Justice is a tricky word. Everybody makes claims for it and in its name, but very few would be able to explain exactly what it means. This is not because of ignorance, but rather due to the wide scope the term is assumed to cover, and the ambiguities attached to it in its everyday use. Justice — or keadilan in Indonesian — is one of the most common terms used when discussing post-conflict processes in Aceh. The absence of justice or the failings of the justice system are seen as major problems in post-conflict reconstruction — and these are addressed through programmes aiming to improve people's access to justice in Aceh. Justice is the key word for local civil society groups that seek to improve its realization and, now and then, to bring their own forms of justice to people in the villages. And justice is what is at stake when the victims of conflict lament that, despite all of the good promises, none of the terrible wrongs they experienced during the conflict have been made right. They are still waiting for justice.

In this chapter, I discuss the question of justice in Aceh's post-conflict reconstruction and peace-building. I argue that to maintain sustainable peace in the territory, it is important to have the widest possible consensus on what is understood by “justice” in post-conflict Aceh. So far, much of the justice talk in the Aceh peace process has been limited to transitional justice issues. Post-conflict reconciliation takes place in relation to institutionalized forms of justice such as human rights courts and truth and reconciliation commissions that seek to provide justice and reconciliation between victims and perpetrators. However, the process of peace-building and reconstruction must also be sensitive to Acehnese views on how a just society should be constructed. This includes talk about social justice, the rights and obligations of members of a society towards each other, as well as the relations between the state and its citizens.

The tsunami that struck a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004 evoked international sympathy on a scale beyond any previous natural disaster. The unprecedented media coverage and humanitarian response was prompted not only by dramatic images relayed from hand-held cameras and phones, but by the inclusion of “First World” victims in an essentially “Third World” catastrophe. Among the areas hit by the tsunami were popular beach resorts in southern Thailand and Sri Lanka; Europeans, Americans and Australians were among the Indonesians, Indians, Thais and Sri Lankans who perished in huge numbers. The international relief effort broke all records both in scale and diversity, with seven billion U.S. dollars donated from all over the world through public and private agencies for Sumatra alone.

The disbursement of those funds and the rebuilding of housing, infrastructure and economy posed major national and international challenges. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) welcomed an unprecedented international relief effort which brought thousands of government and private aid workers to Aceh, transforming it from isolated backwater to international hub. After some initial uncertainty, he sidestepped the Indonesian bureaucracy and took the unprecedented step of establishing the novel Agency for the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Aceh and Nias (known by its Indonesian initials, BRR). The head of BRR, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, had complete autonomy to act, as a minister responsible directly to the president.

However, this was not simply a reconstruction effort. Aceh at that time was a war zone; Indonesia's military was engaged in a major operation to crush a separatist rebellion that had been simmering since 1976. Curiously, two other hotbeds of separatism and repression, southern Thailand and Sri Lanka, were also severely affected by the 2004 tsunami, but without any peace dividend. In Aceh, however, the scale of the disaster, in conjunction with some other factors detailed in this book, became part of the remarkable peace of 2005.

INTRODUCTION

Unlike the previous two peace attempts, the Helsinki peace accord reached by the Government of Indonesia (GoI) and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in August 2005 appears to have a better chance of bringing an end to the separatist conflict in the Province of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (NAD). More than four years after the implementation of the agreement, peace in Aceh was still holding. After the conclusion of peaceful regional elections on 11 December 2006, the overall picture has become even more encouraging. For GAM, its decision in Helsinki to transform itself from an armed insurgency group into a political force within the Republic of Indonesia began to pay off when many former GAM leaders, including the candidate for governor Irwandi Yusuf, won the local elections. For the Government of Indonesia, the fruit of a political settlement to the conflict was evident when Irwandi Yusuf and Muhammad Nazar officially took the oath as the new governor and vice-governor of NAD Province on 8 February 2007, pledging allegiance to the Republic of Indonesia.

