Less than two weeks after the House of Representatives passed the Aceh governance bill which the government says will pave the way for greater autonomy in Indonesias northern-most province on June 21, the Aceh governor issued a decree declaring 16 Acehnese groups illegal.

While most of the organisations named in the decree are anti-separatist militia groups set up by the military prior to the signing of the peace agreement between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement last August, the list also includes the Aceh chapter of the highly respected environmental forum Walhi, the Aceh Referendum Information Centre (SIRA), the Acehnese solidarity organisation Student Solidarity for the People (SMUR) and a number of other student and activist groups.

SIRA and SMUR have been campaigning to ensure that the Aceh governance bill adheres strictly to the peace deal particularly over issues such as Acehnese control over its vast natural resources, the right to form local political parties and the establishment of an ad hoc human rights court to try perpetrators of past human rights abuses in the province. In a July 13 statement, SIRA said the new bill contravened the spirit of the peace deal and is even worse than the 2001 special autonomy law, which was enacted in a bid to appease separatists.

Walhi has been highly critical of the Aceh Nias Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency for using timber from conservation forests and illegally importing timber from outside of Aceh to rebuild the thousands of houses destroyed in December 2004s massive earthquake and tsunami.
Although SIRA has reaffirmed that despite the word referendum in its name, it is no longer seeking an independent Aceh and fully supports the peace deal, in recent months the organisation has been the target of attacks.

In February, the SIRA offices in western Aceh were vandalised by a group of around 100 militia. In June, the Indonesian governments senior representative on the Aceh Monitoring Mission, Major-General Bambang Darmono, claimed that SIRA was illegal and called for the organisation to be disbanded. Then on July 10, three SIRA activists were arrested for distributing a leaflet calling for a general strike against the endorsement of the Aceh governance bill.

The bannings came in the wake of mounting public pressure for stern government action against groups taking the law into their own hands, in particular the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and the Betawi Brotherhood Forum (FBR). Although the FPI is best known for smashing up Jakarta nightspots and exhorting money, while the FBR is used to provide hired thugs in local disputes, in recent months the two have been campaigning for the enactment of the controversial Law Against Pornography and Porno-Action (UUAPP). Most Indonesians see this as a step towards the implementation of Islamic law and it has generated a wave of popular resistance from women, who view it as a further violation of their already limited rights.

More recently, FPI made headlines by vandalising the offices of the local version of Playboy magazine, harassing women activists campaigning against the UUAPP and even forcing former president Abdurrahman Wahid a moderate Muslim cleric and steadfast advocate of pluralism off the stage at a meeting in West Java in May. In almost all cases police simply stood by and watched.

Rather than putting pressure on police to take action against the members of these groups who are clearly breaking the law, the government is instead seeking to revise the 1985 law on the freedom to organise in order to allow for the disbanding of organisations deemed to have disrupted security and public order.