Saturday nights in Banda Aceh for years meant ducking off the streets to avoid curfews, enforced by soldiers and paramilitary police in armoured personnel carriers or trucks wrapped in crude armour plating and bearing sinister insignia.

“No one went out after dark,” says Taufik Iskandar, a maths lecturer at the city’s Syah Kuala University.

But with the 29-year-old armed struggle of the separatist Free Aceh Movement, or GAM, due effectively to end this month, Saturday nights in the capital of Indonesia’s tsunami-racked Aceh province have recently undergone a makeover.

Revving tinny motorcyle engines and throatier cars, young men tracked up and down a boulevard near the city’s biggest hospital after midnight last Saturday in a scene that, bar the girls’ Muslim headscarves, seemed more suited to suburban New Jersey than a conflict zone.

Nearby, a clutch of twenty-something men sat outside a house rented by aid workers, offering overpriced rides home on the backs of motorcycles to westerners leaving a dinner party, and asking for stray beers when their would-be passengers chose to walk instead.

All over Banda Aceh, in other words, things were peculiarly normal, a normality that, with the exception of a few minor incidents, has become the rule since Indonesia and GAM’s exiled leadership signed a peace agreement on August 15.

If all goes to plan – and there are few indications it will not – by the end of this month GAM will have handed in almost 1,000 weapons and demobilised more than 3,000 guerrillas.

Within weeks Jakarta will withdraw the last of more than 30,000 troops as part of the peace process, and the focus will switch to the implementation of local elections next year in which amnestied GAM members will be allowed to run for office.

The peace has gone so well until now that Dutch diplomat Pieter Feith insists the European Union-led peace monitoring mission he is leading in the province is unlikely to be extended much beyond March, when its six-month mandate runs out.

“By and large we have now reached a point where it [peace] should be self-sustaining,” says Mr Feith.

The parties have yet to overcome a final weapons handover and the full withdrawal of Indonesian security forces, and there are still disagreements over the quality and quantity of the arms that have already been handed in.

In the first three disarmament rounds, GAM surrendered 856 weapons, 16 more than the 840 provided for in the August agreement. Of those, a number have been rejected for being too old, dysfunctional or home-made, and Mr Feith says GAM needs to find 143 more weapons to comply.

No one believes that is the end of GAM’s armoury, though most analysts believe its 3,000 or so fighters often shared weapons.

But all agree that the more difficult issues that have to be overcome, for a long-term peace to endure, lie ahead, in the economic and political arena beyond disarmament.

Aceh’s people have already seen two previous peace attempts fail, although neither had the motivating factor provided by last December’s tsunami, which left 160,000 dead or missing in Aceh alone.

A draft law clearing the way for local political parties – something now against the law in Indonesia but key to the peace agreement – was sent to Jakarta on December 2. Mr Feith says he has been told it will be passed by parliament by the end of March.

That means local elections scheduled for April will be moved to “May, June, or July”, says the Dutch diplomat, although they will probably be monitored by a separate EU-led electoral mission. What will happen if GAM loses those elections is unclear, even if Bakhtiar Abdullah, the rebel spokesman, insists that “when you have fair elections you accept the result, whether it is positive or negative”.

But both Mr Abdullah and General Supiadin AS, the commander of Indonesian forces in Aceh, say they are worried about the future livelihood of demobilised fighters, with Jakarta yet to finalise land and work schemes called for in the August agreement.

Also at issue is the pace of reconstruction in areas devastated by the tsunami, with almost 500,000 people displaced and, at the last count, nearly 70,000 living in tents.

But whatever the threats, Mr Feith insists Aceh is a symbol of what the EU can do when it turns to conflicts.

“This is a very useful model for the future,” he says. “While in the military field [the EU] may not be the most powerful one, in terms of civil crisis management we have a real competitive advantage.” He adds: “These types of civilian missions are more and more on the rise. You don’t need soldiers to bring an end to conflicts nowadays.”

Source: Financial Times