The Aceh peace process represents a remarkable example of a peaceful settlement of internal conflict in a democratizing country. However, because the conflict in Aceh is deep-rooted and multifaceted, factors that could derail the peace process have not disappeared entirely. The key challenge now for the Indonesian Government, the new Aceh government and the Acehnese is how to manage the difficult task of post-conflict peace-building in order to ensure that conflict does not recur in the future. This chapter analyses why the Helsinki peace accord, known as the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), has so far worked well. In addition, the chapter also examines future challenges in post-conflict peace-building efforts. Three issues are critical in this regard: the challenge of governance, the progress of post-tsunami reconstruction and the imperative of a democratic political order in Aceh. Finally, the chapter draws some lessons that might be relevant to the resolution of other conflicts in the region.

INTRODUCTION

The people of Aceh have been the victims of two immense disasters: more than three decades of conflict that officially ended in 2006 and the 2004 tsunami. Both of these have been at the centre of immense international focus since the tsunami propelled Aceh onto the world stage; the peace process and the post-tsunami relief and reconstruction efforts have involved significant amounts of international intervention. Both are important examples that need to be better understood, as they can provide valuable lessons for other conflict and post-disaster situations in the region and beyond.

In this chapter, I provide a brief assessment of the workings of the peace process from the perspective of the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM), which I had the honour of heading from 2005 until 2006. The AMM was put in place as part of efforts to ensure that both GAM and the Indonesian Government operated in good faith on the obligations agreed to in the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding, signed on 15 August 2005. I explore the experiences of the AMM and discuss why the peace process has so far been relatively successful. Following this, I will talk about the wider implications this process has for Indonesia and the region, and about the importance of peace in the reconstruction and development of Aceh. Finally, I conclude by discussing some matters that might be factors in the future.

POLITICAL FACTORS FOR THE PEACEFUL SOLUTION: FOUR KEY REASONS

While the cessation of hostilities in Aceh, like all peace processes, was an incredibly complicated process that required the sincere efforts of multiple parties to resolve, there are four key reasons for its success that I want emphasize. These points are crucial elements without which the peace process would not have succeeded.

First, the MoU signed in Helsinki was very well constructed. Not only did it address the main concerns of both parties, but it also benefited from clearly articulated sets of provisions, responsibilities, and timelines.

INTRODUCTION

The past decade has presented the development community with some of its most demanding reconstruction challenges since the aftermath of World War II. The World Bank and other development partners have been involved in post-disaster reconstruction in response to the devastation resulting from the tsunami in Indonesia (Aceh), Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India, and also from the earthquakes in Pakistan and Indonesia (Yogyakarta/Central Java). The World Bank and its partners have also supported post-conflict reconstruction following peace agreements in Haiti and Sudan. All these activities came in addition to other large-scale reconstruction programmes in Afghanistan, East Timor and several other countries, most recently Lebanon.

In most cases, such disasters greatly exceed available domestic resources. Consequently, international donor agencies are frequently called upon to finance reconstruction in post-disaster and post-conflict countries. In the case of large-scale natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami, private contributions were also an important part of the reconstruction programme.

Spending these significant financial resources well has been a key concern in all these reconstruction episodes. Appropriate arrangements for Public Financial Management and Accountability (PFMA) are increasingly viewed as crucial ingredients to ensure that reconstruction proceeds with integrity in a timely and effective manner, while also adequately managing fiduciary risk.

The international community has increasingly emphasized the performance of Public Financial Management (PFM) systems to enhance the use of domestic resources in developing countries and to underpin the scaling up and effectiveness of aid. The strengthening of country financial management systems and donor harmonization have both emerged as key priorities in enhancing aid effectiveness, including through budget support. The recent Public Expenditure & Financial Management Accountability (PEFA) performance indicator framework has focused on benchmarking outcomes as a way of promoting capacity development in the PFMA area.

This chapter focuses on special considerations for strengthening PFM arrangements in post-disaster and post-conflict reconstruction environments that have yet to receive systematic attention. This chapter's objective is twofold: (1) to present key features of PFM in post-disaster environments, and (2) to analyse the similarities and differences between PFM in post-disaster and post-conflict environments.

