After the flood... peace: Rebels lay down their arms

The Indonesian province of Aceh has been riven by a brutal civil war for decades. But out of the horror of the tsunami has come an unexpected benefit. Marcus Tanner reports from Banda Aceh

There can't be many guerrilla leaders with escape stories like Yusuf Irwandi's. One of several hundred separatist fighters in the province of Aceh jailed by the Indonesian military, his nine-year sentence came to an abrupt end at 8am on 26 December last year, when the tsunami washed away his prison. "The water lifted me up to the ceiling and I found it was quite soft - just asbestos - so I punched through it," he says. "After that I lifted off the tin roof and swam away."

Most of his comrades from the Free Aceh Movement, known as GAM, were less lucky. Unable to escape their cells, about 200 drowned like rats in the prison on the outskirts of the local capital, Banda Aceh. Another 180 fighters perished in an equally gruesome fashion in the jail in nearby Lhoknga.

Today Irwandi holds court in the rebels' head office, only yards from the headquarters of Aceh's military governor, General Bambang Dharmono, who before the tsunami struck had waged a merciless war against the rebels and their dream of independence from Indonesia.

The war in Aceh was one of many low-level conflicts that had rumbled on for decades in developing countries such as Indonesia without a clear winner, or anyone in the outside world really noticing. Overshadowed by the bloodier drama in the largely Christian former Portuguese colony of East Timor, few foreigners knew much about the parallel conflict wracking Muslim Aceh, a remote, mountainous slice of northern Sumatra.

When the tsunami struck, killing 200,000 of Aceh's four million population, no one knew if the disaster would ratchet up the war, or help extinguish it.

In the event, it did the latter. Having sealed off Aceh for years, Jakarta was forced to open the province dramatically to several hundred foreign aid organisations and from being a closed city, Banda Aceh overnight became home to thousands of mainly young Western aid workers.

As government and aid agencies struggled together to feed, water and rehouse the tsunami's half a million homeless survivors, Brussels and Indonesia's neighbours in the Asean group of countries launched a remarkable initiative, which led to a tentative peace deal in Aceh, and then to a joint mission, the Aceh Monitoring Mission, to supervise the terms.

The result was the Helsinki Agreement, signed in August, since which Jakarta has withdrawn most police and army units, and the rebels have handed in most of their weapons.

In a landmark event yesterday, which showed that the agreement continues to hold, more than 1,600 Indonesian troops left Aceh, only one day after the monitors declared that the rebels had handed in 840 weapons, thereby fulfilling the quota for disarmament laid down in the Helsinki deal.

More is to come. About 5,600 remaining troops are due to leave Aceh by the end of the year, after which the province will be policed and defended by an overwhelmingly "organic" - that is, locally born and trained - security force. Under the second phase of the Helsinki deal, starting next spring, political change will take priority as the people of Aceh get the chance to choose a government that will enjoy wide autonomy - though not independence - within Indonesia.

Diplomats who recall the fiercely centralising policies of Indonesia's former presidents Sukarno and Suharto rub their eyes in disbelief. But Marty Natalegawa, of Indonesia's foreign ministry, says that alongside Sumatra's natural catastrophe, "a political tsunami has taken place in Aceh. One year ago peace negotiations weren't even on the table whereas now we have a real agreement." He adds: "It's not peace at any price but a happy compromise."

Jakarta pulled in its horns in Aceh, foreign diplomats say, because unlike East Timor, whose loss Jakarta still bitterly resents, the Aceh deal does not threaten Indonesia's very existence as a state. "It's not separation and the framework is Indonesian unity," Mr Natalegawa says. "It's shown we can rebound from a doomsday scenario."

That might sound like diplomatic patter. But a drive round Aceh yields no glimpses of army - or rebel - roadblocks. Dawn brings the sight of remaining Indonesian troops doing their morning press-ups in the steaming heat on the parade grounds but there is no other sign of a military presence in Banda Aceh, or in the more remote villages, where many remember the years when they were frightened to go out after dark for fear of meeting army - or rebel - patrols. The "emergency" years, one village headman told me, were overshadowed not only by shootouts but routine extortion and kidnapping, carried out by both sides.

Maria Leissner, head of human rights for the international Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM), says there are occasional lapses on both sides in the form of exchanges of fire between jumpy army patrols and rebel units. But there is equally no doubt that one of Indonesia's nasty backyard wars is well and truly over and that everyone is enjoying a slice of the peace dividend. "Freedom of movement has helped subsistence farmers," she says. "Road blocks and checkpoints have gone, so extortion decreases."

