish behaviour of many of its supporters – it is even questionable whether people would feel sufficiently secure to be able to discuss former GAM abuses in formal hearings in GAM base areas. More broadly, however, many other influential voices in Aceh, including those of many religious scholars (
ulama
) have been raised to argue that the time is not ripe now, if it ever will be, for ‘digging into’ (
mengungkit-ungkit
) the unpalatable past.

Despite the efforts of many of Aceh's highly committed civil society organisations, the lack of strong political backing suggests there is a possibility that Aceh will become like several post-conflict societies (Mozambique is one example), where there is an ongoing peace process without truth and reconciliation.