Islam and Nation

Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia

Edward Aspinall

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780804760454
  9780804760447
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780804776271
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rooted in the latest theoretical debates about nationalism and ethnicity, yet written in an accessible and engaging style, Islam and Nation presents a fascinating study of the genesis, growth and decline of a nationalist movement.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with nationalist leaders, activists and guerillas, Aspinall reveals how the Free Aceh Movement went from being a quixotic fantasy to a guerilla army in the space of a generation, leading to a bitter conflict in which thousands perished. And by exploring the complex relationship between Islam and nationalism, Aspinall also explains how a society famed for its Islamic piety gave rise to a guerilla movement that ended up rejecting the Islamic goals of its forebears.

Islam and Nation is a tour de force in the study of nationalist politics. It will be of great interest to readers concerned about Southeast Asia, Islamic politics, ethnic conflict and nationalism everywhere.

1

Nation, Islam, War, and Peace

“Who is the governor of Aceh?” asked Military Resort Commander A. Y. Nasution, during a discussion with a group of children. … “Abdullah Syafi’ie, Sir,” piped up Mustafa, a grade five elementary school student. The commander was shocked and surprised, then quiet for a moment. Then he explained to the children that the governor of Aceh was Abdullah Puteh. “That Abdullah Syafi’ie, he’s a GAM rebel” he explained, prompting laughter from the villagers.

Analisa, April 27, 2004

This uncomfortable scene, in which a child in a village in North Aceh confuses the name of the head of Indonesia’s provincial government with the name of the (deceased) military leader of Aceh’s rebel movement, occurred almost a year after the Indonesian government declared martial law in Aceh. The government had intended to exterminate the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, or GAM) “down to its roots,” but military officers’ encounters with Acehnese school children suggested that this was easier said than done; the incident just presented was not the only one of its type recorded in the press. A few months earlier another officer found that students at a different school in North Aceh did not know the date of Indonesian army day, yet could quickly recall the anniversary of GAM’s declaration of independence. “Education has failed,” he lamented, apparently good-humoredly (Kompas, October 28, 2003). A little later, Colonel Nasution was angry when a patriotic song competition was attended by students from only thirty-five of the ninety schools invited. Schools that did not send students, he said, had likely been “influenced by GAM.” The army would interrogate their principals. “Fighting the GAM rebels doesn’t have to be with weapons. This kind of event will also make GAM sad. School children are blank sheets. It’s up to us what we fill their heads with” (Waspada, June 2, 2004).

Such reactions are not surprising. In Indonesia, as elsewhere, the education system had been a chief instrument of nation building. At schools throughout the country, all children were taught a uniform curriculum in the same national language about the same national history and culture. Students learned that kebhinekaan (diversity) was Indonesia’s essence, and about the many ethnic groups that made up the Indonesian nation. In this way, the state tried to inculcate national identity in its future citizens. Yet in Aceh, after the Soeharto regime collapsed, the education system began to falter in performing this function. Its failure was testimony to the success of GAM’s insurgency, the leaders of which had always viewed the education system as one of their greatest enemies precisely because of its role in turning children into Indonesian citizens.

These events came as part of the penultimate act in a bitter secessionist dispute that ran on and off in Aceh between 1976 and 2005. That dispute is the subject of this book. It is safe to say that the conflict caused great suffering, although data on the victims are still being collected and we do not yet have precise figures. The death toll over thirty years of conflict is uncertain and controversial, but it is likely to be in the vicinity of twelve to twenty thousand people.¹ This figure is equivalent to approximately 0.5 percent of the 2007 population of 4,350,000. After the conflict ended, a survey conducted by Harvard Medical School and the International Organization for Migration (2007) in seventeen districts of Aceh found very high levels of conflict-related abuses of civilians. For example, 38 percent of respondents reported that a family member or friend was killed, 24 percent experienced forced labor, and 40 percent experienced the confiscation or destruction of property.

