Islamic rebellion in Aceh and Mindanao is not so irrational
Jacqueline Aquino Siapno
'Mountain goats eat the corn; village goats
get hit with stones.' This Acehnese saying poignantly captures the
ongoing violence there. Unable to capture Free Aceh guerrillas, the
Indonesian military go after Acehnese villagers. My own work in the
Southern Philippines and in Aceh tries to help dispel the negative
propaganda against the Acehnese and against Bangsamoro in Mindanao as
'fundamentalists' and irrational troublemakers. It is astounding to see
how easily the government, media, and 'experts' can influence the
public into forming opinions about these movements without a need for
critical reflection and careful investigation. This fosters a
pernicious cycle of violence and ignorance.
News coverage of the rebellions in Aceh and
Mindanao against the Indonesian and Philippine states respectively has
much to say about the 'terrorism' conducted by Free Aceh (GAM) and by
Abu Sayyaf. The latter, leader of a splinter group of the factionalised
Bangsamoro rebellion, was responsible for kidnapping tourists from a
Malaysian resort in April. Yet hardly anything is said, at least not in
the Australian media, about what the Indonesian and Philippine
governments are doing to the unarmed civilian populations there, or
about the political-economic dimensions of the conflicts, or about why
independence movements emerged in the first place.
Mention is rarely made of a history of more
than twenty five years of armed rebellion in Mindanao, producing at
least one million internal refugees, including more than 100,000
Filipino Muslims who have fled to Malaysia, and about 120,000 dead.
Propaganda against the Free Aceh Movement and against Muslim 'rebels'
in Mindanao as 'security disturbing gangs' (GPK), as extortionists,
kidnappers, and extremists is pervasive in the media, and uncritically
reproduced even by progressive intellectuals. Institutionalised,
systematic state violence in Aceh and the Philippines, meanwhile, is
hardly ever called 'criminal'. Only recently are observers belatedly
beginning to acknowledge that members of the government and the
military have behaved like no less than war criminals in these two
places.
Making a state
My own interpretation places the armed
rebellions in Aceh and in Mindanao within a larger context. The
construction of modern nation-states and citizen-subjects in these
areas is itself a new and violent historical project. This project
tends to paint populist movements that are anti-occupation culture,
anti-colonial, anti-secular, and anti-capitalist as a sort of
'quintessence of evil'. It dismisses acts of resistance as
'fundamentalist', 'fanatical' responses to depressed rural conditions,
conditions that need to be dealt with by education and the mediation of
a secular, representative government.
The state-building project justifies state
terror through a judicial system that makes it impossible for its
victims to seek redress or even challenge its language. It portrays
whole communities who threaten to break up the nation-state and put it
to shame as terrorists, kidnappers, and 'subversives'. The Philippine
government and the Indonesian government have failed in Mindanao and in
Aceh. They have failed because they have had to resort to extremely
brutal measures to implement their goals of integrating the Acehnese
and the Muslims in Mindanao into the nation-state project.
The reasons for the continuing Acehnese and
Bangsamoro rebellions are complex and numerous, but certainly not
irrational. More than twenty five years now of political instability
and violence, class conflict, and underdevelopment have produced
impoverishment. The most basic infrastructure is lacking, as is access
to schools and higher education. Moreover, occupation culture has been
a culture of terror. It has produced militarisation and sadism. Both
areas have suffered from policies of massive transmigration of
non-organic groups: from over-populated Luzon to Mindanao, and from
other areas in Indonesia to the under-populated, fertile lands of Aceh.
This has created conflict by dispossessing people from their land.
In Aceh, colonising power has been
institutionalised through an extensive system of surveillance, torture,
road checkpoints, street harassment, sexual harassment and rape,
'sweeping operations' and house-to-house searches. Aceh's oil and
natural gas resources are exploited for the benefit of Jakarta. Its
over-centralised administration has alienated the people. The
independence movement and its sympathisers are demonised as 'enemies of
the state'. Indonesian government officials constantly use a language
of paranoid absolutes, for example: 'referendum is out of the
question'; 'separation would be a violation of national integrity'.