How can we achieve post-disaster reconstruction and development that both rebuilds and protects people from potential loss in future catastrophes? How can we nurture a peace that assuages previous grievances and reduces the possibilities for renewed hostilities between parties with a long history of antagonism? These have been two of the main challenges facing Aceh following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2005 Helsinki Peace Accords that ended hostilities between the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM — Free Aceh Movement) and the Indonesian Government. Such questions are clearly important to the people of Aceh, who have experienced decades of conflict and isolation, the sudden devastation of the tsunami, and the painful and drawn-out process of mourning and rebuilding. The future of Aceh has been dramatically transformed by events since December 2004, and it will take years, if not decades, for things to stabilize.

The above questions are of immense importance to the wider international community. The experiences of Aceh will undoubtedly influence the texture and outcome of both future post-disaster responses and peace processes around the world. A large cadre of humanitarian aid workers, people involved in conflict resolution, and reconstruction and development advisers have already begun to bring their experiences from Aceh with them to their next posting or assignment. A whole generation of NGO staff, policy-makers and academics has been influenced by what happened around the Indian Ocean in the wake of the tsunami. The efforts in Aceh — both conflict and tsunami related — are extensively well documented and relatively transparent, opening possibilities for the kind of in-depth research and appraisal that are often not possible in the aftermath of large-scale trauma. The sheer amount of resources that was poured into the region to deal with the conflict and rebuild the shattered lives of victims of war and disaster warrants — indeed obligates — a comprehensive reflection in which previous standards are questioned and new knowledge generated.

This new knowledge should not be restricted to merely practical “lessons learned” or generic solutions that can be automatically applied during the next major crisis.

INTRODUCTION: A SEASON OF SURPRISES

The final months of 2006 and early months of 2007 were marked by a series of surprises in Aceh, as the province continued a political evolution that began with the signing of the historic Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on 15 August 2005. The first surprise was that the political campaign and elections were relatively peaceful. This was welcomed by all, but not necessarily expected by most. The second surprise was the election results. Contrary to pre-election polls, Irwandi Jusuf and his running mate, Muhammad Nazar, won nearly thirty-nine per cent of the votes, exceeding the vote threshold in order to avoid a run-off. The third surprise was the response of key stakeholders to these results. There were no cries of alarm or very negative comments from the Indonesian national government, parliament or press. Nationalistic political and military leaders who were extremely agitated over the Helsinki accords during the June–August 2005 period were also largely silent or pragmatic.

Approximately eighteen months after the signing of the Helsinki MoU, Aceh successfully negotiated key milestones and entered a new phase. Reaching almost any agreement in Helsinki was remarkable enough, but Helsinki seems to have achieved something even more unusual: a negotiated peace settlement that has taken hold, launching a new era in Aceh's political life.

This chapter examines what made the success in Helsinki possible, and how this established the foundation for the subsequent achievements in Aceh itself. It analyses three distinct but related questions concerning the Helsinki agreement:

1. The key factors that account for the success of the Helsinki negotiations

2. The path to the Helsinki MoU, which laid the foundation for subsequent, successful local government elections

3. The implications for Indonesia's democratic development and some of the lessons for the future.

There have already been some excellent descriptions of the events leading up to the Helsinki negotiations and step-by-step narratives of the negotiations themselves as they unfolded over the January–August period.

DISASTER RECOVERY: DEFINITIONS, DESCRIPTIONS AND CONSTRAINTS

Natural disasters produce long-term and complex impacts on survivors' livelihoods, on their physical, social and political infrastructure, and the environment. In almost all cases, recovery operations appear almost immediately following a natural disaster. After being initially absorbed with helping survivors locate loved ones and organizing emergency aid, recovery efforts rapidly turn to longer-term concerns such as housing, re-opening schools and re-establishing income generation and livelihood activities. As is argued by other authors in this volume, to be successful, recovery activities must be rooted firmly in local and national priorities, processes and capacities. This, however, has become increasingly complicated because of the large-scale internationalization of disaster response efforts.

In industrialized countries, natural disaster response is typically managed (“owned”) by the affected states, as can be seen in the US response to Katrina, the Japanese response to the Kobe earthquake, and the more recent Chinese response to the Sichuan earthquake. Disaster-affected persons are the primary actors in their own recovery, funded and led in large part by national and regional authorities. Respect for such “ownership” is a principle of international humanitarian aid, as reflected in the Sphere Project standards, the Red Cross Code of Conduct and the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative.

