News from Aceh in English: August 2011

Aceh’s long years of conflict still scar the lives of their victims

Mustawalad

Sapiah wants her story to be heard

Henri Ismail

Sapiah binti Ahmad, a middle-aged Acehnese woman, was about to cross the street when a young man on a motorbike drew up in front of her. ‘Get on the bike. There’s something important I want to discuss with you,’ he said. Sapiah didn’t argue. She positioned herself behind the rider and the motorbike took off again. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked a little anxiously. The bike rider was heading towards the forested area of Cot Glumpang, about 20 minutes to the east of the village of Darussalam where Sapiah lived. The village lies in the sub-district of Nisam (now called Nisam Antara), in North Aceh.
When they reached the edge of the forest, the young man stopped the bike and told her to get off. He turned off the engine and led Sapiah into the forest. Then, turning to face her, he made his accusation. ‘You’re a cuak. Thanks to you, a lot of my friends are dead.’ Sapiah was shocked. An allegation like that could be a death sentence in Aceh. ‘You’re wrong. There’s no cuak in my family,’ she shot back at him.
The word cuak refers to those who were considered the lowest of the low by Acehnese nationalists during the years of armed conflict. It has been a term of abuse for enemy spies and informers since the days of the war between the Acehnese kingdom and the colonial Dutch in the late nineteenth century, so it is a word with a long history. Acting as an enemy spy or an informer is regarded as something that is passed on from one generation to another, which is why Sapiah chose the words ‘There’s no cuak in my family’ to reject the allegation levelled against her that day in the forest.
Women as well as men can be cuak, but during the time Aceh was designated a Military Operations Area (DOM), they were usually men, and they had a reputation for extreme cruelty. Government officials and military officers from outside Aceh called them ‘Operational Assistants’. They not only supplied information or acted as guides during operations carried out by the Indonesian police or military, but they were also directly involved in the torture and even execution of people accused of being enemies of the Indonesian state. In a matter of days after the Indonesian government lifted Aceh’s DOM status on 7 August 1998, known cuak were attacked by gangs of people who had suffered at their hands. Deaths were recorded, but no perpetrators were identified. Rumours circulated that some cuak had been killed by those they worked for, to wipe out traces of crimes against humanity.

Neighbour against neighbour

The young man who took Sapiah to the forest that day and accused her of being a cuak was in fact one of her neighbours. They lived no more than 200 metres away from each other, and Sapiah knew he had connections with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). She referred to him as ‘GAM Atom’, another term that was widely used during the years of conflict. In the language of the people who live on the north coast of Aceh, ‘atom’ is a word for something made of plastic, that is difficult to destroy or get rid of. It was used either to refer to resistance fighters who seemed immune to the army’s bullets, or else people who liked to call themselves ‘GAM’, but in fact knew nothing at all about the history of the movement and what it stood for. This was how Sapiah saw her accuser, a young man who was a big talker but really just a hanger-on, not a true resistance fighter.
Even so, her situation that day was perilous. There was no-one else around, and Sapiah’s abductor was now getting ready to tie her to a nearby tree. Curiously, Sapiah chose to remind him that in his inexperience, he was putting himself in danger as well. ‘Son, if you tie me up here, and soldiers come past, they’ll fire at us both and you’ll die as well,’ she said. ‘If you want to save yourself, we need to move further away from the road.’ There was no special strategy in her words. She just let herself be led deeper into the forest and be tied to a tree with the cloth she had been wearing around her head. As it happened, she was recovering from a broken arm at the time, and had her arm in a sling. When it was twisted behind her back and tied to the tree, the bone displaced again, and she suffered a permanent injury to her right arm. She stood there tied to the tree from four in the afternoon till early evening, a total time of around two hours.
All through that time, the young man interrogated her mercilessly, trying to get her to admit that she really was a cuak. But during the pauses in the interrogation he kept making and receiving calls on his mobile phone. Finally, in the stillness of the forest, Sapiah could hear someone on the other end of the phone say to him, ‘Don’t touch her. Take her home immediately.’ She was freed. ‘I bear no grudge against GAM, and I feel no hatred towards them,’ she told me years later. ‘But I do carry a grudge and feel hatred in my heart for that young man who tied me up,’ she said, wiping a tear from her eye with the corner of her headscarf.

