It is a source of pride among locals that Aceh was the last area of what would become Indonesia to succumb to the Dutch. That was in 1873, about 250 years after the colonisers founded Batavia at modern-day Jakarta on the most populous island of Java.
After World War II, Aceh was the only province the Dutch did not reoccupy, making it a platform from which the nascent conglomeration of religions, languages and islands called Indonesia could wage and win its struggle for independence.
A new nation
Aceh was incorporated into the new nation. But the Acehnese found it difficult to accept pancasila, the secular state ideology of founding Indonesian president Sukarno, taking precedence over Islam. When natural gas was discovered in 1971, the Acehnese grew resentful of the enormous wealth from their land and jobs going to the central government in Jakarta or foreigners. Leaders came to view Indonesia as the new colonisers. Their people had been independent for centuries before the Dutch. Now they wanted it back.
In 2001, Indonesia allowed Aceh to keep 70 per cent of money generated from resources, but this was a long way from independence. Following the breakdown of peace talks in 2003, then president Megawati Sukarnoputri attempted to wipe the separatists out for good in a bloody military crackdown.
That Heri Syahrial is alive when almost his entire family is dead (one surviving sister lives in Jakarta) comes down to a series of fateful decisions. One is the Aceh conflict and his father’s efforts to shield him from the Indonesian soldiers.
He was 25, a ripe fighting age, and had an uncle who advised GAM. As the Indonesian army was known to take and interrogate members for information, his father decided it was unwise for Heri to be living under the same roof as his older relative.
This boat came to rest on top of houses in the 2004 tsunami at Banda Aceh. It has been left there as a monument.Credit: Fairfax Media
Saved by a bike
So when an earthquake measuring more than 9 on the Richter scale rocked Banda Aceh at about 8am on December 26, 2004, Heri was at a friend’s house. The shaking knocked him to the ground and crumbled the walls.
He assumed his family was safe because the house was much stronger than his friend’s. But he wanted to be sure – and it was only a five-minute trip on his motorbike.
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The second reason he is alive is because the bike would not start.
The other bike at the house belonged to his friend, who wanted to check on his own family. In a compromise, they instead rode together into the centre of town to evaluate the damage there.
“When I was in the city, people and traffic were only going one direction,” he says. “They were shouting ‘run, run, run’. There was a river right there, and it already carried chairs, spring beds and everything – the water level was already equal with the land.”
It was about half an hour after the earthquake. They did not know it, but Heri’s family home and the place he had been staying were gone. Had he made it home or not ridden into the city, he would have been gone too.
Mountain refuge
Heri and more than a dozen others, including a teenage girl he knew from his neighbourhood, took refuge on a mountain.
He and the girl talked that first night, sharing their shock and grief. She explained her escape from the filthy water and debris. “The next morning I touched her hand, and it was cold. She was already dead,” Heri says.
Each day he made his way down the mountain to search for his family and was confronted with bodies, “thousands” of them, some whole, others cut in half or decapitated from sheet metal in the water, a mother and daughter frozen in a clutching hug.
When he found his neighbourhood, the family home and all those inside were gone.
The worst revealed
Jusuf Kalla had been Indonesia’s vice president for just two months, and was on the way to an Eid get-together with the Acehnese community living in Jakarta, when a staffer leaned over and told him “something” had just happened on the island of Sumatra.
Kalla tried to call Aceh’s governor, but the governor was in Jakarta for the same Eid gathering. Neither could he reach Aceh’s military commander and police chief because communications were down.
Within about 90 minutes of the tsunami, Kalla had Acehnese community leaders and senior government people on his government jet. When satellite phones began to work, the news relayed to Kalla was stunning.
“They cried, and they said maybe 10,000 died here,” he recalls.
The numbers would only get worse.
Kalla, then serving under president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, arrived in Banda Aceh early the next morning and saw the destruction – bodies on the roads and scattered through the fields, barely a home left.
Food for peace
One of the many immediate problems was food. As there were no means to cook rice, Kalla ordered “all of the bread” in the city of Medan to be sent north to the trouble spots. A political official angered the vice president by warning him that GAM fighters could get their hands on the food instead.
