From the Ground Up: Perspectives on Post-Tsunami and Post-Conflict Aceh

11. Justice and the Aceh Peace Process

11 JuSTice and The aceh Peace ProceSS Leena Avonius 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 226 Leena Avonius 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 following will focus on institutionalized forms of justice. I first give a brief overview of the situation in Aceh, then examine how the two signatories of the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) — the agreement that ended three decades of conflict in Aceh in August 2005 — defined the needs and mechanisms of justice in post-conflict Aceh. After discussing briefly the prevailing legal pluralism in Aceh, I examine how the transitional justice mechanisms — amnesties, a human rights court and a truth and reconciliation commission — have been prepared and used in post-conflict Aceh. legacy of conflicT Aceh has been a scene of violence for a long time. In fact, since the 1870s, Aceh has seen much less peace than armed struggle, fighting and human rights violations. The latest conflict, which began in 1976 and ended in August 2005 with the signing of the peace agreement between the Indonesian Government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), took the lives of at least 15,000 Acehnese. Hundreds of thousands of others were either forced to flee their homes or endure similar ordeals. Indeed, as some have stated, practically the entire population of Aceh — over four million people — were directly or indirectly affected by the conflict. There is still no exhaustive data available on all the damage, destruction and injustices the conflict caused in Aceh. During the conflict years, it was impossible to collect such data, though some non-governmental organizations did their best to document incidents reported to them by victims and their families. Some of these data were lost in 2004 when the Indian Ocean tsunami destroyed NGO offices in Banda Aceh. However, for example, the Acehnese NGO Coalition for Human Rights registered over ten thousand cases of serious human rights abuse before the Helsinki MoU.1 Rather than accurate information on the number of cases, this type of NGO data offers a good general picture of the patterns of past violence in Aceh: most commonly mentioned are extrajudicial executions, torture, arbitrary arrest, disappearances and sexual violence. If human rights NGOs catalogued the forms of injustices that took place during the conflict in Aceh, other agencies tended to focus more on the consequences the atrocities have had on the lives of people. For the Justice and the Aceh Peace Process 227 purposes of post-conflict assistance programmes, there have been a number of...