Word: tengku
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mothers, our wives, our children are victims from this tragedy. We would never ambush any convoy with aid for them." TENGKU MUCKSALMINA, rebel leader in Banda Aceh, dismissing claims by the Indonesian government that insurgents might try to steal relief supplies...
...part, G.A.M. says its fighters can outlast anything the government throws at them. "It costs a lot of money to run a big campaign, and Indonesia's economy is weak," says a slight, soft-spoken G.A.M. representative who calls himself Tengku, a common honorific in Aceh. "We can wait until the money runs out. We have fought them for 27 years. We can fight on for three times that long until the Indonesians finally get tired and go home." But given the rate at which people are dying or fleeing the province, there will be far fewer Acehnese left...
...Tengku Lukman Sinar, born in 1933, lives in one of Medan's leafier neighborhoods in a spacious house with a driveway and a satellite dish. He can use the honorific "tengku" because his father was a Sultan, the last Sultan of Serdang. Other descendants of Sultans dropped the tengku because their fathers, many of whom were allied with the colonizing Dutch, were jailed or murdered during the independence campaigns of the 1940s. Sinar's father died in 1946, but of natural causes. He had allied himself with Sukarno. A wise choice, though his family was still marched...
...Sinar himself has always been comfortable, Sultan or not. He inherited a palm oil plantation and he teaches history and ethnomusicology. His life, he says, goes from "one seminar to the next." As a tengku, he blesses a ceremony here or there and performs the local equivalent of supermarket openings. Neighbors come to him for advice, interactions he enjoys though "it's hard if they arrive when I'm having a siesta." In his living room, above the couch, is a picture of his father in full regalia. He is stunning, all sashes and ribbons. Sinar, sitting in a high...
...which has several hundred full-time soldiers and perhaps 2,000-3,000 firearms, is small and vulnerable. "Obviously we can't face TNI (the army) in a situation of total war," says Tengku Darwesh, one of GAM's 17 local commanders. "As in any guerrilla conflict, we have to choose our time and place to fight." The overwhelming bulk of the movement in Aceh is led by Abdullah Syafi, a 45-year-old graduate of a Banda Aceh school of Islamic jurisprudence. Syafi recognizes the leadership-in-exile of aged GAM-founder di Tiro and his deputies. But there...