Peace and piracy in the aftermath of the tsunami

AS NATURAL disasters go, the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 was of a scale all its own: an estimated 238,000 people died as coastal towns and villages in the Indian Ocean rim were washed away in an instant. However, the wave of retrospection in recent weeks often overlooks, for Indonesia at least, an upside in the terrible event.

One of the worst hit regions by the tsunami was North Sumatran Aceh province. It had been the grip of an armed conflict between separatists from the Free Aceh Movement (known by its Indonesian acronym GAM) and the central government for nearly three decades. More than 15,000 people were killed in the fighting between 1976 and 2005. Occasionally, the rebellion would even spill over to a neighbouring country when a hijacked plane would suddenly turn up.

Paradoxically, the tsunami’s very devastation provided the hiatus for everyone to step back and think about where things were heading. After all, Aceh has a long history of resisting outside forces. The Aceh sultanate was one of the last places in the archipelago to be subdued by the colonial Dutch rulers in Batavia, as Jakarta was then known as. The Acehnese fought a guerilla war that drained the colonial treasury. Dutch subjugation of the region was not completed until 1904, a good three decades after that colonial war started.