Most adults cannot even remember a time when Aceh was at peace. When Indonesia was the jewel in the Dutch Queen's crown, the fiercely independent Acehnese, who treasure memories of long-ago fighters against the colonial army, maintained a constant guerrilla war. They rejoiced when the war-weary Dutch reluctantly hauled down the flag in Batavia, now Jakarta, in 1949, only to find themselves at loggerheads with a new set of masters who insisted on treating the Acehnese thirst for self-government as treason. The existence of substantial oil reserves round the province, to which Jakarta helped itself, added an extra element of resentment.

Quite why a low-level war that has rumbled on almost since time immemorial has stopped is still somewhat mysterious, despite the obvious fact that the tsunami drowned so many GAM fighters. Aceh's pugnacious military governor maintains his forces had already broken the back of the GAM. "If it hadn't been for the tsunami we'd have just waited [for their surrender]," General Bambang tells me with a broad grin in his military HQ, minutes from GAM's humbler digs. "Before all the foreign aid arrived [in Aceh] the GAM fighters were all starving!" The general's claim that the rebels never had much armoury is born out by photographs of the guns they have handed in to the AMM monitors.

Many, as one monitor admits, were rusting pieces of rubbish, some literally struck together and of danger only to those foolhardy enough to use them. Many were such junk that the AMM refused to register them as weapons, which was one reason why the disarmament process has taken as long as it has done. The ex-fighters also seem mightily relieved it's all over. In the coastal town of Meulaboh, I met a group of them in a GAM office.

Barefoot, tongue-tied and bashful in front of the white foreigner, they hardly belonged to same league as the hatchet-faced gunmen of the IRA. None saw any real action against the Indonesian military during their sojourn in the jungle, where they were sustained by a "tax" imposed by GAM on nearby towns.

"We never got any money, though," one ex-fighter notes. "All we got was food and cigarettes." They professed delight with the peace deal and especially with the financial packages they stand to receive from the authorities under the Helsinki deal. Worth about $100 an instalment, and financially underwritten by the EU, the ex-fighters stand to receive several instalments over the coming months - a substantial bonus in a region where most incomes are tiny. If there was a gap between the independence they fought for, and the autonomy they are about to receive, it didn't appear to bother them. All that interested them was whether they would be able to get a job.

Some foreign aid workers believe the tsunami gave both sides an excuse to end a war that had exhausted all sides, for although it is true that Indonesia's massive army had easily contained the GAM in the dense jungle that covers the mountainous interior of north Sumatra, like a rash, the GAM never went away.

Moreover, it wasn't just GAM fighters who died terrible deaths in jail when the flood came; 1,700 government policemen are also thought to have lost their lives.

Certainly, Aceh's smiling general-cum-governor betrayed no irritation with the fact that government policy towards Aceh seemed to have undergone a 100-per-cent revolution. "As a soldier I follow my mission," he said. "My mission before was to wipe out the GAM. Now it is to implement to peace deal." If the GAM fighters seemed to be looking forward mostly to new jobs, the general seemed eagerly to contemplate joining the military exodus.

Others believe that joint European-Asian mediation was just as crucial as either the tsunami or the existing military stalemate. Pieter Feith, the head of the AMM, says Jakarta would never have allowed the United Nations the same leeway to broker a deal as it did the Asean and the EU, as "there is a perception in Jakarta that it was thanks to the UN that [East] Timor was lost".

Unburdened by suspicions of harbouring an agenda in favour of independence, he added, Brussels was able to help theAcehnese to negotiate political and economic gains they could never have achieved through any number of years of future guerrilla warfare. And with real peace, foreign aid has flowed freely and liberally into Aceh.

Many complain at the slowness with which houses have been rebuilt, but Aceh is no longer the physically devastated landscape it was six months ago. New, deep clean-water wells, paid for by the EU, dot the partially rebuilt villages and Aceh's destroyed fishing fleet, also paid for by the Europeans, is once more going about its business.

"It's the biggest building site in the world," says Andrew Steer the World Bank's country director in Indonesia. "Things are well positioned to get everyone in permanent housing by 2007. We are reaching cruising speed in house building. The world is now spending $200m a month in Aceh. Before it was more like $20m." Little of this would have been possible if Aceh had still been at war and if aid workers had been caught in the fighting or the culture of bribery and extortion that the conflict fed and created.

Mr Feith is reluctant to buy into euphoric suggestions that the Aceh road to peace-building might be applied to some of the other regional conflicts, such as Kashmir or Sri Lanka, as these are "frozen conflicts", in which both sides have become totally embedded over the years. But he does see some potential for its application in the insurgency in southern Thailand. Others suggest it might be used elsewhere at home in Indonesia, to settle other sputtering unsolved conflicts, such as the one in Papua.

As for one of the world's luckiest ex-jailbirds, Yusuf Irwandi is gearing up for the forthcoming elections in which many former GAM fighters will take part, even though he himself is not. "I'm going back to teaching veterinary science," he insists. Irwandi looks back on the tidal wave that changed Aceh for ever with more mixed feelings than most. "It was that force that freed me from jail," he admits.