Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Indonesia

  • Secretary of State Powell’s Visit to Indonesia Can Help

    Published in the Ventura County Star

    I participated in facilitating student workshops sponsored by Nonviolence International on peace education in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, last month.

    In discussing the chapter entitled “We Love Peace,” the students made important distinctions between active and passive peace. They said, “It’s easy to stand outside the conflict and claim that you’re being nonviolent — that’s passive peace. What we want is active peace. Standing up for ourselves and our communities. But in Aceh,” they warned, “that’s dangerous.”

    Aceh, a lush jungle and mountainous region on the northernmost tip of Sumatra, is home to a vicious civil conflict between armed Indonesian forces and guerrillas seeking Acehnese independence. A team of peace activists looking for a proactive lasting solution to the violence that has plagued their province for the last three decades developed a peace curriculum for high schools — the Program Pendidikan Damai — a peace education curriculum rooted in Qu’ranic peace teachings and Acehnese culture.

    The students are right — it is dangerous for civilians in Aceh, much less a tenacious peace team trying to promote active peacemaking and nonviolence in high schools.

    Case in point: One day leaving the peace education training, I saw firsthand a 23-year-old student, Muhammad Iqbal, shot in the head by a police officer at lunchtime in broad daylight on one of the busiest thoroughfares. His crime? He’d accidentally bumped the officer’s vehicle as he was riding by on a motor scooter.

    The Indonesian military issued a flaccid apology the next day.

    This year alone, more than 600 civilians have been killed in Aceh. Everyone has a story and no one is untouched by the violence. My friend and guide in Aceh reported that Muhammad Iqbal was once his student and frequented the coffee shop next to the school where he teaches.

    One woman activist pleaded: “You must tell the United States that the Indonesian military must be stopped. You must help us.” Acehnese and Indonesian human rights groups both claim that the Indonesian military (TNI) acts with impunity.

    Many people in the community expressed doubt that the officer allegedly responsible for the slain student’s death would be brought to justice.

    Unfortunately, her plea may fall on deaf ears. Aug. 5 looms, the date set for deciding whether to impose martial law or a state of civil emergency in Aceh. The Indonesian military leader in Aceh says that he needs 3,000 additional troops to control the violence in this province.

    This would mean disaster for the traumatized Acehnese population who are already living in constant fear, even to go out after dark.

    Another friend I met at Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh told me of his brush with death walking home from making a phone call just after dusk a few months ago. He saw a shadowy figure slink behind a building, so quick he thought he had seen a ghost. Moments later, an explosion nearly knocked him down as gunfire began to pepper the air. Dodging a falling power line, he barely escaped unharmed.

    With the possibility of increased support from the United States, the Indonesian government is becoming more resolute in seeking a military solution to the ongoing conflict. The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee voted to lift a decade-old ban on military training initially imposed based on human rights abuses that occurred there in the early 1990s and appropriated $400,000 in funding.

    As U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visits Indonesia, he should not presage U.S. support for the Indonesian military, nor Indonesia’s participation in a proposed “School of the Americas-style” Southeast Asian military training institution to open in Hawaii. Powell should strongly encourage the Indonesians to demilitarize the conflict, withdraw its troops and support humanitarian aid, education and development assistance.

    Further militarizing Aceh would make the existing peace initiatives almost impossible to continue. The Acehnese have resourceful, good ideas, differing from the rebels’, about ameliorating their situation, but they need support. One group is currently traveling to neighborhoods and villages at great personal risk to capture cultural stories and local lore about conflict resolution and peacemaking to incorporate into a curriculum for grade-school students. Their ability to travel would be further circumscribed and thus their peace work thwarted if the area came under more stringent military control.