The conflict began with the formation of GAM in 1976 (or early in 1977; the exact date is disputed) and is conventionally divided into three periods: (1) 1976 to about 1979, during which GAM had only about two hundred members and was quickly repressed; (2) 1989 to 1998, when the movement resurrected itself and launched new attacks, prompting massive retribution; and (3) 1998 to 2005, when, after the authoritarian Soeharto regime collapsed, it resurged and temporarily controlled much of Aceh’s countryside. For a time, Indonesian sovereignty looked shaky. A resurgent hard-line mood in Jakarta and a return to harsh methods in Aceh ended this brief nationalist euphoria. The military offensive, however, proved to be the prelude to a peace deal that ended the armed conflict altogether, at least for a time. Under the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding of August 2005, GAM members put aside their goal of independence, gave up their arms, and ran in elections. Surprising most observers, the peace has held since that time.

During the conflict years, the two sides strove to “fill the heads” of the Acehnese with different visions of their place in the world and in history. For the Acehnese nationalists of GAM, Aceh was distinct from and incompatible with Indonesia. Hasan di Tiro,² founder of the movement, explained in his declaration of independence in 1976 that Indonesia was merely a front for Javanese dominance and that “the Javanese are alien and foreign people to us Achehnese Sumatrans. We have no historic, political, cultural, economic or geographic relationship with them.” He also explained that the Acehnese “had always been a free and independent Sovereign State since the world begun [sic].” Aceh’s movement for national liberation was, in this view, merely reclaiming the sovereignty of the old Acehnese sultanate, which had succumbed to Dutch colonialism after heroic resistance in the nineteenth century. However, when, “after World War II, the Dutch East Indies was supposed to have been liquidated—an empire is not liquidated if its territorial integrity was preserved—our fatherland, Acheh, Sumatra, was not returned to us. Instead, our fatherland was turned over by the Dutch to the Javanese—their mercenaries—by hasty fiat of former colonial powers” (di Tiro 1984a, 25). This vision of Aceh’s historical authenticity and its incompatibility with Indonesia was central to Acehnese nationalism to the end.

The Indonesian government’s view (shared by many Acehnese) was that the Acehnese, although members of a distinct ethnic group, were merely constituents of Indonesia’s multicultural nation. Indeed, they were a treasured and honored group, having played a key part in winning Indonesian independence from the Dutch in the 1940s. As one military officer explained, “The ancestors of the Acehnese long ago swore oaths to Indonesian independence. Why now rebel? Betrayal: that’s what you call it” (Serambi Indonesia, September 2, 2003). Surya Paloh, a prominent Acehnese businessman and national politician, used less bellicose language to make the same point: “For the people of Aceh, once free means always free” (Serambi Indonesia, August 18, 2003). For Surya Paloh, the only independence that counted was the independence of Aceh from Dutch rule as part of Indonesia in 1945, not the new version promised by GAM.

Although the two sides in the conflict fought with guns, fire, and bombs, their battle was fundamentally about the identity of the people at the center of the conflict, the Acehnese themselves. This battle over identity poses major problems for the researcher because almost every element of identity is contested. The history of Aceh, for example, presents raw material that could be used to support both sides. Aceh did have a long history of independent statehood and of resistance to colonial powers. Moreover, almost as soon as Indonesia became independent in 1949, many Acehnese revolted against the central government. On the basis of this history, Acehnese nationalists propagated an image of the Acehnese as permanently rebellious and independence-minded. There was also much to be said for the historical arguments advanced by antiseparatists: during Indonesia’s national revolution against the Dutch in the 1940s no voices were raised in favor of a separate Acehnese state; even individuals who later supported independence backed the Indonesian cause. In the more recent, post-1998 period, in the space of a few years Aceh saw both one of the largest secessionist mobilizations of modern times and the sudden abandonment of secessionist goals by virtually the entire spectrum of Acehnese opinion. Rebel leaders who had been ardent nationalists suddenly accepted that Aceh would remain part of Indonesia, prompting some observers to say that Acehnese nationalism had always lacked depth.

