Few rebel leaders have had the privilege of having fought for his cause for years and yet
be able to return home, safe and honored.

Still fewer, if any, of those who have fought and been forced into decades of exile without achieving their ultimate goal, have received tribute at home as a father of the nation by the people he wished to lead.

But the most satisfying thing for both Tengku Hasan Mohammad di Tiro, who died on June 3, at 85, and the people of Aceh is that he finally could peacefully return home and died surrounded by relatives and the people in his beloved homeland.

I first met him in 1989 in The Hague at the office of another separatist leader near the Indonesian Embassy.

I remember him as a brave man who reminded the world that any suppressed nation, like Indonesia in the past, should fight for its freedom and independence.

He sat next to his host, the late J. Manusama, the rebel leader who led the South Maluku Republic (RMS). In almost every respect, Hasan was the opposite of Manusama.

Hasan was an astute politician as much as Manusama, an engineer by training, was a reluctant leader. Hasan was an angry man, who expressed his strong opinion by talking loudly, while Manusama was a soft spoken amicable man.

Hasan consistently spoke English as he refused to speak Indonesian while Manusama used both Dutch and English.

Only much later, as I met him again in The Hague in 1996, did Hasan reluctantly agree to an interview in Indonesian.  

The point here is that, while the two might be as determined and spirited to their cause, personalitiy alone never charts the trajectory and define the chance of the rebellion.

Sociologists usually point to some structural characteristics of the societies where the rebellion broke. The interplay between personalities and structures thus vary from case to case.

In the Indonesian case, the RMS, the first separatist movement to arise, and the GAM (Free Aceh Movement), the latest such a movement, were situated in contrasting time dimensions and social contexts.

The RMS in the Maluku was undoubtedly associated with Dutch attempts to regain its former colony just when the Indonesian struggle for independence in Java, Sumatra, and Bali, reached its peak.

Aceh, by contrast, pioneered the Indonesian struggle for independence in such a way as to make the region, in Sukarno’s word, the very first modal (asset) of the republic. Without Aceh, Indonesia has since been perceived as inconceivable.

It is here that the name, the struggle and the leadership is often recalled of Daud Beureu’eh, the man who in someway later inspired Hasan.

These structural contrasts, so to speak, define the way forward for such a movement. Inciting a rebellion is one thing, but to give the rebels and the people who support them a strong identity to pursue their cause, is another.

Like Sukarno who did both for the Indonesian people to fight against the colonial power, Hasan did it for Aceh to fight against Indonesian — in Hasan’s perception, Javanese — dictatorial rule.

Interestingly, if Sukarno’s supporters, like Mohammad Yamin, were inspired by the idea of Greater Indonesia, Hasan consciously and consistently focused on Aceh and Aceh’s history ever since he found some academic works pointed out the Acehnese as a nation and a great power of the 17 century Asia.

A kinship conception helped him to claim legitimacy as a descendant and heir of Sultan Iskandar Muda and great-grandchild of (Indonesian and) Acehnese national hero Tengku Cik Di Tiro.

A smart politician, Hasan moreover was endowed with great self-confidence.

As I asked him in 1996 how he thought he would achieve his goal, he replied in an unmistakably sincere tone: “dengan jalan apa saja” (by any means).

In 1958 Hasan wrote a book on democracy for Indonesia and throughout his long journey of exile and struggle he kept his commitment to his cause for Aceh even when he failed to get international support, only to find, and  thus acknowledged through the words spoken by his second in command, Malik Mahmud, in October 2008, that “Indonesia has now changed and become a democracy”.

For Aceh he had been a faceless leader for so long as a consequence of his self-exile.

In October 2008 he returned home for the first time in 30 years, demonstrating to the Acehnese, Indonesians and the world that he was still hugely beloved in his homeland and showed that Aceh has become a self-conscious nation.

He thus returned home as a “penyatu bangsa Aceh” (the unifier of Acehnese nation), as one local said.In that sense, as one prominent Acehnese, Tengku Ahmad Syuja, put it, he became “the Sukarno of Aceh”.

For Indonesia, Hasan is in essence a big lesson. The state that suppresses its own ethnic groups will find itself changing into a multinational nation-state.

For it was Indonesia’s New Order that, even if partly but significantly, made Hasan what he was: A stubborn rebel against the unitary state. Soeharto’s New Order economic exploitation and its Army’s human rights abuses thus contributed greatly to the fact that he truly became the Wali Nanggroe, the guardian of his nation.

In the end, Hasan’s movement has lost its cause and never achieved his ultimate goal of independence. But if one is to believe his words, which one should, as spoken by Malik Mahmud in October 2008, “peace is now for Aceh forever.”

As he indicated that this was satisfying while remaining loyal to his adjusted cause, then, Hasan
has in fact died as a rebel, who no longer dreamed of a delayed cause of independence.


The writer is a journalist.

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