    U.S. agencies and citizens should increase support for forces of peace in Aceh, through groups like the Human Rights Coalition of Aceh and Women Volunteers for Humanity, and through international groups like the Henri Dunant Center, which has been brokering peace talks between the Indonesian military and GAM rebels in Geneva, such as Peace Brigades International, which does vital third-party accompaniment for human rights workers whose safety is threatened, and agencies like UNICEF and Oxfam whose humanitarian contributions attempt to stabilize the weakening educational and health conditions in Aceh.
    *Leah C. Wells of Santa Barbara serves as Peace Education Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Islamic Peace Education in Aceh

    In response to more than 25 years of violence and armed struggle in the province of Aceh, Indonesia, a group of academics and activists have undertaken the task of creating a peace education curriculum grounded in the core Islamic peace beliefs and rooted in the Acehnese social and cultural values.

    Islam, derived from the word salam, peace, is at the core of its very name, a religion of peace.

    Many times miscalculated as a religion of vengeance and retribution, Islam on a global scale has received defamatory attention in recent times. Yet its truest practitioners continue to quote the Qu’ran as a book of peacemaking directives.

    Inequity, violence and a highly traumatized population serve as the backdrop for this curriculum and the accompanying teacher and student trainings. Many rural Acehnese are under-educated, while the city of Banda Aceh is experiencing a rapid rate of urbanization. These factors contribute to a level of dissatisfaction with the centralized Indonesian government, and cause the Acehnese to become further entrenched in the separatist movement.

    In the past year alone more than 600 people have been killed in Aceh. Nearly every Acehnese has a story of witness to violence. Few are untouched by the bloody struggle.

    For the past three decades, violence has been the modus operandi for resolving conflicts in Aceh. The GAM (Free Aceh Movement) and Indonesian military routinely and aggressively perpetrate acts of violence which often catch civilians in the crossfire. Like many international conflicts, the blame and frustration is so deep and the feelings so hot that this power struggle has assumed a life of its own.

    Young people angry at the disparity of wealth and inaccess to better education and thus a better life have taken up arms to ameliorate their situation. Admittedly they recognize that weapons are a quick fix and permit no long-term solution, but are good tools for getting revenge and perpetuating the conflict.

    Recognizing that violence only perpetuates more violence, the curriculum team began developing a peace education program for high school-aged students as well as teachers, and over the past year has conducted trainings and workshops which have reached both private and public schools throughout Aceh.

    Thus far, the Acehnese academic community, including students, teachers, administrators and government officials, have embraced this peace initiative with open arms. Led by Director, Dr. Asna Husin, supported by UNICEF, AusAID, and the Washington, DC-based non-profit Nonviolence International, this curriculum seeks to bring an active, dynamic peace perspective to Aceh so that future generations of Acehnese need not live under the same threatening conditions that currently exist.

    Six basic principles form the foundation for the curriculum: Introspection and Sincerity, Rights and Responsibilities, Conflict and Violence, Democracy and Justice, Plurality of Creation, and Paths to Peace. Embedded in the lessons in these chapters are crucial Acehnese proverbs that have superficial as well as deeper meanings for bringing about peace and justice.

    Central to the curriculum is the teaching that Allah desires peace. It is not enough to have peace just between the individual and Allah, however. If there is injustice or inequality among humans, then Allah is not satisfied. Moreover, Islam teaches that peace is not a receptive, passive condition where only self-interests are served. Rather peace is a dynamic which must be continually refined, redefined and struggled to achieve.

    In achieving peace, humans must examine our wants and needs. We all experience social, spiritual, physical and psychological needs, all of which must be kept in a rough balance to maintain peace. Our excessive wants, however, are often the cause of conflict and violence because this means that others needs are not being met.

    The peace paradigm this curriculum espouses is one where Allah encompasses the realms of peace within, peace in the community, and peace with nature. The Aceh peace education curriculum teaches that in Islam, nature is meant to serve our needs  not our wants.

    Therefore, to have peace with Allah and peace between human beings, we must also respect the peace that exists in nature and not take advantage of natural resources which bring great wealth to a few and great poverty to many. It is the economic injustices that are perpetrated at a structural level which cause tremendous personal violence on an individual level.

    In Aceh, peacemaking is not a theory or hypothetical question to be answered with leisure. It is an inventive means for proactively addressing the systemic, militaristic and interpersonal violence which disrupt every corner of society.
    *Leah C. Wells serves as Peace Education Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. She is currently in Aceh contributing to the student nonviolence trainings.