Official and unrecognized narratives of recovery in post conflict Aceh, Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Anthropological analyses of post conflict narratives reveal how strategic interests mobilize to resolve or perpetuate conflict. Three years after the 2005 Helsinki peace agreement between the Government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) that ended GAM’s thirty-year separatist rebellion, the author led a post conflict programming evaluation. Drawing upon qualitative interviews of rural informants for this study and using an anthropological approach to narrative analysis, this article argues that recovery narratives can be understood in terms of official and counter-official discourses, each utilizing strategic resources to amplify their interpretation of an unfolding peace process. Subaltern narratives heard most clearly are empowered because they adhere to narrative conventions proscribed by the peace agreement and other powerful discourses such as GAM’s separatist ideology. Other unrecognized voices are left out; their stories of recovery resist easy interpretation and sidestep clichéd narratives of peace.

KEYWORDS:

• Aceh
• Indonesia
• narrative
• post conflict
• recovery
• separatism

Acknowledgements

I thank my colleagues and supervisors from the Multi-Stakeholder Review (MSR) team: Neven Knezevic, Adrian Morel, Cameron Noble, and Robert Wrobel; and especially the MSR field research team: Fuad Ramly, Isra Safil, Maimun Fuadi, Muhammad Nizar, Murniyati, Nyak Anwar, Retno Wandasari, Siti Rahmah, and Sri Wahyuni. My longer term research in Aceh received sponsorship from the Center for the Development of Regional Studies at Syiah Kuala University (PPSK-UNSYIAH, Pusat Pengembangan Studi Kawasan), the International Center for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS), and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI, Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia). For their helpful comments on earlier presentations and drafts of this manuscript, I thank Bobby Anderson, Leena Avonius, Byron Good, Eunsook Jung, Yusny Saby, Mary Steedly, and Silvia Vignato, as well as the editors and two anonymous peer reviewers from Critical Asian Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Conflict violence did not reach the Central Highlands of Aceh until the late 1990s, when GAM launched a massive recruitment effort after the fall of President Suharto and his New Order government in 1998. As a counter-insurgency measure, the Indonesian military supported the formation of anti-separatist militia groups, which took strongest root among Javanese transmigrant communities in the Central Highlands. The ethnic mix of Bener Meriah's wholly rural and underdeveloped population – Javanese transmigrants, local Gayo, and Acehnese migrants from the coast – was easily exploited and provoked into heretofore unprecedented levels of communal inter-ethnic violence and displacement throughout the district.

2 See, for example, Aspinall 2005; Barron and Burke 2008; ICG 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009; Jeffery 2012; and Kingsbury 2006.

3 Bourdieu 1977, 21.

4 Steedly 1993, 134. Steedly cites Marx and Engels [1845] 1965, 61.

5 Steedly 1993, 134.

6 de Certeau 1984, xix, 35–36.

7 See, for example, Aspinall 2007a, Kell 1995, Robinson 1998, and Siegel 2000.

8 The Aceh War against Dutch colonial integration lasted from 1873 until 1912. See: Alfian 1987.

9 Aceh's Darul Islam rebellion did not seek independence from Indonesia but rather fought with a loose network of Islamic insurgencies across Indonesia for Negara Islam Indonesia, the Islamic State of Indonesia. See: Aspinall 2007b and van Dijk 1981.

10 Robinson 1998, 137, Ross 2005, 41, and Sulaiman 2006, 135, 146.

11 Siegel 1998. In the specific context of Aceh, see Drexler 2008.

12 Aspinall 2009b, 105–109.

13 Drexler 2007.

14 Miller 2009, 202.

15 Barron and Burke 2008.

16 As its title suggests, a variety of stakeholders participated in the project, including several national and provincial government agencies, local civil society organizations, and several international development and humanitarian organizations. Donor support for the MSR came from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the World Bank, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), the United States Agency for International Development SERASI Program, the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), and the IOM. For a comprehensive report of the MSR's findings, see: Noble and Thorburn 2009. For a peer-reviewed overview of the MSR findings, see: Thorburn 2012.

17 Grayman 2009. The eleven MSR case studies covered the following topics: provincial secession movements, disgruntled GAM ex-combatants who do not support the MoU, the emergence of local political parties, mental health services in post-MoU Aceh, conflict-displaced households, anti-separatist groups, ex-political prisoners, GAM ex-combatants who surrendered before the MoU, post-MoU reintegration assistance, civilian attitudes toward GAM ex-combatants, and perceptions of the peace process in Aceh. Support for the MSR's community-based qualitative research described in this article came from AusAID and the World Bank. The findings and opinions described in the case studies and this article are those of the author and should not be attributed to any of the bodies who have supported the MSR, nor the authors of the main MSR report.

18 I have written more extensively about the methodological challenges posed for an anthropologist conducting fieldwork of this sort in Grayman 2013a.

19 Li 2007, 2.

20 Good 2012, 531.

21 Martini and Jauhola 2014 and Missbach 2011a.

22 Most stories of conflict violence highlight the distinction between “organic” and “inorganic” security forces. Organic troops are the local recruits into the police or military by local command structures based in Aceh. Inorganic troops are the police and military troops that were brought to Aceh from other parts of Indonesia specifically for counter-insurgency. Inorganic troops answered to a command structure based in Jakarta, where distrust of organic forces prevailed. Without ties to local populations in Aceh, inorganic troops had a reputation for more brutal and arbitrary acts of violence against civilian populations.

