The Aceh Peace Agreement, 20 Years On

Two decades ago last month, representatives of the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) came together in Helsinki to sign a landmark political agreement. The Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding, as it was officially termed, successfully terminated more than 29 years of civil war, during which GAM fought for independence from the Indonesian republic. The former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who mediated the talks and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, described the agreement as "the beginning of a new era for Aceh.”

Under the agreement, the Indonesian government agreed to release political prisoners and offer farmland to former combatants to help them reintegrate into civilian life. Meanwhile, GAM abandoned its demand for full independence, accepting instead a form of special autonomy that would safeguard Acehnese culture and religious traditions, and grant Aceh preferential access to the profits of its bounteous natural resources. It is now also the only region in the country permitted to form local political parties.

“We are here to try to make history,”Indonesian Justice and Human Rights Minister Hamid Awaluddin said at the signing ceremony, which was reportedly broadcast on a large screen in the main mosque in the Acehnese capital of Banda Aceh. “Let's not make the bitterness of the past destroy our future.”

Malik Mahmud, the head of the GAM delegation, spoke of the promise of peace, adding that the agreement had required “a leap of faith” from his group.

Twenty years on, the leap of faith appears to have been vindicated. The 2005 Helsinki agreement is widely cited as a case study in mediation and conflict resolution. As David Harland, the executive director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, which played a role in the peace negotiations, wrote recently in the Jakarta Post, 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.”

In the years since, a lot of commentary has focused on the role played by the devastating tsunami of December 2004 in pushing the two sides to the negotiating table. Aceh, surrounded by ocean at the northwestern tip of Sumatra, was among the areas most affected by the tsunami, which was triggered by a mega-earthquake off the coast of Sumatra on December 26. Massive tidal waves, some as high as 30 meters, virtually erased the provincial capital Banda Aceh from the map. An estimated 130,000 people were killed in the tsunami, and half a million more were displaced across Aceh. Soon after the tsunami hit, GAM and the Indonesian military declared a ceasefire to help aid get through to survivors, opening the way to a resumption of political dialogue, and the eventual finalization of the Helsinki Agreement.

Harland said that it was easy to overstate the importance of the tsunami in catalyzing the agreement. The breakthrough was preceded by extensive, albeit fraught and challenging, discussions, which occurred against the backdrop of Indonesia’s democratization after the fall of Suharto in 1998.

“Peace is never won through natural causes alone,” he wrote. “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.”

As one would expect, the relationship between Banda Aceh and Jakarta since the Helsinki Agreement has not been without its frictions. The two sides have had periodic disagreements about Aceh’s right to use regional symbols, including a flag, crest, and regional hymn that have separatist connotations. In a recent interview with Channel News Asia, Aceh Governor Muzakir Manaf, a former GAM fighter, said that only 30 percent of the Helsinki Agreement has been carried out, and that the government is “not… really serious about taking action.”

Another issue is accountability for wartime abuses. The Helsinki Agreement contained provisions for the establishment of an Aceh Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but as Jacqui Baker noted in a 2022 article, this was not established until 2016, and only then “after constant agitation by activists and victims.” The Indonesian government has chosen a non-judicial path, one that focuses on restoring victims’ rights rather than holding perpetrators criminally accountable.

In a recent statement, a group of Indonesian and Timorese human rights groups said that despite the achievements in Aceh, they were “deeply concerned about the slow and incomplete fulfillment of victims’ rights and the lack of accountability.” It added, “The wounds of the past continue to call for recognition, redress, and firm guarantees that such violations will never happen again.”

Most recently, Aceh and the neighboring province of North Sumatra engaged in a brief territorial dispute over the four islands of Lipan, Panjang, Mangkir Gadang, and Mangkir Ketek, after a ministerial decree listed them as belonging to North Sumatra’s Central Tapanuli regency. Muzakir protested strongly against the decision, and demonstrations erupted across Aceh, including in Banda Aceh and in Aceh Singkil regency, which is adjacent to the islands. As the Indonesia Business Post reported in June, many in Aceh saw the decision “as a unilateral move by Jakarta that undermines Aceh’s autonomy and historical identity.”

As a recognition of the seriousness of the dispute, and its potential to reawaken separatist sentiment in Aceh, President Prabowo Subianto stepped in swiftly to mediate, eventually ruling that the four contested islands belonged to Aceh, citing a 1992 decree. Muzakir and North Sumatra Governor Bobby Nasution later signed an agreement recognizing Aceh's jurisdiction over the islands.

The fact that the islands are also close to an oil and gas block known as the Singkil Offshore Working Area clearly raised the stakes for Aceh. Were the area to belong to North Sumatra, existing revenue sharing agreements would grant 85 percent of potential future oil and gas revenues to the central government. But if if the area remains under Aceh’s jurisdiction, the revenue sharing would follow the different formula contained in the Helsinki Agreement, under which the central government would gain just 30 percent of revenues, with the remaining 70 percent going to Aceh.

Beyond this, Aceh now grapples with the more mundane challenges that are familiar in most other parts of the Indonesian archipelago. Despite large infusions of aid from Jakarta, and its own considerable natural resource endowments, it remains one of Indonesia’s poorest regions – and the pending end of the region’s special autonomy fund in 2027 portends more developmental challenges to come. It also struggles with the local corruption that is pervasive in Indonesia, the poor state of infrastructure in many areas, and the challenge of securing jobs for a young population. But the possibility of progress on any of these issues relies on the foundations laid in Helsinki 20 years ago.