The price of involvement

The reasons for Sapiah’s abduction and interrogation that day are unclear. There was nothing at all in her family background that might have suggested she was an enemy spy. In fact, her eldest son, Jamaluddin Hanafiah, was a member of GAM who had already given his life for the cause, in an exchange of fire with Indonesian soldiers on 15 September 2002. At the time, Sapiah was busy cooking for some GAM fighters she had often helped out when they came looking for food. There was a plot of land behind her house where Hanafiah had built a hut in the middle of a small orchard, and local GAM fighters, as well as some from further away, made use of the hut as a place to rest while Sapiah prepared food and coffee for them. This time, however, they didn’t touch the food she served them. As they whispered among themselves, Sapiah could hear her son’s name being mentioned. She knew something bad had happened.
‘My son’s been hit, hasn’t he?’ Sapaih asked the guerrillas. The men looked away and said nothing, till one of them finally spoke, saying ‘Yes, he’s been hit, but only in the leg.’ It was only later that day that someone came and told her to go straight to the village prayer house. There she found her son’s body lying on a floor mat and covered in a batik cloth. Only his face was visible. ‘His eyes were closed and his face was clean. There was a bullet wound in his neck, but there was no more blood,’ she told me. ‘He hadn’t been shot in the leg.’ Tears began to form in her eyes.

Being called an Inong Balee in military custody was as dangerous an accusation as being called a cuak in the hands of GAM, since both were likely to end in execution

Sapiah was not present at her son’s funeral. She fainted soon after seeing his body, and when she regained consciousness, Hanafiah was already in his grave. However that wasn’t the end of her trials. On 9 November 2004, at 11 in the morning, trucks full of soldiers drew up in front of her house. ‘There were 17 trucks here,’ she recalled. Armed soldiers leapt off the trucks and surrounded her house. Bravely, Sapiah went out to confront them. As she approached one of the trucks, she could hear a voice she recognised say, ‘Yes, that’s her. I once stayed overnight here, and she always gave me food to eat.’ One of the guerrillas she had helped had turned informer, and had reported her to the Indonesian military. She was taken to a neighbour’s house and interrogated.
The soldiers accused her of being an Inong Balee, the term for a female GAM fighter. In military custody, this was as dangerous an accusation as being called a cuak in the hands of GAM, since both were likely to end in execution. On that occasion, however, Sapiah was let go after she confessed to cooking and feeding GAM fighters, but said that she did so only under duress. Her ability to speak Indonesian during the interrogation helped make things easier for her, because security forces often suspected those who could, or would, only speak in Acehnese.

A traumatic legacy

The threats and accusations, the armed conflict going on around her, and above all the death of her eldest son, have left Sapiah traumatised. Whenever the sky darkens she rushes to cover all her windows with pieces of cloth, and then quickly hides under the bed. Once she tried to lock herself in the cupboard, but she was frightened she wouldn’t be able to breathe. She breaks into a cold sweat, shaking with fear. It’s the lightning and thunder in particular that she is scared of, because it takes her back to the exchange of gunfire between GAM and the Indonesian military that took place so often in her neighbourhood. ‘When the soldiers came and asked for my coconuts, I gave them to them. If they wanted my chickens, I gave them them too. But I never handed over any living soul to the army,’ she says.
Ever since the incident with the young man in the forest, Sapiah cringes at the sight of tall, well-built men with beards, or the high-pitched roar of a motorbike engine. When the fear overwhelms her, she feels driven to attack and burn the house of the man who tied her to the tree that day and accused her of being a cuak. Her family restrains her when this happens, and they have taken her back to her home village of Samalanga to see a traditional healer. But Sapiah needs more than this. The trauma goes deep inside her mind, and if she is to overcome it, she will need proper psychiatric care. Until that happens, she will remain one of the many casualties of war, still living with their demons in today’s Aceh.

Mustawalad (mwalad@gmail.com) is a contributor to Aceh Feature, based in Aceh. He is a supervisor for the Community of Victims of Human Rights Violations in North Aceh (K2HAU). For more discussion of trauma and its effects in post-conflict Aceh, see Jesse Grayman, ‘No nightmares in Aceh’.

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