In “non-industrial” nations, and other instances where the scope of the disaster exceeds local capacities to respond effectively, a wide range of humanitarian actors have increasingly become involved. This is clearly illustrated by the intensive response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, especially in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. A dramatic increase in the funding entrusted to international humanitarian aid actors has put pressure on them to assume more prominent roles in post-disaster settings (see section below on funding). However, they face major constraints and challenges in designing and implementing recovery programmes. While there are many cases of “good practice”, in this chapter I will be focusing more on the appropriateness and effectiveness of humanitarian aid actors in the face of such recovery challenges and constraints. In doing so, I concentrate more on the shortcomings of international organizations.

INTRODUCTION

Aceh has witnessed significant human migration due to both man-made and natural disasters. The civil war during the late 1940s to early 1950s, followed by three decades of struggle for independence since 1976 have caused major IDP and refugee crises. The great quake and tsunami of 26 December 2004 caused another major IDP crisis, displacing more than half a million people. It is widely established that disasters and conflicts typically influence population movements, as well as the social characteristics of affected communities. Natural disasters and conflicts often generate both large- and small-scale migrations of people away from affected areas. Paul, however, argued that not all affected communities out-migrate permanently after a disaster, if there is a “constant flow of disaster aid and its proper distribution by the government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)”. This chapter uses the case of IDPs in Aceh to look in more detail at the impact of aid distribution upon mobility and community cohesion in post-disaster situations.

In my research, I take the position that migration was actively used as a mode of survival for the Acehnese during the conflict and initial days after the tsunami. I relate this to “social capital” and the importance of village (or gampong) connections in Aceh. I demonstrate that social capital is embedded within gampongs, and was pivotal to both the movement of conflict and tsunami IDPs. In this chapter, I demonstrate that the main force determining the movements of IDPs from the long-running conflict between GAM and the Indonesian military were village connections and networks. This provides a control variable for looking at the impact of post-tsunami relief and reconstruction aid on IDP responses. I argue that gampong connections were undermined after the tsunami by relief- and reconstruction- related interventions.

After lying dormant for about a thousand years, the sudden slippage of a 1,600-km long section of the Sunda megathrust fault caused uplift of the seafloor between the Indonesian island of Sumatra and Myanmar, resulting in a great earthquake and the horrific Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Three months later and just to the south, the slippage of a 350-km length of the same megathrust beneath Simeulue and Nias islands caused another destructive great earthquake and a lesser tsunami. While research indicates that it may be several hundred years before these areas experience another catastrophic earthquake, there are other highly populated areas along the Sunda fault that are vulnerable. It is imperative that we better understand the tectonic processes at play in the region, so that informed steps can be taken to promote disaster mitigation programmes, and avoid the scale of casualties caused by the 2004 earthquake and tsunami.

This chapter first provides a basic overview of what happened on 26 December 2004 from a geological perspective. This is in part to better contextualize the chapters in this volume that deal with the aftermath of the tsunami and also to situate my ongoing research in the region. I then discuss possibilities for future massive seismic events in the Indian Ocean region, drawing on several years of research. Finally, I make suggestions about how best to utilize this scientific knowledge to protect communities living in vulnerable coastal areas.

Similar future losses from earthquakes and tsunamis in South and Southeast Asia could, in theory, be substantially reduced. However, achieving this goal would require forging a strong chain that links knowledge of why, when and where these events will occur to people's everyday lives. The post-mortem of the 2004 disaster makes clear that the most important links in this chain are recognition and characterization of hazards through scientific research, then public education, emergency response preparedness, and improvement of infrastructural resilience.

In a powerful critique of where the West stands today, John Gray avers that the Enlightenment project has ended, and has been replaced by a sense of value-pluralism that frees non-Western societies from being accountable to the Western telos. He diverges sharply from John Rawls's original position, a thought-experiment that eliminates from the legal order all references to individual conceptions of the good — and hence all potential for human division and conflict — so as to produce a society in which “no question can arise that does not have a solution acceptable to everyone”. Gray rejects the premise that such a solution is achievable and argues instead that the “post-modern condition of fractured perspectives and groundless practices” is an “historical fate”. Contrary to the Panglossian claims of the Enlightenment project — “the ruling project of the modern period” that was also “self-destroying” — the period has closed with “a renaissance of particularisms, ethnic and religious”.