“I said, ‘No, GAM are people too. This is humanity. If GAM needs food, no problem’,” he says.
Kalla says the group’s exiled leadership, including Malik Mahmud and the late Hasan di Tiro, read about this action from their base in Sweden, smoothing the path to face-to-face peace talks.
Six months earlier, Kalla had tried to broker peace meetings and got GAM underlings instead. But the devastation caused by the tsunami also presented an opportunity.
“After the tsunami, I knew that even GAM people were suffering,” Kalla says. “We got in contact, but it wasn’t easy.”
Malik Mahmud, a top GAM leader and now Wali Nanggroe of Aceh province.Credit: Zach Hope
In early January 2005, Kalla asked the ambassadors of six nations to his office in Jakarta for a meeting: Sweden, because that’s where the GAM leaders were living; Singapore, Malik Mahmud’s birth country; Japan, as the previous host of failed talks; America, because of its vast contribution of emergency aid; Malaysia, because it held many Acehnese refugees; and Libya, which had trained GAM fighters.
Preserving tradition
One of GAM’s senior leaders of the time, Malik Mahmud, remembers events differently, or at least emphasises different elements. He says the first efforts to get the combatants to the table after the tsunami, made by European Union and Swedish officials, were rebuffed by the Indonesian foreign service.
“We agreed to talk,” Mahmud says. “Indonesia also agreed. Then they asked me where do you want to have the meeting. I said in Helsinki, Finland.”
Mahmud now lives in Aceh, inside what locals call the “White House”, a compound dotted with other regal buildings for his dozens of staff. All of it has been built since the tsunami.
Mahmud’s title is Wali Nanggroe. He describes it as “The preserver of the Aceh tradition and figure to unite the people of Aceh”. Mahmud advises Aceh’s politicians and the Indonesian government in Jakarta.
The position was created in the peace talks held and brokered in Helsinki in five rounds of “give and take” negotiations under the mediation of former Finland president, the late Martti Ahtisaari. In an historic shift, GAM agreed to a form of self-government instead of its long-held demand for full independence.
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The memorandum of understanding was signed on August 15, 2005 and set out a new political, economic and social justice dynamic between the central government and the semi-autonomous province. Aceh could have its own political parties, allowing GAM into politics. The rebel fighters were given amnesty and handed in their weapons. The Indonesian army withdrew some troops.
If the Boxing Day tragedy never happened, would Aceh have found peace?
“The tsunami made it faster,” Kalla says.
Mahmud says: “It changed everything.”
Problems remain
The hard-won peace has endured for 20 years but problems remain, including corruption and maladministration of a central government funding arrangement that expires in 2027.
Mahmud complains that the Indonesian government still opposes the flying of the Acehnese flag, despite it being provided for in the MoU. At a human level, he says the government has failed in its obligation to give suitable farming land to former GAM combatants as part of reintegration promises.
“At the moment, as long as I’m here, I manage the Acehnese, especially the ex-fighters, to be patient,” he says.
“But what I fear … is we have limits.”
Kalla says the government has fulfilled all of its obligations, “except the flag”. The pair remain close. Kalla had Mahmud around to his Jakarta house only last month.
International relief
In the days after the tsunami, the Australian government under prime minister John Howard announced a $1 billion relief package for Aceh and the affected island of Nias.
Locals say Banda Aceh is much improved for the global effort from 2005 and beyond. Schools, homes and roads were rebuilt more and better.
On a Sunday during this masthead’s visit, families gathered at a park complete with jogging track, children’s rides, food stalls, volleyball courts and even a skate park. The perimeter is lined with monuments thanking each of the nations who came to Aceh’s aid in its most dire time, Australia included.
A huge fishing boat has sat on top of a house since the tsunami in Lam Pulo, Banda Aceh in 2005.Credit: Jason South
Unlike Mahmud’s white house, the new city is showing its cracks. One path built after the tsunami has fallen into such disrepair that it is almost unwalkable. Even at Siron, the mass grave, the concrete railing by the disintegrating path has collapsed, and no one seems much bothered to fix it.
Heri pays this no thought. The important thing is that his loved ones are here, that he has a place to pray and process grief now 20 years old. Sometimes he comes with his wife and four children.
