Chairman of the Indonesian Red Cross (PMI), former vice president Jusuf Kalla traveled to Naypyitaw, the capital of Myanmar, on Monday, to join talks on finding peaceful solutions to long-standing civil conflict in the country.
Kalla said that in the forum he shared some of the best practices from Indonesian experience in striking a peace deal in Aceh.
“We told the Myanmarese government that the most important issue in negotiations with insurgent groups is that the groups need to leave the past behind and start talking about future plans. A peace negotiation is about building a future and not history,” Kalla said after the meeting.
Kalla said that in order for the peace talks to be successful, the Myanmarese government needed to address the problem of injustice among minority groups in the country.
He also said that conflict settlement and peacemaking needed political stability, economic stability and socioeconomic
development.
Kalla represents an Indonesian delegation invited to join the meeting by the Geneva-based Center for Humanitarian Dialogue. A team sent by the Philippine government to talk about its experience in dealing with the insurgent groups in its restive southern province of Mindanao also attended.
Joining Kalla in the meeting were former law and human rights minister Hamid Awaluddin, who led the government’s negotiating team in the Helsinki peace talks with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and former Indonesian Military (TNI) commander Gen. (ret.) Endriartono Sutarto.
Representing the Myanmarese government is U Aung Min, the chief negotiator in the peace talks with the insurgent groups in the country.
As part of the government-initiated reforms in Myanmar, the military junta has taken a bold peace initiative to talk with insurgent groups in the country that it had engaged in a devastating 60-year long civil war.
President Thein Sein has made resolving ethnic conflict a key component of the reform agenda.
Myanmar has 11 major armed ethnic groups spread across seven states, and many more smaller groups and militias. Over the past year, cease-fires have been agreed upon or renewed with 10 out of the 11 groups. An agreement has not yet been reached with the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO).
Soe Thein said that Myanmar could learn from the experiences of other countries.
He also said that the Myanmarese government was in critical need of international support and assistance for the peace process.
Serving as vice president, Kalla has been credited as the prime mover behind the Helsinki peace agreement in August 2005, a deal that brought an end to more than 30 years of violence in Aceh, which had killed more than 15,000 people. Due to his position, and the sensitivities of the negotiations, Kalla often had to play a very subtle, behind-the-scenes role.
Prior to his work in the Helsinki talks, Kalla served as coordinating people’s welfare minister under president Megawati
Soekarnoputri, where he took a lead role in mediating talks between conflicting parties during the Malino I and Malino II peace agreements that formally ended the conflicts in Poso and Maluku in 2001 and 2002, respectively.
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