A MARTYR FOR ACEH.

• Author: Brancaforte, Stephanie
• Position: Jafar Siddiq Hamzah of Aceh, Indonesia

Jafar Siddiq Hamzah enrolled as a graduate student at the New School for Social Research in New York in September 1999 to learn, according to his application, what democracy is, at the theoretical level; what the benefit will be to the people by choosing democracy; about the government and the history of democracy itself."

As a lawyer for the Legal Aid Foundation in Medan, Indonesia, Hamzah had not received many opportunities to witness democracy in action in his homeland.

Hamzah was born in 1965 in the village of Blang Pulo in Aceh, a region on the northwest protrusion of the island of Sumatra.

For centuries, the independent sultanate of Aceh, endowed with vast natural resources, was known as the Gateway to Mecca. Colonized by the Dutch in 1873, Aceh helped Indonesia secure independence after World War II and was conditionally integrated into the new republic.

But the conditions, including the establishment of an Islamic state, were not honored, and the Acehnese rebelled.

In 1957, Indonesia sent in troops to quell the uprising. Unable to prevail with military force alone, Indonesia made Aceh a separate province and in 1959 granted it "special region" status with greater autonomy.

In 1971, when Hamzah was six years old, he saw security forces cart his father off to prison for his refusal to join Golkar, the Indonesian government's political party. He never saw his father again.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, the political situation deteriorated as the military repression in Aceh grew worse. In 1989, under the pretext of attacks by the Free Aceh Movement (or GAM), Indonesian security forces launched a counterinsurgency effort. They have killed thousands and have engaged in widespread torture and rape. So far, more than 200 people have died in the first part of 2001 alone.

Hamzah's peace advocacy in Aceh kept pace with the violence.

At Legal Aid in Medan, Indonesia's second largest city, he began documenting human rights abuses, and he defended GAM fighters when they were brought to court. In 1996, when six captured GAM members burned to death in their cells, the military claimed the prisoners themselves were responsible. It was

Hamzah who challenged this account. Within two days, the military torched his office. Security forces accused him of being a member of the Free Aceh Movement and threatened him and his family.

Hamzah fled with his wife, a political scientist, to New York via Malaysia in 1996.

In 1998, Hamzah founded the International Forum for Aceh (IFA) "to bring the Aceh case to international attention and...