Word: aceh
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...Nowhere are the two faces of the military?traditionally oppressive, potentially progressive?more evident than in Aceh, where the army is locked in a bloody battle for control of the province with the secessionist Free Aceh Movement, or GAM. Villagers living along Aceh's one main road welcome the TNI as an antidote to rampaging police units. But off the road, in benighted hamlets, little has changed. "Most TNI still behave the same way?brutally," says Fitri, a 22-year-old volunteer with Care Human Rights Forum, known locally as FP HAM. Fitri produces half a dozen photo albums...
...leaders insist the TNI is changing. It has introduced 140 hours of instruction in law and human rights at its army-officer academy, while soldiers dispatched to Aceh receive an extra three or four months' training to hone their military skills. One exercise gives them four seconds to decide whether they are facing an armed rebel or an innocent civilian?a distinction which, as Aceh's casualty figures suggest, has mattered little in the past. More than a thousand civilians perished in the conflict last year; this year's death toll looks set to surpass that. Combat troops have also...
...winning trust is not easy in Aceh?especially when heavily armed units routinely patrol nearby villages in armored personnel carriers with heavy machine-guns mounted on the roof. "An attack can happen at any time, any place," warns army intelligence officer Captain Adrain Ade, an assault-rifle on his lap, as he scans passing villages for signs of rebel activity. His destination today is the distant village of Montasik, where another TNI platoon is camped out in a disused rice warehouse. Conditions are cramped and squalid, and the sense of siege is palpable. Platoon leader Captain Heri Sumitro says...
...sure, not all Acehnese hate the TNI. At the village of Sarah Tebe, near Peureulak, southeast of Banda Aceh, the people have welcomed them. Some 400 families used to live here but more than half moved away in the past 18 months as the conflict worsened. Recent clashes between soldiers and rebels have sent villagers fleeing in terror and, only days before, the corpses of two unknown men?slit from belly to throat and eviscerated?were fished from the nearby Kuala Bayan River. The military is now building a small post at Sarah Tebe. "I'm very glad...
...Even if some Indonesians are starting to like their military better, the TNI still has plenty of room for improvement. Aceh is just one of many areas in which the TNI needs to show it is willing to change. Unless the country's political leaders take measures to kick start the stalled reform process, the only rules the military will obey will continue to be their...