Equally, even what was meant by the term Acehnese was contested. At the very least, it could mean residents of the territory of Aceh, or it could refer to individuals who identified, or were identified, as ethnically Acehnese. Questions about ethnic identification were not asked in Indonesian censuses until after the fall of Soeharto; violence prevented meaningful data collection for the 2000 census, but the intercensal (susenas) survey of 2003 suggested that 82.7 percent of the population of Aceh considered themselves—when asked—to be ethnically Acehnese. (Two decades earlier, the 1980 census had indicated that 67.5 percent of the population spoke Acehnese at home, and that figure had declined to 57.4 percent by the 1995 intercensal survey.) In addition to Acehnese speakers, several other ethnic groups were also indigenous to the territory; these groups included relatively large populations such as the Gayo and Alas in the central highlands, as well as many migrants and their descendants. In its early iterations, Acehnese nationalism elided the distinction between territorial and ethnic identity, stressing simply that the Acehnese were a noble and ancient people who deserved to regain their historic statehood. When pressed, Acehnese nationalists said that all groups indigenous to the territory were constituent ethnicities in an overarching Acehnese nation (a formulation that almost exactly replicated how Indonesian nationalists viewed the relationship between Aceh and Indonesia). However, they also mobilized many distinctly ethnic symbolic resources (such as the Acehnese language). Although some individuals among the Gayo and other minorities did identify with Acehnese nationalism and became members or supporters of GAM, others viewed the movement as representing only narrowly chauvinistic ethnic Acehnese interests. Overall, Acehnese nationalism had greater difficulties striking roots in these communities than in Acehnese-speaking heartland areas such as Pidie on the east coast. Of course census results and talk of ethnic “majorities” and “minorities” say very little about all of the people of mixed heritage, about those who could switch between languages and cultural codes in ethnically heterogeneous contexts, or about those who were simply unaware of or indifferent to matters of ethnic identity in most daily situations. The point is that although Acehnese nationalists insisted that people had to choose between only two alternative identities—Acehnese and Indonesian—at the level of lived experience the available choices of ethnic identification were far more complex—a fact that must always be borne in mind when reading the narrative presented in this book.

Of course such analytical challenges are not unique to the study of Aceh but are typical of ethnic and nationalist conflicts in many contexts. As Rogers Brubaker (1996, 278) reminds us, “Nationhood is not an unambiguous social fact, it is a contestable—and often contested—political claim.” Elsewhere he has warned against treating ethnicities as “substantial entities,” instead stressing the performative character of ethnic claims, in which actors, “by invoking groups … seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being” (Brubaker 2002, 164, 166, emphasis in original). The question of identity is cast in a particularly stark light in secessionist struggles in which the fundamental question is not merely about which identity is to be primary but about whether the group at the center of the conflict constitutes a nation and should therefore have a right to a state, and sovereignty, of its own.³ Secessionism is always an attempt by individuals imagining their community to be a putative nation that should excise itself from a larger nation-state, slough off the distinctive features it had worn as part of that larger body, and assert its uniqueness and right to exist as an independent entity. Secessionist nationalism, in other words, grows in an intimate embrace with its mortal foe.

In this book, my intention is not to evaluate the validity of the perspectives of either side of this deadly struggle. I do not seek to debunk the historical or other claims of Acehnese or Indonesian nationalists, nor is my goal to pronounce on the ethics of their claims or decide whether Acehnese can be, or should have been, considered a distinct nation. Rather, I take my lead from Rogers Brubaker (1996, 7):

Nationalism can and should be understood without invoking “nations” as substantial entities. Instead of focusing on nations as real groups, we should focus on nationhood and nationness, on “nation” as practical category, institutionalized form, and contingent event. “Nation” is a category of practice, not (in the first instance) a category of analysis. To understand nationalism, we have to understand the practical uses of the category “nation,” the ways it can come to structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organize discourse and political action.

It is in this spirit that this book proceeds: as an attempt to understand how the idea of an Acehnese nation came into being, interacted with alternative frames for structuring political action, changed over time, and eventually was transformed.

Theorizing Acehnese Nationalism

This book presents an analysis of the emergence, development, and demise of Acehnese nationalism between 1976 and 2005. It treats nationalism both as a set of ideas and as organization, movement, and insurgency. It grounds the analysis in theoretical debates about nationalism, conflict, and conflict resolution. As explained in the next section, it does this by presenting chapter-length studies that analyze discrete periods from distinct theoretical angles. These chapters crosscut and interlink, but they are not building blocks in a single, overarching hypothesis or line of argument. Nevertheless, the book is animated by three central lines of inquiry and built around three core arguments concerned with the origins of Acehnese nationalism, its relations with Islam, and the dynamics underpinning its eventual demise.