The immediate source of Gray's deep discomfort is the downfall of the Soviet Union, which unleashed convulsions comparable to those attending the fall of the Roman Empire. The collapse of “the Enlightenment ideology of Marxism” did not result in a globalization of Western civil society, but led instead to “a recurrence to pre-communist traditions, with all their historic enmities, and in varieties of anarchy and tyranny”. His wider point is that the “humanist emancipatory project” of the Enlightenment has collapsed into nihilism, which is perhaps the only legacy that the Western movement will bequeath to a world where the West once had “humiliated” other forms of knowledge. In the Counter-Enlightenment that is upon the West, its new missionaries — the nuns and novices training in the academic cathedrals of Western postmodernism — seek to translate nihilism into a universal condition.

And yet, and yet, a global event does not mean the same thing everywhere.

Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, two elderly Indians were drowning their sorrows at a street-side tea stall in Calcutta. One of them was despondent and wondered how such a calamity could occur and question the inevitability of socialism. The other, dyspeptic, retorted: “Where does it say in Das Kapital that you and I shall be sitting here today, in this stall next to a running drain, drinking this horrible tea? If this can happen, so can that.” He added: “But if the counter-revolution can occur, so can the next revolution. We are old, but the dialectic is still young.” After all, Zhou Enlai had said, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution: “It's too early to tell.” Had he not? Had not Roland Barthes declared that history is not a good bourgeois?

This elderly Indian was taking the long view of contingency and change, but all optimism was gone. The Soviet Union had been erased from the map. A young Indian, a cousin of a friend of mine, could not handle the catastrophe and developed a mental disorder from which he suffers to this day. The two older comrades knew that they were living and would have to live in a moment of post-communist time — till, they hoped and believed, the ramparts of capital would be breached again at some unsuspected turn of the dialectic. They looked back at Soviet time with a tenderness that was almost physical.

The seven decades of world history that had followed the Bolshevik ascendancy had formed the most ambitious intellectual challenge ever posed to rump Europe. The fall of the Soviet Union represented the destruction of an alternative version of European modernity from within the Enlightenment tradition. “Communism was not a type of oriental despotism, as generations of Western scholars maintained,” Gray writes.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem is purgatory. One goes there to pay for other people's sins, but comes out purified all the same. One emerges a Jew. The photographic exhibits soon overwhelm the senses; one grows immune to the tragic residues of suffering because suffering is depicted on such an epic scale and, therefore, diffused. But it was a single photograph that rescued my mind from numbness. It showed a group of Jews, spanning several generations, who had been photographed just before they were to be transported to a concentration camp. Their faces betrayed none of the emotions that could be expected of humans in such a situation. They did not exhibit even the calmness of resignation. They looked at the camera with a calmness approaching calmness itself. It was as if the occasion could not have been more normal. True, the condemned all wore a plaintive look, but it was the plaintiveness of tourists posing for a group photograph at the end of a holiday cut short by an inexplicable act of nature. The holiday had brought them to a wonderful place that they liked very much and were loathe to leave, but the holiday would have come to an end in any case. So they were going home. They merely wished they could have stayed a little longer.

I could not take it any more and ran out of the museum. It was almost as if I were running towards Europe. “Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent,” George Steiner writes. “It is this fact which must, I think, make the Jew wary inside Western culture, which must lead him to re-examine ideals and historical traditions that, certainly in Europe, had enlisted the best of his hopes and genius. The house of civilization proved no shelter.” This is what Europe had done to the Jews.

