International Herald Tribune, Tuesday, March 27, 2007
In Indonesia's Aceh, a former rebel takes the reins
By Seth Mydans
BIREUEN, Indonesia: The little green car accelerated around a mountain curve and
flashed through a village here in Aceh Province, scattering chickens, children, dust
and pebbles. It swerved past potholes, skidding precisely to the edge of the road
before speeding ahead.
At the wheel was Irwandi Yusuf, the new governor of Aceh, and he was racing into the
hills to catch illegal loggers by surprise.
"I have to do it myself," he said, his foot on the accelerator. "I couldn't rely on law
enforcement. I don't know who I can trust."
Irwandi, 47, is a one-man political science experiment, a separatist rebel who has,
quite unexpectedly, become the leader of the government he until recently fought
against.
Under a peace agreement signed in 2005, Irwandi renounced his separatist agenda,
ran for governor last December and won, taking almost 40 percent of the vote in a field
of eight. The second-place finisher was also a member of the former separatist
movement, bringing its total to more than 50 percent of the votes cast.
Irwandi took office at the start of February and is now guarded by the army that once
hunted him in the jungle. He works with a police force that was known for its brutal
treatment of his comrades. He travels to Jakarta to talk policy with President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono, himself a former general.
He has no alternative but to leave the past behind, he said. Most of the people he
works with are his former enemies.
Military intelligence still watches him, he said, as it did in the past, and he expects
hard-line opponents to try to complicate his job with political manipulation. But the
agreement that ended Aceh's 30-year separatist war is holding - after the death of
15,000 people - and both sides seem to have embraced nonviolence.
Irwandi has inherited a wounded province of four million people here on the northern tip
of Sumatra island. The traumas of its long, brutal conflict have been compounded by
the devastation of the Asian tsunami that took 170,000 lives in Aceh in December
2004.
Along with economic revival, he must deal with the reintegration of former rebel
fighters, delicate relations with Jakarta, Muslim clerics with a hard-line agenda and a
local administration that is known for corruption and ineffectiveness.
In a doubly unusual move for a new governor who is also a former rebel, he has
decided to keep the old administration in place, cabinet ministers and all.
"I tell them, 'I believe, I trust you all,' " he said. " 'You are all trustworthy until you
prove otherwise. Then I will know.' "
If they are up to it, he said, they are welcome to "rock and roll" with him.
"Rock and roll," he said. "That means to do something new, rocky, that was never felt
before. It is spirit. Spirited people. Young blood. Young spirit."
As he raced through the mountains, Irwandi talked, one after another, into three
mobile telephones, dodging trucks and bicycles with one hand on the wheel. From the
back seat, an aide handed him a Korean energy drink. He tipped his head back twice
and drained the bottle, then pulled a ginseng root out with his teeth.
"I'm not afraid of anything," he said, speaking of his adversaries but driving straight
into oncoming traffic.
Illegal logging, a major enterprise in Aceh, illustrates the problems he faces, and the
way he means to take them on.
"They have Jakarta connections, and they've got backing from the police and the
military and also civil servants," he said. "I entered into a system with all the network
there. I have no network."
He does have assistants and a security detail, drawn mostly from among his former
comrades in arms. As he careered through the mountains in his Toyota RAV4, he
was chased by three unmarked vans carrying what he said was his personal security
team.
"This is a pilot project," he said of the logging raid. "Scare the hell out of them. I want
to show them, 'Don't play games with me.' All the government people, when they see I
do what I say, they won't have courage to play games anymore."
When he reached the sawmills, rocketing up a rutted forest road, the overseers were
gone, apparently forewarned of his raid. It seems the bad guys may still have better
intelligence than their new governor.
But Irwandi insisted he had made his point. He used a tiny camera to take pictures of
fresh-cut logs and heavy equipment that he said would be used as evidence when he
made his move.
"I know I can't do it all," he said. But he seems to be trying.
At one point in his drive, something caught his eye and he performed a sudden U-turn
into the courtyard of a school, where girls with Muslim head scarves walked with their
books.
"Why are they out of class so early?" he asked, and was told that, on Saturday,
school ends at 11 a.m. He made a second U-turn and drove on.
Irwandi said he had felt at home in his new job from the beginning.
"For me it was just like a natural transition, like I was pushed here little by little to this
position," he said, from the jungle to peace negotiations to governor. "The jobs are
about the same, dealing with people."
By training, he is a veterinarian, with a degree from a local university where he later
taught. He married a student there and they now have five children, aged 4 to 16.
He joined the insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement, known as GAM, in 1990, but
took a break three years later to study for a master's degree in veterinary science on
a scholarship to Oregon State University.
Back in Aceh he joined GAM's central command, where he served as chief
spokesman and propagandist and helped restructure its military.
In 2003, Irwandi was arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison for rebellion. He
was there behind bars, 19 months later, when the tsunami struck.
"There was a big earthquake," he said, recalling the terror of the trapped prisoners,
"and then we heard a roaring noise outside the high wall. Everybody tried to escape
out the front door, but it was locked."
Irwandi climbed to the second floor. The walls around him were collapsing. "I didn't
know what to do," he said.
He climbed an iron bar to the ceiling, punched through a layer of asbestos and
clambered onto the roof, where he rode out the waves. He was one of just 40 survivors
from a prison population of 278.
The trauma of the tsunami led the two weary armies to reach a peace agreement,
signed in August 2005. Irwandi became GAM's liaison with the international
peacekeeping mission that, among other things, prepared the way for the election he
won.
As governor, he works hard to stay ordinary, shunning an official mansion for a small
rented house, where he receives a stream of visitors and petitioners.
On the day after his raid on the loggers, Irwandi attended the inauguration of a
soybean plantation here at Bireuen, where he was born, 140 kilometers, or about 90
miles, southeast of the provincial capital, Banda Aceh.
He was the only dignitary to arrive on time. He sat patiently, cross-legged on a plastic
mat, as one local official after another arrived, with polished shoes, in convoys of
polished black cars.
"He's normal, he's normal," said Yusuf Saidi, a farmer standing nearby, searching for
words to explain his admiration for the governor.
"He talks just like anybody else," he said. "People like him because he's just like a
common person. He doesn't need any protocol. He drives his own car."
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