ARI Working Paper Series

The Indonesian military “invasion” of Aceh on 19 May 2003 marked the collapse of a peace process initiated discreetly by the Henry Dunant Centre three years earlier.  This process had culminated in the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (COHA) between the Government of Indonesia and the Aceh Independence Movement (GAM), which came into effect on 9 December 2002.  Although the two sides were still far apart in their understandings of the COHA, they did both implement the peace and begin to work cooperatively with each other and the Filippino and Thai military facilitators. This article ends with the problems of the peace, after tracing the shifts in Acehnese perceptions of their own history and identity, which led to the widespread alienation from Jakarta since 2000.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published as ‘War, Peace and the Burden of History in Aceh’, Asian Ethnicity 15, no.3 (Oct 2004), pp.301-314.