Presidency College shares a playing field with Hare School, my father's school. Like the school, the establishment of the college in 1817 had opened an early chapter of the Bengal Renaissance. An extraordinary quickening of the senses accompanied every class or tutorial with our teachers at Presidency, most of whom had been students of the college themselves. They impressed on us the importance of not reading backwards into literature, of not imposing our values on the past in a regressive attempt to recover it for our age. Each age and its literature had to be judged on its own terms, which meant placing it in the tradition that it had grown from and the tradition that it had grown into. No age could be judged by extrapolating back into it what a subsequent age did, nor by looking in it for seeds of the future, except inasmuch as the earlier age had itself tilled the field. Thus, G.B. Harrison's scholarly approach to Shakespeare was dinned into us by the head of the department, the stern but saintly Professor Sailendra Kumar Sen. Harrison's approach rested on recreating Shakespeare's historical environment; recognizing the conditions of dramatic production in which he had functioned; and knowing the conditions of publication that had delivered to posterity his plays as printed texts. To read Shakespeare meant viewing the Elizabethan world picture that he worked within, not least for its reflection in the Tudor view of history. This historical approach to literature was conservative; it was, to employ Sir Herbert Butterfield's analogous metaphor, a warning against a Whig interpretation of literature in which the written word from Chaucer to Browning is studied with reference to its receding distance from a centrally situated present. All the past then becomes a preparation for the present: Literature, like history, becomes a story of progress. We were permitted no such illusions, literary or historical.

On a conducted tour of Italy undertaken on the cheap in the summer of 2004, my family and I travelled by coach. We generally stayed in little hotels tucked into city outskirts, where people and places could not be bothered to put on a show for tourists. Our ten-day tour took us to Rome, the Vatican City, Pisa, Milan, Verona, Venice, Florence, Assisi, Pompeii, Sorrento, Naples, and Capri. We did see a bit of Italy. The patrician north swept by on the whiff of an arrogance manufactured in some perfumery of the Roman Empire. But in Florence and Rome, we also saw men and women who seemed to have stepped right out of the canvases of the Masters. Is that Caravaggio's Narcissus, reduced now to producing sketches for tourists? How obscene it is for a foreigner to come to Italy and be consumed by his own beauty! Look, Italians are so beautiful that the Renaissance came here for a visit and stayed on as art forever. Foolish tourists, be gone.

By the time we were in the south, we met people. In Sorrento, for the princely sum of 9.80 euros spent in a provision shop, I got to chat with the matriarch. She spoke in Italian and I replied in English, with a few translations helpfully thrown in by people in the queue. It hardly moved because the matriarch was chatting with me, but nobody minded. The encounter ended with the lady getting her two daughters in the shop to stop work, change into the best clothes they had at hand, and pose with my family and me. She did not want copies of the photographs: They would not have Singapore in them. She wanted her daughters to look beautiful in our photographs: They are Italians. The queue lengthened in patience. On the way out, my teenage son got a hug and football stickers as presents.

The Quai d'Orsay invited a dozen Asian journalists to savour the feel of France in the summer of 2004. On a free day during the trip, my tourist map of Paris led me to to the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Many religious observances, whatever the faith, are almost funereal in nature. People attending them are on their best behaviour, as if they are prepared to drop dead and be judged eternally, immediately after the onerous ceremonies are over. But this church, consecrated in 1163, is different. Here — as in the thirteenth-century Cathédrale de Chartres, which, too, I visited — humans are not quite a part of God's family. Instead, the Almighty has been co-opted into an extended human family. And that family was having a roaring party in church when this tourist dropped in.

In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, children played on their parents' laps while priests spoke of the Heavenly Father. One earth-based father had his attention diverted by his little son, who kissed him repeatedly. Close by, on the floor, sat a toddler. He had been propitiated with a set of toys. When he grew tired of them, he made his displeasure known, loudly and forcefully. His mother, who had been focusing on Mass, turned to him in one effortless movement from Heaven to earth and soothed him. She then returned to her prayers and he to his toys. The French, it appeared, do not believe in scolding their children, especially in the presence of the Heavenly Father.

A man was singing traditional, devotional songs. Training had made his voice crystal clear, but what divine training was it that made the voice tactile to the soul? How French, is it not, that enigmatic dictim of the American Don Marquis — that you don't have to have a soul unless you really want one? Here, you really wanted a soul. The children fell silent; it was the adults' turn to have tears well up in their eyes.