Former rebels in Indonesia’s Aceh province get to contest for parliamentary seats for the first time when the country holds elections on Thursday. But a spate of recent violence is threatening the fragile peace in the area. Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen reports.

More from the Jakarta Post on the Indonesian elections in Aceh, a restive province on the northern tip of Sumatra.

Aceh’s leading local parties have promised sharia law during their recent campaigns, bidding to win the upcoming legislative elections and a political chance to reinstate the province’s special identity as “Mecca’s verandah”.

At least, the Aceh Party (PA), the Acehnese People’s Independent Aspiration Party (SIRA) and the People’s Aceh Party (PRA) have all taken up this unique theme in their campaigns to win the hearts of the people, clerics and pesantrens.

While all agreeing that Islamic teachings have for a long time taken root in Aceh, the parties have different ideas about the implementation of sharia.

The Aceh Party, established and fully supported by former combatants of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), says Aceh needs sharia law, but not now. Instead, it says, Aceh should pursue a full implementation of the 2005 Helsinki peace pact, to improve the community’s social welfare.

Adopting Islamic values in daily life is supposed to be an individual obligation, without any external repressive factors, Aceh Party spokesman Adnan Beuransyah says.

“Islam is supposed to be a rahmatan lil a’lamin [blessing for the universe].”

Adnan says his party is, in fact, fighting for a full implementation of the Helsinki MoU signed by the Indonesian government and GAM in 2005, a cornerstone peace agreement ending years of bloody conflicts and giving a political chance to the Acehnese to create a civil society, a democratic government and with almost full autonomy in its home affairs.

The peace agreement, however, makes no single mention of the sharia, which would be fully implemented after the pact’s goals were achieved.

SIRA chairman Muhammad Nazar says his party would adopt Islamic teachings in all areas, because “Islam can not be seen as just a criminal code,” he said.

Nazar, also the Aceh’s vice governor, says sharia was introduced to the provincial administration because it benefitted the people and was in keeping with universal humanistic values.

“Those who have a different ideology to the Acehnese people do not really need to protest against Islamic law, because Islamic punishment does not dominate the legal system in Aceh.

“Lashing punishments can only be handed down if evidence is found, and these punishments are only given at a very soft level,” Nazar said.

The People’s Aceh Party (PRA) have a more firm stance about the introduction of Islamic law.

“The implementation of sharia is clearly political driven. This issue has been used by the central government to silence turbulence in Aceh,” PRA Secretary-General Thamren Ananda said.

If PRA wins the legislative election, it would hold a referendum to find out whether Aceh wants to maintain Islamic law or drop it, Thamren said.

“We will ask the public to criticize existing qanuns (bylaws),” he said.

According to Thamren, Islam was important to Acehnese even without sharia.

“The current system is more like an Arabization movement,” he said.

Since 1999, Aceh has been preparing its institutional system to adopt sharia law.

The biggest step came when the law on special autonomy was passed in 2001, paving the way for the Islamic court to also try criminal cases.

As of today, the westernmost province has passed three bylaws forbidding gambling, alcohol consumption, and khalwat (filthy acts).

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Indonesia has seen a military dictatorship ousted a decade ago but its politics are still dominated by soldiers. Retired General Prabowo Subianto, who denies masterminding a bloody riot in 1998, is gaining popularity despite his reputation. Even former victims are now joining his political campaign, as Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen reports from Jakarta.

Prabowo was born on 17 October 1951 in Jakarta, the son of noted economist (and dissident politician) Professor Sumitro Djojohadikusumo. While his father was on the run for supporting a failed regional revolt in 1957, Prabowo grew up in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Britain. He graduated from the military academy in 1974.

In 1976 he went to East Timor as part of Tim Nanggala X, a special forces unit that belonged to Kopassandha, later called Kopassus. He undertook anti-terrorist training in the US (Fort Bragg, 1980; Fort Benning, 1985), and in West Germany (GSG-9, about 1981), scoring ‘top graduate’ each time. In 1983 he married the daughter of President Suharto, Siti Hediati Harijadi (Titiek). In 1983, sent to East Timor as a major in charge of Kopassus Detachment 81 (D81), he established the Tim Alfa militia in Lospalos. He was involved in the Kraras massacre of September 1983. In 1988-89 he was in East Timor again, in command of the Kostrad combat Battalion 328. He turned it into such a highly trained unit that it was chosen as the best battalion in East Timor.

After eight years in Kostrad he returned to Kopassus in 1993 as commander of its Group 3, a special forces training unit in Batujajar, West Java, that also played a role training militia leaders. He rose to Deputy Commander of Kopassus in 1994-95, and to Kopassus Commander in 1995-98. In March 1998 he was moved back to Kostrad, becoming Kostrad Commander.

