"Indonesia is an abstract concept," explains Dewi Fortuna Anwar, spokeswoman for former Indonesian President Habibie. "It is either the whole of the former Dutch East Indies, or it's nothing." Consisting of over 13,000 islands, of which 3,000 are inhabited, the archipelago of Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country, and one of the most ethnically diverse. With 360 tribal and ethno-linguistic groups, and more than 250 different languages, Indonesia is far from homogenous. What does Anwar mean by the claim that Indonesia is either the whole of the former Dutch colony or it's nothing? When Indonesia achieved independence from the Netherlands, it inherited a fragmented territory, occupied by diverse peoples who had never considered themselves as "Indonesians" with any kind of unified sense of identity. The effort to build an Indonesian nation of people who think of themselves first as Indonesians has been the most difficult challenge for the Indonesian government since Independence.
Regionalist movements of ethnic separatism have flared up many times over the past several decades. In the 1990s, the most well-known of these occurred on the island of Timor, where the East Timorese fought for, and won, an uneasy independence in 2000. Meanwhile, a much less publicized, but very similar conflict had been going on in Aceh, on the island of Sumatra. Anwar's statement reveals the government's attitude that to tolerate ethnic separatism would bring into question the very existence and legitimacy of Indonesia as a nation itself.
To learn more about the on-going conflict in Aceh, visit the U.S. Committee for Refugees' report on the "Political History of Aceh" .
You can learn much more about Aceh through the following sites: