It’s hard to overstate how surreal peace feels to Aceh and its surviving population of 4 million. They have an old saying: “For the Acehnese people, fighting is as common as eating rice in the morning.” Would-be colonizers from Britain, the Netherlands, Japan and Java learned this the hard way. The fighting has been nasty, with many thousands of civilians raped or tortured. But the speed and scale of losses to the tidal waves blasted all sides out of their mental trenches. The rebels gave up their demand for independence; Jakarta granted Aceh special autonomy and gave GAM members the right to contest the elections. And the campaign has been remarkably peaceful. “It’s a democratic election, so we aren’t worried,” says Cut Rosmini, a midwife in Aceh’s Pidie district.
The shock effect is complex. The civil war in another tsunami-hit nation, Sri Lanka, has only escalated since the disaster. So why has peace held in Aceh? Analysts cite the relative success of the international aid and reconstruction effort, which underpins the peace and democratic progress, and vice versa. New schools, roads and hundreds of thousands of homes have been built in the capital, Banda Aceh, and on the battered west coast. The government and foreign agencies are funding “quick impact” projects to help stricken villages and move former guerrilla fighters into new jobs.
The elections will choose a governor, district chiefs and mayors. The candidates include former GAM members, Javanese militia leaders, pro-Jakarta politicians and even a former Indonesian Army general. “Democratizing a population as part of a peace process is good,” says James Bean, who runs a post conflict project for the International Organization for Migration in Aceh. But there is a sense that the peace is fragile, and Bean is one of many who are calling for “more boots on the ground” to accelerate the rebuilding.
The progress is nowhere complete. While nearly all tsunami refugees are out of tents and makeshift shelters, tens of thousands remain in temporary barracks with poor security and sanitation. Permanent houses built by at least two foreign aid groups had to be demolished and rebuilt because of shoddy construction. As many as 75 percent of former guerrilla fighters remain unemployed. “We are constantly overwhelmed by the massive task confronting us,” Kuntoro Mangunsubroto, director of Aceh’s reconstruction agency, told foreign donors in New York last month.
Aceh’s mental reconstruction is equally daunting. A sobering psychological evaluation in three war-torn districts compared its intensity with Bosnia and Afghanistan and found that 65 percent of civilians ranked high on depression symptoms. In addition, many thousands of Acehnese remain traumatized by the tsunami. One tsunami widow, Mardiana, who clung for her life in a community center in Banda Aceh while waters swept away several friends, demanded to be relocated inland. “If I go back to my village, I’m afraid the tsunami will come again and destroy my family,” she said, weeping, sitting on the floor of her new house some 60 kilometers from the ocean.
The election could also produce trouble. GAM is divided, with its formerly exiled civilian leadership endorsing one team for governor and vice governor, and its former field commanders endorsing a rival ticket. The split has opened the door for candidates not related to the independence movement, though there will likely be a runoff in February between the top two finishers. If a GAM candidate doesn’t win the governor’s race, “there will be a lot of soul-searching going on” within the movement about its failure to transform from guerrilla force to political movement, says Marcus Mietzner, a political analyst in Jakarta. Aceh’s next provincial elections are scheduled for 2009–which is a long time for the ex-rebels to ponder the benefits of war and peace