However, with Suharto gone his fortunes quickly declined. He was exposed as having organised the kidnapping of anti-Suharto activists early in 1998, and was finally dismissed from the armed forces in August 1998 after an internal inquiry (DKP).

His website is partly in English: Prabowo Subianto.

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Egyptian officials have arrested at least 30 people for online activism over the build-up of a nationwide general strike planned for Monday.

The movement gained more than 70,000 supporters for industrial action through internet networking sites.

Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh reports from Cairo on the risks Egypt’s bloggers take in publishing their views online.

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Fresh from saving Tim Geithner and the US dollar, former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Roger Altman has an op-ed in the Financial Times on why this downturn isn’t cyclical but structural.

The rare nature of this recession precludes a cyclically normal US recovery. Instead, we are consigned to a slow, painful climb-out, as are nations such as Japan and Mexico that depend on US demand. The implications for US policy include a likely second round of stimulus, much more federal capital for the banking system and stunning budget deficits that will slow key initiatives for President Barack Obama, such as healthcare and energy reform.

What is unusual is that this is a balance-sheet driven recession, centred on the damaged financial condition of both households and banks. These weaknesses mandate sub-normal levels of consumer spending and overall lending for about three years.

In contrast, most postwar recessions had a different sequence – rising inflationary pressures, a monetary tightening to counter them and, then, a slowdown in response to higher interest rates. This was the pattern of the sharp 1980-81 slowdown.

None of that happened here. Instead, we saw a housing and credit market collapse that caused enormous losses among households and banks. The result was a steep drop in discretionary consumer spending and a halt to lending. To see why recovery will be slow, we can look at the balance sheet damage. For households, net worth peaked in mid-2007 at $64,400bn (€47,750, £43,449bn) but fell to $51,500bn at the end of 2008, a swift 20 per cent fall. With average family income at $50,000, and falling in real terms since 2000, a 20 per cent drop in net worth is big – especially when household debt reached 130 per cent of income in 2008.

This debt derived from Americans spending more than their income, reflecting the positive wealth effect. Households felt wealthier, despite pressure on incomes, because home and financial asset values were rising. Now that wealth effect has reversed with a vengeance. The crisis and unemployment have frightened households into raising savings rates for the first time in years. They had been stagnant at 1-2 per cent of income but have surged to nearly 5 per cent. With reduced incomes, only cutting discretionary spending can produce higher savings. This explains why personal consumption expenditures fell at record rates at the end of 2008.

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Al Jazeera’s Inside Story discusses the new Israeli government’s first cabinet meeting, the longer term effects on the whole Middle East and the future of Israel’s potential peace partner.

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Qatar is cementing its position as the world’s largest supplier of liquefied natural gas. The LNG produced from the world’s biggest project will supply 20 per cent of Britain’s gas energy. But as Nicole Johnston reports, the global recession is hitting producer and causing a gas glut.

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Jonathan Landay is a veteran journalist who has covered National Security Affairs for over 15 years. He was one of the few journalists who in the run up to the Iraq War questioned the veracity of the statements made by various officials of the Bush Administration. He co-authored with Warren Strobel a story for Knight-Ridder entitled “Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials” that has come to be viewed as the most overlooked story in the rush to war. On Afghanistan, Mr. Landay questions whether the balance of expenditures (military versus development) is commiserate with the needs of the country and the national security objectives of the United States.

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The United States said on Monday that it will continue to press the United Nations Security Council for a strong response to this weekends rocket launch by North Korea, a rocket that President Obama said could be used for long-range missiles.

The U.S. and others have called the launch a failure. But North Korea claimed success, and its real victory may have been in capturing the worlds attention.

Leon Sigal, with the Social Science Research Council, joins Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss the results of the launch, Chinas influence on North Korea and the possibility of sanctions.

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Over the weekend, NATO allies decided to contribute 5,000 additional short-term troops to the war effort in Afghanistan, some to help provide security for the country’s upcoming elections and others to help train the Afghan army.

The small eastern European nation of Estonia, population 1.3 million, has sent troops to Afghanistan, just as it did in Iraq.

In fact, after decades of Soviet occupation, Estonia happy to be in the fight, report Worldfocus correspondent Daljit Dhaliwal and producer Sally Garner. Ara Ayer shot this piece.

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Rwanda is preparing to mark the anniversary of one of the bloodiest chapters in recent African history – the genocide that killed more than one million people.

Most of the dead were ethnic Tutsis, and most of the perpetrators Hutus. They later fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, an estimated 7,000 former fighters have returned to Rwanda, 15 years later.

Al Jazeera’s Yvonne Ndege reports from Rwanda on their attempt to reintegrate.

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