Rising from the Rubble

It’s 11:30 a.m., and Banda Aceh airport, once a sleepy, two-flight-a-day aerodrome that consists pretty much of just a pair of large sheds, is as busy as an international hub. Two large Malaysian Sea King helicopters lumber down the runway and into the sky. As a parked Chinook from Singapore fires up its engines, two Australian army Hueys swoop in a few feet off the ground and sideslip into their designated parking slots. Troops in a grab bag of uniforms hurry back and forth to German, Russian and privately hired helicopters in various stages of loading relief supplies and passengers. Low overhead, a steady stream of U.S. Navy Seahawks clatter past, shuttling between their landing zone on the soccer field next to the airport and the 24-ship American fleet stationed offshore.

In the fixed-wing area, cargo planes from Australia, Britain, Uzbekistan and the U.S. fill up the small parking bay. In front of a Royal Air Force jet, civil defense volunteers from France take a quick break to line up for a group photo. Dressed with Gallic panache in calf-high boots and matching navy blue pants and T shirts, the men joke and laugh as they jockey for position, at first oblivious of three Indonesian soldiers standing stiffly behind them, cradling automatic rifles. Then one of the volunteers turns and waves the troops over to join in the picture taking. Language is at first a barrier, but the bonhomie of the French is infectious, and the troops unbend and agree to pose. They squeeze in among the boisterous volunteers, their orange berets vivid among a sea of floppy blue hats, and, in the end, everyone grins cheesily.

The world has come together to give aid to Asia’s tsunami-stricken areas and, by and large, it has been warmly received. Yet in Indonesia’s Aceh province, the welcome is proving awkward. Of all the many places struck by the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami, Aceh was the hardest hit—110,000 of the 160,000 deaths reported so far have occurred here—and needs the most help. Up until now, the relief effort has gone surprisingly smoothly. Some 1,700 soldiers from a score of different national armed forces have joined hands with 2,500 foreign aid workers and volunteers. Doctors and medical-support staff have poured in to treat the sick, clean water (and mobile-phone signals) is flowing again, and while an outbreak of disease remains possible, it hasn’t happened yet. People have even started talking about reconstruction.

But a combination of nationalism, suspicion of foreigners and historical baggage may conspire, if not to work against the relief effort, then perhaps to slow it down. Last week the Indonesian authorities set a March 26 deadline for all foreign troops to leave the country (though in an exclusive interview, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono tells TIME that deadline might be extended), and started barring aid workers from venturing beyond the towns of Banda Aceh and Meulaboh if they are not escorted by Indonesian soldiers.

The restrictions drew immediate criticism from international aid officials. “I am sure the Indonesian government will agree with me that the most important thing is to save lives and not have deadlines,” Jan Egeland, chief of the U.N.’s tsunami-relief effort, told reporters after the announcement, adding that he was “worried” by the restrictions on the movement of aid workers. In Banda Aceh, aid officials—who preferred to speak anonymously to avoid offending their Indonesian hosts—said the move could interfere with their work, but much would depend on how strictly the restrictions were applied. “We’ll just have to see where the military wants to take this,” says a senior official with a major relief organization.

The Indonesian government’s actions may have to do with the dilemma it faces in Aceh in the wake of the tsunami. For nearly 30 years, the province has been wracked by a separatist insurgency that has claimed the lives of some 12,000 people, mostly civilians. The Free Aceh Movement (or G.A.M., its Indonesian acronym), the main rebel group fighting for independence, asserts that Indonesian troops have committed widespread human-rights abuses in Aceh and that Jakarta has shortchanged the province over its share of the revenues from its oil and gas reserves. The government, in turn, says that G.A.M. fighters do not reflect the wishes of the vast majority of Acehnese, who want the province to remain a part of Indonesia, and that the rebels are merely bandits who kill and loot.

Indeed, Indonesian officials say they are restricting the movement of aid workers in order to protect them. That’s the unequivocal view of Major General Bambang Dharmono, the powerfully built, crew-cutted ex-commando who is the operational chief of the international relief effort in Aceh. Dharmono says he has no worries about his foreign military colleagues. They are there to help, he says, and besides, “they are willing to be under my control … they get their tasks from me, so I don’t have a problem.” Dharmono’s concern, he says, are the NGOs. “They go wherever they like without control.” If relief workers stray into unauthorized areas, “that would make me very unhappy. That would become a problem … and whatever happens to them, the Indonesian military will get the blame.”

