ACEH was like a wild horse in need of a brave jockey to tame it, the former rebel leader making a strong run for governor in the Indonesian province's first democratic elections said yesterday.About 2.6 million Acehnese go to the polls on Monday after peace accords signed in Helsinki last year, when Free Aceh Movement (GAM) separatists agreed to hand in their weapons, and Jakarta assented to withdraw its military occupying force.
The peace agreement ended 30 years of what many Acehnese regarded as occupation by Jakarta, with the province ruled for a good deal of that period under effective martial law.
A previous ceasefire in 2001 broke down, leading to a vastly increased presence by the Indonesian military, or TNI.
However, Irwandi Yusuf, a former GAM military spokesman who was jailed for his part in the rebel insurrection, now stands a strong chance of mounting -- to use his own analogy -- a dark horse race for the governor's office. He has promised that if elected he will re-examine the province's controversial imposition of sharia or Islamic law which now has uniformed sharia police patrolling cities and towns.
Campaigning has been strictly controlled under Indonesian electoral law, with final mass rallies held on Thursday before candidates' posters and bunting were torn down yesterday.
GAM was forbidden from putting forward its own candidates in the election, forcing Mr Yusuf and his deputy, Mohammad Nazar, to stand as independents.
The organisation pledged initially to avoid influencing voters' choices but GAM legend Sofyan Dawood told an appreciative crowd of several thousand Irwandi supporters in Banda Aceh this week, that "I give you this man as our candidate; if he cannot do the job, then you can give him back to me".
Prominent candidates from mainstream Indonesian political parties appear on paper to stand a better chance than Mr Yusuf -- businessman Malik Raden, the former ruling Golkar party's choice for governor, for instance, attracts significant support both from Jakarta and from the Banda Aceh elite.
It is at the grassroots level that Mr Yusuf can claim his greatest support, with rallies in the remote districts of overwhelmingly rural Aceh, as well as regional towns such as Lhokseumawe on the north coast, attracting mass turnouts over the two weeks of official campaigning.
There has been a striking lack of political vision in most of the campaigning, but there has also been almost none of the violence and other social unrest that often marks Indonesian elections.
Analysts view this as a result of the desire to preserve the long-awaited peace that has finally settled on Aceh, nicknamed the "Verandah to Mecca".
Mr Yusuf is one candidate determined to turn back Aceh's politicisation of the religion, in the form lately of a superficial and restrictive imposition of sharia law that has seen women reprimanded for not wearing the jilbab headdress, and unmarried couples prosecuted for holding hands in public.
"This is not real sharia law," the urbane, softly spoken former veterinary science professor said yesterday. "Sharia should not be about seeing what people are doing wrong, but about increasing the prosperity of the people. Instead of targeting the most vulnerable, we should be targeting the most corrupt."