Twenty years of peace in Aceh, the fruits of dialogue (© The Jakarta Post, David Harland)

Today Aceh enjoys special autonomy and is uniquely governed by an indigenous political party which safeguards Acehnese culture and religious traditions.

Twenty years ago, a little-known armed conflict between Aceh, a far-flung natural resource-rich province of Indonesia, and its central government was resolved using the tools of dialogue and mediation.
 
The Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in August 2005 ended a vicious 30-year war that killed 170,000 people. It also lent legitimacy and credibility to the field of mediation worldwide.

Indonesia and the people of Aceh are rightly proud of their ability to peacefully settle this long-running conflict. For those individuals and organizations that helped build and secure the peace in the years leading up to 2005 and afterward, Aceh proved the effectiveness of third-party international mediation and was a valuable testing ground for techniques of monitoring and disarmament that have helped bring peace to other parts of the world afflicted by internal conflict.

The Helsinki agreement was mediated by former Finnish president Martti Athisaari, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Then Indonesian vice president Jusuf Kalla played a pivotal role in persuading the Aceh rebels and Indonesia’s hardline military to see the value of compromise and settlement.

The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD), the organization I am proud to lead, was then a very small start-up based in Geneva. We played a pioneering and seeding role from 1999, facilitating early encounters between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government.

In those early years, we made the case to both sides that dialogue is more likely than not to lead to the discovery and acceptance of a peaceful means of resolving disputes. This led to an initial understanding between the two sides in 2000 that enabled a humanitarian pause and opened the door to dialogue about a political solution. HD facilitated an early ceasefire agreement in 2002 that did not last, but which laid the foundations for an eventual peaceful settlement.

In the background, Indonesia’s own struggle for democratic reform played an outsized role in preparing the ground. The fall of president Soeharto in May 1998 resulted in a reform-minded government under president B. J. Habibie which paved the way for greater autonomy and self-government across Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago.

Habibie’s successor Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, a liberal Islamic cleric, opened the door for outside facilitation and mediation of the Aceh conflict. It was Gus Dur who first invited HD to explore mediation in the Aceh conflict.

The Acehnese themselves, a proud and cultured people with a long history of struggle for independence going back to the Dutch colonial era, presented a dignified and sophisticated case for autonomy and were tough negotiators.
 
However, despite the conducive political environment and the early success of third-party mediation before 2004, there simply was not enough trust between the two sides to sustain the peace process.

Domestic political turmoil and external economic factors played a role.
The early fruits of dialogue were derailed when in 2003 the Indonesian government declared martial law and the army went back on the offensive against GAM.

Many analysts have suggested that the December 2004 tsunami in Aceh was the catalyst for both sides to return to the peace table – the disaster, which killed more than 150,000 people, helped to focus both sides on helping victims rather than fighting.

But peace is never won through natural causes alone. The collective efforts made by Indonesian and outside facilitators over a tense five- year period, aided by pressure from Acehnese civil society, focused the conflicting parties on sustaining dialogue that helped them reach an agreement.

Today, Aceh enjoys special autonomy and is uniquely governed by an indigenous political party which safeguards Acehnese culture and religious traditions. Just recently, the peace agreement was tested after a dispute erupted over four offshore islands of Mangkir Besar/ Gadang, Mangkir Kecil/Ketek, Lipan and Panjang in Aceh that were claimed by neighboring North Sumatra.

The dispute opened old wounds, but the central government swiftly intervened and the islands were deemed to belong to Aceh. President Prabowo Subianto chaired a virtual cabinet meeting from Russia to resolve the issue
 
In a broader sense the legacy of this high-profile peace process, which drew support from the international community, goes beyond the end of the conflict in Aceh.
Together with the independence of Timor Leste in the same period, which I witnessed as a member of the United Nations team in Dili, the Aceh peace process has lent momentum to Indonesia’s aspirations to contribute to peacemaking and peacebuilding globally.

HD is proud to have contributed to the peace in Aceh and to have maintained a close relationship with Indonesia as it strives to contribute to global peace and security. With the rise of armed conflict and the eclipse of Western and multilateral mediation efforts, it is important that countries as varied as Qatar and Indonesia are taking the center stage of mediation, drawing on their own experiences of war and peace.
 
 
The writer is executive director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. The views expressed are personal