23 Good et al. 2006, 2007; Good 2015; Grayman, Good, and Good 2009; and Siapno 2009.

24 See, for example, “Panglima TNI: Bila GAM Tidak Menyerah Akan Dihabisi” (Gatra, May 19, 2003). Accessed 20 August 2015. http://arsip.gatra.com/artikel.php?id=28474.

25 The use of transitional cash assistance for amnestied prisoners and ex-combatants during the reinsertion phase of a peace process is discussed in Knight and Özerdem 2004. The model described by Knight and Özerdem was used for IOM's post conflict program in Aceh.

26 In many ways, the political prisoners given amnesty immediately after the MoU were the luckiest of all post-MoU beneficiaries. The government had a set list and funds were channeled to them directly, presenting fewer opportunities for government officials or GAM commanders to spread around or siphon funds (see sub-header below: “Mismanagement of Recovery Assistance”). Most amnestied prisoners were also eligible for in-kind vocational packages and basic training. Not all amnestied prisoners enjoyed outcomes as successful as Nur's. For a case study of failed reintegration, see: Grayman 2014.

27 Reid 2004 and Reid 2006.

28 Aspinall 2009a and ICG 2009.

29 Aspinall 2009a and Grayman 2013b.

30 Das and Kleinman 2001, 25.

31 In addition to my MSR case study titled “Sawang” (in Grayman 2009), the World Bank's Aceh Conflict Monitoring Update reports from December 2007, July–August 2008, and September 2008 address and analyze the chronology of events in Sawang. Bobby Anderson 2013 also recounts the events in Sawang from the perspective of a small NGO faced with extortion threats and an actual carjacking while trying to deliver post conflict assistance.

32 Sultan Iskandar Muda's reign was from 1607 until 1636.

33 Alfian 2006, Grayman 2015, Aspinall 2009b, Hadi 2011, Kloos 2014, and Siegel 1979.

34 Das and Kleinman 2001, 4.

35 Das and Kleinman 2001.

36 Steedly 1993, 135.

37 de Certeau 1984, 37.

38 Scott 1985.

39 Scott 1990.

40 For a comparison of Scott and de Certeau in studies of resistance, see Rankin 2010.

41 For more on the role played by overseas GAM during and especially after the conflict, see Missbach 2011b.

42 Hasbi's exaggerated predictions were probably not so far off the mark. In former GAM strongholds PA won the 2009 legislative elections in a massive landslide. In Hasbi's home district of East Aceh, 71 percent of the electorate voted for PA. See Palmer 2010.

43 Inong balee literally means “women widows.” Afrianty 2015, 109–110, reports that indeed many of the inong balee soldiers were widows of men killed during the conflict, but many others were also just women who wanted to contribute to GAM's struggle for Aceh's independence.

44 Afrianty 2015, Good 2015, Grossmann 2011, Jauhola 2016, Siapno 2002, and Siapno 2009.

45 Nor did any of the other respondents in this research, despite the inclusion of women on each research team and their efforts to address gender disparities in Aceh's conflict recovery. I do not discount the positionality of the research team, as representatives of international donors and government agencies, as barriers to accessing more critical gender perspectives on this project.

46 Jauhola 2016, 335 observes that in the absence of formal documentation of gendered conflict experiences in Aceh, the “retelling of women's war stories requires searching for subjugated knowledge and alternative war memories, which are often to be found in poems and fiction rather than in formal documents or war archives.”

47 The term Pa’i is Acehnese slang for TNI, with roots in the derogatory term sipahi from India that signifies Indian conscripts in the British colonial army. Good 2015 writes about the multivalent historical resonance of the Pa’i (also Si Pa’i) terminology as it has been used in Aceh generally, and more specifically in Acehnese women's narratives of traumatic experience, resilience, and recovery.

48 Drexler 2007 and Drexler 2008.

49 Das and Kleinman 2001, 26.

50 Caton 2006.

51 Steedly 1993, 135.

52 Nordstrom 2004, 40.

53 IPAC 2015.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for the component of the MSR project titled “Community Perceptions of the Peace Process in Aceh” in 2008 came from the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the World Bank in Indonesia [7522]. The author thanks the Fulbright Foundation via the American-Indonesian Exchange Foundation (AMINEF), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, for supporting longer term research in Aceh.

Notes on contributors

Jesse Hession Grayman

Jesse Hession Grayman is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at the University of Auckland’s School of Social Sciences. His research in Aceh examines post-conflict and post-tsunami humanitarian recovery, particularly through international organizations and local NGOs. His current research elsewhere in Indonesia looks at community driven development policies in the health sector, with a particular interest in the role of information and communication technologies. Recent publications include “‘We Build our Own Stories’: The 19th-Century Figure and 21st-Century Myth of the Acehnese Poet Dôkarim” (2015, Indonesia), “Rapid Response: Email, Immediacy, and Medical Humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia” (2014, Social Science and Medicine), and “Conjuring Zones of Insecurity: Post-Conflict Election Campaigning by Text Message in Aceh, Indonesia” (2014, with Bobby Anderson, in Communications Technology and Humanitarian Delivery: Challenges and Opportunities for Security Risk Management).