The provisions of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreed to in August called on the GAM rebel leadership to formally end its bloody thirty-year struggle - which had cost an estimated 15,000 lives in the northwestern Indonesian province - and hand in its weapons. Rebels had agreed to these conditions in exchange for an opportunity to contest local elections to be held in April and the opportunity to experience a promised degree of autonomy from Jakarta.
The Indonesian Government, for its part, agreed to recognize GAM as a legitimate political party and remove all non-locally raised military and police from the province. The troops had been stationed in Aceh since 2002 following the breakdown in peace negotiations in Tokyo.
Both sides had appeared to comply with these terms by year’s end with GAM having renounced their armed struggle and handed in weapons to a team of international observers. The Indonesian Government had fulfilled its part of the understanding by withdrawing most of their troops from Aceh in a much-publicized ceremony from the Acehnese port of Lhokseumawe.
Chief international mediator behind the peace process, Maarti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish Prime Minister praised the way both sides had stuck to the terms of the MOU,
“I'm not surprised, but I must say that I'm nevertheless impressed and pleased that the parties have kept to their word,” he said to the BBC. “"It's a very impressive performance by both the government of Indonesia and GAM.”
Professor Damian Kingsbury, an Australian academic who acted as an advisor to the rebels during the negotiations also commended the Indonesian Government’s acceptance of the MOU,
“The peace deal proves that the Indonesian Government is now capable of finding political answers to political problems, rather than military answers to political problems,” he said to the Age newspaper.
However cracks began to appear in the accord just days after GAM decommissioned their weapons when rebel leaders accused the Government of breaking the terms of the peace deal by redeploying up to a battalion of soldiers to the devastated province for “reconstruction purposes.”
The decision to return troops to the province came at the request of Aceh's Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency chief Kuntoro Mangkusubroto. Kuntoro, whose agency had come under fire for the slow pace of the reconstruction effort, had requested the TNI’s assistance in rebuilding important infrastructure projects in devastated Aceh where last year’s destructive tsunami had left as many as 190,000 still homeless one year after the disaster.
However senior GAM leader Baktiar Abdullah said any additional troops would break the understanding, which allows for only 14,700 Acehnese raised troops and 9100 police officers to be deployed in the province. <!--page-->
“If there are any more than that, even one, it will breach the agreement's memorandum of understanding,” he said to reporters adding, “If they can use that excuse now, later they could use others.”
Baktiar also said the request was an underhanded attempt to return TNI (Indonesian military) troops to the province which would be,
“… an unhealthy development, because it will create anxiety and also concern among the civilian population who have not forgotten the hard experience that they have had during the large presence of the military here in Aceh,” he said to Australian radio.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono though has denied that the terms of the peace agreement had been violated,
“This deployment should not disturb the ongoing peace process,” he said in Aceh saying the troops would be engineers whose mission would be to rebuild and repair desperately needed bridges and roads.
Senior Indonesian military officials agreed with the President and welcomed the proposal,
“If the [Aceh and Nias Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency] has no other choice but to ask for military help to carry out reconstruction, then we will help, on the condition that [the agency] provides the funds to mobilize the troops,” said TNI commander General Endriartono Sutarto to reporters.
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