On the national level, citizens will be voting
for representatives to the DPR (People’s Representative Council), which has 560
seats, and the Regional Representative Council, which has 132 seats.
At the provincial level, citizens vote for the
Regional House of Representatives (Level I) and at the District or Regency
level citizens vote for the Level II Regional House of representatives, of
which there are 2,137 and a whopping 17,560 seats, respectively.
Aceh’s current governor Zaini is a member of
Partai Aceh (PA), which is the “original” party to be formed from the Free Aceh
Movement/GAM after the signing of the 2005 Helsinki Peace Accord. In
Aceh, this is the group that controlled the province immediately post-tsunami
and received much of the reconstruction money. I believe that currently the majority of
District heads, called Bupati, are also from the PA party, as are Aceh’s
current legislative representatives although the ideology of the party is vague
and its tactics are disliked by ordinary citizens. It’s felt that
PA would still like to push for complete independence from Indonesia, and that
this recent return to Sharia is a ploy to begin a conflict that will press the
issue. The splinter group, PNA, was headed by former Governor Irwandi who
stressed cooperation with Jakarta and believed that provisional autonomy would
result in a mutually beneficial relationship between the province and
Jakarta. He was known as a conservation-oriented moderate with a
community-oriented agenda who worked with NGOs post-tsunami and garnered a lot
of support until 2011-12 when he began to collude with foreign extraction
interests and signed an illegal approval for the palm oil company PT Kallista
Alam to convert Protected Peat Swamp Forest into Palm Oil Plantations.
Mr Irwandi has claimed that he went against his
former pro-conservation stance to “show” the rest of the world what the results
would be if Aceh’s forests were unprotected. Hey, a poor excuse . .
.
Many in Aceh feel that despite this bizarre
anti-conservation turnaround, the PNA party’s methodical and gradual approach
to strengthening Aceh was preferable to the all-or-nothing independence route
that PA seems to be advocating. For the average Acehnese citizen,
conditions outside of Banda Aceh, while not fabulous, were on the whole better
than under the current administration, according to our on the ground mini-poll.
Many members of PA, for example, did not even want the peace accord to be
signed, despite the fact that the province was decimated by the tsunami in the
west and made a wasteland from the conflict in the east.
Still, it’s my experience that voters in Aceh are
in no position to weigh these academic matters. Threats, bribes, coercion
and violence are what drives an election in the province. Word on the
(badly washed-out) street is that PA party members are claiming that any member
of the PNA party is a “traitor” to the cause. (43 bullets into one body seems
like an excessive way to get that message across, but it was a pretty clear
message.)
Which begs the question: just exactly what is the
cause these days?
[see “money, control, and power,” above.]
The fear in Aceh is that if PA loses the
election, a GAM-on GAM conflict will start, and no one wants that.
It’s interesting that back in Jakarta, the
prospect of separatists killing each other (as opposed to having the government
do it like before) might be just what the doctor ordered. It’s more than
disheartening to see both of these groups acting just like the TNI to whom they
were so bitterly opposed on behalf of their fellow citizens.
A colleague in Aceh wrote, “We don’t know if we
citizens will be in danger, but I believe the police will not be able to arrest
the people who [killed the PNA candidate] last night, it is really political.
However, people believe that ex-combatants (GAM) from both parties still
have their guns at their homes and will shoot whoever and whenever they want.
People here hate the ex-combatants very much, especially the current Aceh
government, but they are more afraid that Aceh will start a new phase of the
conflict.”
A good link for up to date election information
is the IFES (International Foundation for Elections Systems) Indonesia Page
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