Privately, most aid officials don’t take warnings of attacks by guerrilla fighters seriously, not least because it is in the rebels’ interest to keep the foreign presence in Aceh as long as possible. Most of the smaller NGOs and the informal volunteers are likely to leave Aceh soon anyway. “Some of them can be a bit off the wall,” concedes the senior relief official, noting that the Church of Scientology’s relief group, which is offering free therapeutic massages to refugees, has pitched its bright yellow tents in a field near Banda Aceh’s main mosque. “But there will be a natural attrition. Exhaustion and money problems will take care of most of them over the next few weeks. It’s the big relief outfits that are here for the long haul, and they are more than capable of working with the army and the government. At the end of the day, the aid agencies won’t be the problem. It’s the combatants on both sides who will make or break this operation—and any prospect of peace.”

The uncompromising positions adopted by both sides meant that, in the past, negotiations went nowhere. In fact, until the tsunami hit, Aceh was under martial law and effectively closed to outsiders, Indonesian as well as foreign. But now Aceh has been forced to open up, and a cease-fire is in effect to facilitate the delivery of aid. Will this lead to the peace talks that Jakarta now says it wants? Much will depend on whether Yudhoyono can perform a delicate balancing act. By all accounts, the president himself does want peace with G.A.M. When he was minister in charge of national security under his predecessor Megawati Sukarnoputri, he tried hard to keep negotiations going but had to accept Megawati’s decision when she pulled the plug on talks and declared martial law in May 2003.

Now that it’s his call to make, Yudhoyono is discovering that he has to walk a narrow tightrope. He needs international assistance to provide relief and to help rebuild Aceh. But at the same time, the 55-year-old retired general has to pander to a variety of influential lobby groups. Foremost is Indonesia’s powerful military, which has long regarded Aceh as its private fiefdom. According to Aceh specialists such as Australian academic Damien Kingsbury, the province is an important source of income for the military through a web of enterprises that include illegal logging, “taxes” on fishing and coffee, and even the running of the province’s lucrative marijuana trade. The President must also cater to conservative politicians and religious leaders who want the rebellion crushed and who fret about the presence of so many foreigners on Indonesian territory.

“The foreign military presence has made nationalists extremely nervous,” says Sidney Jones, an expert on Aceh who works for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. “The religious conservatives are also extremely concerned that some of the relief groups have a Christian agenda. And the army is convinced that all this is playing into the hands of the rebels. You couldn’t have picked a worse place in Indonesia to have a disaster happen that needed substantial foreign help.” Nasaruddin Abubakar, an activist who thinks Aceh should be allowed to hold a referendum on independence, reckons the authorities are imposing restrictions on foreigners because “they [think] the international forces will hinder their ambition to control Aceh.”

When Yudhoyono became President three months ago on the back of a landslide election victory, his priorities were clear—and myriad: tackle widespread corruption, track down terrorists, solidify civilian supremacy over the military, rebuild confidence in the legal system, and restore investor confidence. Then the tsunami hit, sidelining most of the objectives that Yudhoyono had set out for his first 100 days in office. Now, Aceh is the President’s biggest test, and it could well be the barometer by which his entire five-year term is judged. “In any tragedy there is an opportunity for a President to show his leadership ability,” says political columnist Bara Hasibuan. “But unlike Bush after 9/11 or [Thai Prime Minister] Thaksin during this crisis, [Yudhoyono] has not been able to boost his mandate because it has taken him too long to set up a clear line of command.”

