Michael Renner: reconciliation from destruction in Aceh.

• Author: Renner, Michael

On a sweltering morning on December 21, 2005, I watched six young men stride onto Blang Padang sports field in the heart of Banda Aceh, the capital of Indonesia's Aceh province. Clad in black uniforms and matching berets, each held an assault rifle across his chest. They marched toward six other men, all dressed in khakis, white polo shirts, and white baseball caps emblazoned with the initials AMM--Aceh Monitoring Mission. On cue, the young men, former fighters of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), handed over their guns. The AMM monitors, drawn from European and Southeast Asian nations, proceeded to cut the weapons apart with the help of two table saws.

I knew I witnessed history in the making: the gun decommissioning ended the first phase of a peace agreement between GAM, which had been fighting for independence since 1976, and the Indonesian government. (In parallel, Jakarta withdrew thousands of soldiers and policemen from Aceh.)

Just a few days later the world's media would descend once more upon Aceh for the one-year anniversary of the devastating tsunami. But very few international journalists were present for the weapons decommissioning. That struck me as odd, because the tsunami and the peace agreement are like twins joined at the hip. It was the massive destruction inflicted by the killer waves that triggered a new mood of reconciliation in Aceh and made negotiations possible. And for the next few years, physical rebuilding and peace-building will be closely intertwined challenges.

Previous efforts to resolve the conflict had all ended in failure. Through it all, civilians suffered tremendously, particularly at the hands of brutal state security forces. Killings, disappearances, and beatings were common and poverty was on the rise.

Having sifted through countless reports and analyses about Aceh, I jumped at the opportunity to visit this lush but still-crippled land at the northern tip of Sumatra, when San Francisco-based Global Exchange organized a field trip. The nine-day visit was a whirlwind tour of meetings with tsunami survivors, villagers with sorrowful tales of repression, grassroots activists and human rights lawyers, international monitors, and GAM representatives.

In the center of Banda Aceh, the streets are clogged with motorcycles, becaks (motorcycle taxis), mini-vans, and cars. Men congregate in noisy coffeehouses and teenagers flaunt cell phones. An unsuspecting...