218 islam, politics and change
dissatisfaction this caused once again resulted in the Acehnese taking
up arms. In 1976 the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement,
gam) was founded. Government suppression of the gam was brutal, with
many ordinary citizens falling victim to the army’s operations as well.
The fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 was a watershed moment.
To redress the mistakes of the past, decentralisation became a political
priority. This new policy was coupled with efforts to end rebellions in
a number of provinces that had plagued the country for years. Under
B.J. Habibie, the first president after Suharto, East Timor (Timor Leste)
was granted independence, while Aceh’s prerogatives of May 1959 were
reconfirmed. Under his successors, Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati
Soekarnoputri, expecting or hoping that religious concessions might
end the gam rebellion, Jakarta gave Aceh the authority to develop its
own Islamic legal system, culminating in Law No. 18 of 2001 on special
autonomy for Aceh. The law also gave Aceh a new name, Nanggroe Aceh
Darussalam, Aceh Country Abode of Peace, combining Acehnese and
Arabic terminology. The miscalculation in Jakarta was that for the gam
it was independence that mattered in the end, not religious reform. As
Reza Idria writes in his contribution, in the negotiations leading up to
the Memorandum of Understanding between gam and the Indonesian
government of 15 August 2005, Sharia formed no part of the discussions.
It took until after the tsunami of December 2004 for an agreement
to be reached. By then, the central government had put into place a
framework for the implementation of Islamic law in Aceh which, as
would later become clear, gam leaders could only partly endorse. The
tension between Islamisation promoted from outside and local opinions
is illustrated by the inclusion of the punishment of stoning to death for
those who commit adultery in a draft law in 2009. This was the work
of the national Islamic party pks (which evoked the threat, often used
in Islamist circles, of eternal damnation in order to get fellow Muslim
politicians to support its view), but as Moch Nur Ichwan notes in his
contribution, the new bill did not take effect because the governor of
Aceh, a former gam leader, refused to sign it.
In this section it has been chosen not to highlight Aceh’s fame as
a province where the people are committed to the enforcement of
Sunni Islam, but to draw attention to behaviour in defiance of this
and to the existence of groups and opinions which challenge orthodox
interpretations. As Reza Idria points out, most studies on Sharia in Aceh
have emphasised its enforcement, and rarely deal with the reactions of
the Acehnese population to its implementation. A similar remark can
be made about the reports published by human rights organisations
and other ngos, and by the coverage in Indonesian and foreign mass