Tour Guide: Guerillas in the Midst

We’ve done a fair share of reporting about gorilla tours and the assorted conflicts they face, but we were interested to hear about guerilla-run tours offered by Aceh Explorer Adventure Tours, which delve into the long history of conflicts in the Aceh region of Indonesia. Aceh’s abundant natural resources of oil, gas, and timber were the fodder for the 30-year fight for independence between Aceh inhabitants and the Indonesian army, who relied on the island’s resources for their economy. But after the tsunami devastated the region, the Indonesian troops pulled out and rebel groups received amnesty. Reuters reports that now, with a growing need for economic development in the region, tourism is quickly taking hold:

The treks in the northwestern tip of Indonesia are an attempt to lift Aceh out of poverty by developing local tourism projects and reviving the crippled economy after a 30-year conflict and a devastating tsunami in 2004. So just as tourists in Vietnam can scramble through the Cu Chi tunnels used by the Vietcong in the Vietnam war, visitors to Aceh can see where the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) hid from or fought against the Indonesian army (TNI) until as recently as 2005 when the two sides signed a peace agreement…[T]ourists scramble over sharp rocky trails, past teak trees cloaked in creepers, and alongside pristine waterfalls and sparkling rock pools.

Wanting to learn more, we wrote to Mendel Pols, Aceh Explorers founder, to get the scoop on how exactly one convinces former guerillas to be tour guides. The Dutch national, who moved to Aceh in 2004, a month before the tsunami struck, quickly got back to us with the details…

The former members of the Free Aceh Movement a.k.a. GAM were already disarmed and [had] returned to their villages after the Helsinki peace accord [in] late 2005. Since most of them have been living in the jungle for years under mostly extreme conditions, they would – in my mind – be the perfect jungle trek tour guides. They practically know every trail there is in the area where they were active as combatants…

I lobbied my way through the ex-GAM community, looking for new trails and guides. Sometimes ex-Gammers approached me directly asking me to come to their village in order to survey a trail. It took me about 7 months of lobbying in order to get the full support of all GAM field commanders as well as the high command. In the beginning I organized so-called survey tours with NGO workers to see if a certain trail would meet the expectations/demands of the Western stand-in tourist. All my guides are poor, so in order to increase their capacity, I re-invested the profits in buying them hiking boots, backpacks, bushknives, first aid kits, special clothes and the like.

Pols now has 23 former guerillas working as guides taking visitors through terrain that was used by the GAM during the conflict. On the hikes, he says, they’ll often teach participants their own survival skills, like finding drinking water from a cut tree branch. Pols says the bulk of the trekkers are aid workers who have come to the region for tsunami relief efforts. We’re glad to see a sustainable partnership between a local community that’s in need of tourism support.

Photos: Courtesy Aceh Explorers

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