Country: Indonesia
Group: Aceh
Date Finalized: 4/4/2020
Team: Colleen Clauss (lead)
Content Warning: physical violence, homicide
Approximate Time Period: 1873-1904, 1989-1998
The Dutch attempt to make a colony out of the Aceh sultanate in the late 1800s involved an extremely long and bloody war. Over its course, “hundreds of Acehnese combatants and non-combatants were summarily executed during the conflict,” as well as “tens and perhaps even hundreds of thousands more were killed, displaced or traumatized because of the systematic destruction of the region’s environmental infrastructure…exposing people to disease, malnutrition and starvation” (Kreike, 2012). A Dutch senator in 1881 accused the minister for colonies and Dutch government of committing genocide, waging “an extermination war so bloody that the population [of Aceh] was reduced to a quarter [of what it had been before]” (Kreike, 2012).
The Aceh region, located “in the northernmost region of the island of Sumatra,” had been an independent state and wanted to remain so even when pressured by the Dutch to become part of Indonesia in the 1950s, although they retained a small amount of autonomy (Minority Rights, n.d.). In the 1970s, a wave of unrest and renewed desire for independence followed the Indonesian government giving multinational companies access to the resources in Aceh, while mostly redirecting the profits away from the Aceh to the capital (Minority Rights, n.d.). An independence movement led by GAM, the Free Aceh Movement, started in the 1970s, which the government repressed using the military. In 1989, the Indonesian government declared the Aceh region a Special Military Region, and under this policy, “Access to the province by outsiders was restricted, allowing the military to conduct a campaign of murder and abductions which cost an estimated 2,000 lives by 1998” (Minority Rights, n.d.). According to the Jakarta Post, by 2004, martial law had been lifted but foreigners were still not allowed to enter Aceh (Amnesty International, 2004). We rated the data quality as a 2 because information was available in a peer-reviewed journal for the earlier, but not the later event.
Sources
- Minority Rights Group (n.d.) Acehnese. Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://minorityrights.org/minorities/acehnese/
- INDONESIA: Operasi-operasi militer baru, pola lama pelanggaran HAM di Aceh (Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, NAD). (2004). Amnesty International.
- Kreike, E. (2012). Genocide in the Kampongs? Dutch nineteenth century colonial warfare in Aceh, Sumatra. Journal of Genocide Research, 14(3/4), 297–315. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2012.719367