Origins of Acehnese Nationalism

The first question is the most straightforward, but answering it occupies most of the book: What accounts for the emergence of Acehnese nationalism as a mass force? The starting point here will be familiar to students of nationalism everywhere: How deep were the historic roots of the Acehnese nationhood that GAM sought to mobilize? For more than two decades one of the chief debates animating scholarly literature on nationalism has been the question of whether nations arise from processes associated with modernization or are manifestations of resilient ethnic communities rooted in the premodern past. The pendulum in this debate, often glossed as one between “primordialists” and “modernists” (Smith 1998), has swung toward modernism, which might now be considered the new academic orthodoxy.

This book emphasizes the novelty of Acehnese nationalism, in contrast with some analyses of Acehnese rebellion that stress continuity (for example, Reid 2004, Nessen 2006). In comparing the nationalist movement that emerged in the mid-1970s with earlier episodes of mobilization, the book finds striking discontinuity and innovation. Rather than laboring this point and presenting yet another study of the modernity of nationalism and the constructedness of nationhood in an already crowded field, the focus quickly turns to questions about causation: Why did nationalism arise when and in the form that it did? After all, in many other provinces of Indonesia no secessionist movements arose. What made Aceh special? Moreover, resistance to the state in Aceh could have taken other forms, such as mobilization in favor of an Islamic state (which had happened before) or in support of democratic transformation of Indonesia, rather than separation from it (which happened briefly in 1998). Nationalism is a highly specific kind of political imagination. Why did resistance take this form in Aceh?

Finding unconvincing the nationalist explanation that the Acehnese had simply always been a nation straining for rebirth, the book focuses instead on two sets of factors that may be summed up as agency and context.

The first point simply suggests that we need to emphasize the purposeful role of political actors in the genesis of nationalism rather than see nationalism as rising automatically from either social processes or premodern ethnic communities. Much of the book tries to understand the actors who created Acehnese nationalism, the social environments and events that molded them, and how they defined their nation and its struggle. Early in the book, the focus is on Hasan di Tiro and his views; later it is on new generations of nationalists who challenged aspects of his vision, as well as on actors from Aceh’s Indonesian political establishment who tried a middle course between secession and integration. The different backgrounds and interests of these actors gave them different perspectives on Aceh and its place in the world.

The book’s analysis also stresses the context in which these actors operated, which constrained the range of choices available to them and the ways in which they thought about identity. The analysis stresses three aspects of context—the institutional, the international, and the social—that are central to the emergence of nationalism in most contexts.

1. Institutional Context Despite the debates in nationalism studies, most theorists agree that nationalism, as a political movement, is indissolubly linked to the modern state. States are the framework within which nations are constructed, whether deliberately (such that “peasants may become Frenchmen”; Weber 1979) or inadvertently (for instance, when inhabitants of a colonial state imagine those living within its borders as belonging to a single nation). The state is the institution against which minority nationalist movements mobilize, and it is the goal that most nationalist movements aspire to reach.

The history of Acehnese nationalism presented here is above all a story of the interaction between the Acehnese population and the process of state formation. This story begins in the colonial period, but the emphasis is on attempts by the postcolonial state to integrate Aceh’s population into Indonesia by way of various nation-building processes, co-optation of key Acehnese groups into national political structures, discursive representations, and at times coercion. Some of these processes generated grievances that gave secessionism its force. Most analyses of the Aceh conflict emphasize these grievances, especially those concerned with political centralization, natural resource exploitation, and human rights abuses. As important as grievances are to the study of minority nationalist movements, states are also important in terms of the ways in which they may institutionalize and normalize ethnic identity, and thus provide political vocabularies with which to imagine separate nationhood (Brubaker 1996, 1998). States not only injure minority groups and repress separatist movements (the stress in most previous studies of Aceh), they also help constitute them. Acehnese nationalism was fundamentally a child of the Indonesian state.

This book examines this constitutive role of the state in Acehnese nationalism. It does so (following works by earlier scholars, notably Morris 1983 and Bertrand 2004) by emphasizing how a particular set of institutional arrangements were put in place in Aceh to bring an early revolt, the Darul Islam (Abode of Islam), to an end in the 1950s. Essentially ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• 1 Nation, Islam, War, and Peace
• 2 Aceh, Islam, and Indonesia
• 3 Birth of Nationalism
• 4 Rural and Global Networks
• 5 The Nationalist Moment
• 6 Violence, Money, Insurgency
• 7 Islam to Nationalism
• 8 From War to Peace
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index