I do not wish to be misunderstood as an
apologist for independence and/ or Islamist movements, nor for
predominantly male nationalist movements which claim to represent their
entire nation while keeping the female half of the population
invisible. But unless the structural roots of the conflicts are
genuinely addressed, any short-term measures will serve merely as
band-aid solutions. That could include the humanitarian assistance and
'confidence-building measures' recommended these past few months by
'conflict resolution' consultants to the Indonesian and Philippine
governments.
In both cases, armed rebellion has a
history which spans several decades, if not centuries if we incorporate
their anti-colonial struggles against the Dutch in Aceh, and against
Spanish and American colonialism in Mindanao. Given these long
histories, it would be fatal to bludgeon them from the arrogant centre
with a quick-fix, ahistorical, militaristic solution.
In the Philippines, the historic peace
agreement known as the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao, signed
with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) led by its founder Nur
Misuari in 1996, did not end the armed rebellion. A different faction,
namely the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), rejected the
agreement. Less than a year after the historic 'peace' agreement was
signed, on 16 March 1997, the Philippine armed forces shelled the
MILF's main Camp Abubakar and hit a religious school (madrasah),
resulting in the deaths of ten female students and their male teacher.
In June and July of 1997, armed clashes occurred between the MILF and
the Philippine military that involved the aerial bombardment of the
MILF's Camp Rajamuda. This produced more civilian and combatant
casualties and evacuations, much like the present situation in Aceh.
This may be a useful comparative study for
Acehnese who want to understand the lasting effect of 'ceasefires' and
'peace negotiations' that neglect to include all important groups. In a
glaring omission, women's groups that have been at the forefront of
political organising, among them the Duek Pakat Inong Aceh Congress
participants of last March, were not included in the Joint
Understanding on Humanitarian Pause for Aceh signed in Switzerland in
mid-May. A genuinely democratic negotiation with any hope of lasting
should include the women's groups, however ideologically diverse they
may be.
There is too much emphasis on the role of
the Free Aceh Movement GAM. The independence movement in Aceh today is
much larger than GAM. Any genuine solution to the conflict ought to
include all the other groups outside GAM. These also want independence,
but talk about it in very different terms - in some cases extremely
critical of GAM's policies.
Islam
The dominant myth that needs to be
dispelled is that the conflicts in Aceh and Mindanao are religious
conflicts aimed at setting up an Islamic state. Most analysts like to
portray the Mindanao conflict as one between a dominant Catholic
majority and a Muslim minority. This argument is seriously problematic.
It says nothing about the just redistribution of economic capital or
the problem of underdevelopment. And it is certainly not applicable in
Aceh, where a Muslim majority is oppressing a Muslim community. In
reality, the conflicts in Aceh and Mindanao are about natural
resources, about land and capital, and about social justice for the
victims of state terror. At bottom, they are about the structural
re-organisation of the nation-state - much like the struggle for
justice in West Papua and East Timor.
In any case, contrary to popular phobias
against Islamic law as being somehow more oppressive of women than
secular law, in some cases it is actually more egalitarian and in
favour of women's rights, particularly in the fields of inheritance and
divorce. The ongoing debate about gender and Islamic law in Aceh and in
the Muslim world generally is complex, but it would serve us well not
to assume that secular law is somehow more liberating for women.
Perhaps we should ask why it is that Islam
in both these places has become such a powerful expression of cultural
identity and mobilisation. Conceptions of social justice in resistance
Islam are in fundamental opposition to the bureaucratic values of the
secular state, which emphasise integration into the national economy
and global capital rather than political community. The earlier
idealisms of 'Islamic socialism', Third World nationalism, the 1955
Bandung Conference, and Sukarno's 'Go to hell with your aid!' have
faded. But the vision of Islam as a form of community that demands
social and economic justice remains very much alive.
Jacqui Siapno (j.siapno@politics.unimelb.edu.au) lectures in political science at the University of Melbourne.
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