That perception is not entirely fair, but it’s partly fed by how long it took Yudhoyono to get to Aceh once the earthquake and tsunami hit. The President was at the other end of the country, two time zones away visiting the Papuan town of Nabire, itself stricken by another earlier quake, when he was told about a tremor—but not a tsunami—hitting Aceh. “We thought, ‘Oh, no, not again,'” recalls presidential spokesman Dino Djalal. Yudhoyono held a conference that night in Jayapura; at the time, all he and his aides knew was that the death toll was about 600. “We had to scramble to get information because there were no phone lines in Aceh,” says Djalal. Yudhoyono tried to fly directly to Banda Aceh the next morning, but couldn’t because the airport was in no state to allow planes to land. Instead, he had to hop across the archipelago. By the time he arrived in the Acehnese capital after having to make two stops for refueling, it was already Dec. 28, two days after the disaster. “At each stop the news kept getting worse,” recalls Djalal. “At our last stop in Batam, we started getting visuals. The First Lady started crying when she saw the images. The President went to see her and hugged her for a long time.”

But it wasn’t just the delay in reaching the disaster zone. In the first few days, relief efforts were supervised purely at the local level—by General Endang Suwarya, Aceh’s military commander, and Aswar Abubakar, the province’s deputy governor. They couldn’t cope. Says Djalal: “People were demoralized, troops were missing, and we only had one helicopter in all of Aceh. They needed outside help.” It wasn’t until Yudhoyono named a Cabinet member, Alwi Shihab, to take charge of coordinating the relief efforts that aid began to flow.

Yet with all the attention on Aceh, there’s a danger that Yudhoyono may become too preoccupied with the province and neglect the country’s many other pressing problems. “In terms of pushing through promised reforms, he’s been lacking,” says Kevin O’Rourke, author of Reformasi: The Struggle for Power in Post-Soeharto Indonesia. “Now, there’s the risk that the crisis will be a serious distraction.” Plans to audit the military’s businesses, the creation of commissions to oversee the judiciary and the attorney general’s office, and an investigation into the murder of noted human-rights campaigner Munir have all been put on hold. “These were all part of a plan to deal with corruption and legal reform,” says O’Rourke. “The President not only needs to outline a vision for rebuilding Aceh but also Indonesia.”

As for the insurgency, Yudhoyono has repeatedly called for a fresh approach to peace in the wake of the tsunami, and there certainly hasn’t been a better opportunity to achieve that in years. Whether he is able to enforce his wishes on the ground in Aceh, where the military has forged a reputation for ruthlessness and independence from Jakarta, is hard to say. But for the moment, with the eyes of the world on Aceh, the military seems to be on its best behavior.

Meunasah Lheuk, a fishing village on Aceh’s strife-torn eastern coast, lost 30 people to the tsunami, and almost all the wooden houses built among coconut trees on a white-sand beach were flattened by the waves. Now the cleanup has begun, and numerous bonfires have been lit to dispose of piled-up timber, cloaking the village in heavy smoke. Flitting in and out of the fumes and flames are scores of soldiers assigned to help clear debris. The villagers help too, but many simply stand and watch. These are no ordinary grunts, after all, but members of the infamous Raider Battalion, a special-forces unit that has been widely accused by human-rights advocates of torture and extrajudicial killings. The Raiders have been reassigned from their camp in the mountains where they have been fighting insurgents, says the battalion’s operational officer Lieut. Amrul Huda, and they will stay in Meunasah Lheuk for as long as they are needed. “This is a different mission for us from fighting, but just as important, like a religious duty,” says the 29-year-old soldier. “We hope people will appreciate the humanitarian work.”

Even so, it’s not easy for the troops to gain the trust of the Acehnese. Zul, a 30-year-old fisherman, looks around carefully before murmuring: “This is the first time I’ve seen a soldier lift a hand to help us. And it comes late as well. They were too scared to come down near the water at first like everyone else. They …” Zul breaks off abruptly as a pair of Raiders emerge from the smoke. Both are carrying piles of splintered wood in their arms but their automatic rifles swing from their necks within easy reach.

For now, those guns are silent. The cease-fire is holding. “We are not attacking the soldiers,” says Syaifudin, deputy rebel commander for Indrapuri district near Banda Aceh. “The world knows that we want peace, and this is a good time for foreigners to see who really wants peace in Aceh and who doesn’t.” The young commander pauses, then adds a thought: “Of course, if they come near our bases, we will shoot them.” Tragically, for hundreds of thousands of homeless—and millions of war-weary Acehnese—that sounds more like an excuse to fight than a strategy for peace.