ON THE RUN IN ACEH / With the guerrillas in Indonesia's westernmost province

Aceh, an internationally recognized state until the Dutch began a decades- long war to colonize it in 1873, has always fought outside rule. More Dutch soldiers died there than in the rest of Indonesia combined during the colonial period. When Indonesia won independence from the Netherlands in 1949, Aceh's leaders agreed to join the new republic. The Acehnese have been regretting that decision ever since, enduring often harsh military rule and widespread human rights abuses under former dictator Suharto, and what they regard as the plundering of their mineral wealth.

William Nessen, a freelance journalist and photographer based in Jakarta, began his sixth reporting trip to Aceh in mid-May at a time when a months-long cease-fire was unraveling. His determination to report from the rebel zones led to a worldwide cause celebre when he was nearly killed by Indonesian troops, and government authorities demanded he give himself up to face possible espionage charges. This is his story.

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It's night and I walk steadily along a ribbon of visible path under a canopy of trees. Fog rolls fitfully through the limbs and leaves. The few houses are unlit and far away a dog barks.

A guerrilla of the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM, walks ahead of me, carrying a pistol whose outline becomes visible when we exit the trees and start across the wet paddy field. Moving in a half crouch under a sickle of moon and stars, I scan the horizons for movement. Gun in hand, another GAM man follows 10 meters behind.

They're taking me toward my morning rendezvous with their enemy, the Indonesian military.

I'm giving myself up after weeks of defying the military's demand to stop reporting from rebel-held zones. I've lost my camera gear and everything else I brought, and narrowly escaped death.

Indonesian soldiers are camped all over this area, but I'm strangely calm. I'm used to the fear now. I know it can suck breath from your body until there is nothing to do but let go.

I had come to Aceh six weeks earlier, in mid-May, to report on Indonesia's impending "final offensive" against Free Aceh Movement, which has waged an independence struggle in this gas-rich province for 27 years.

Separatist movements have plagued Indonesia, a sprawling 13,000-island former Dutch colony of 230 million people, since its birth five decades ago. With longstanding independence aspirations growing in easternmost Papua province, the traumatic exit of East Timor in 1999 and a history of religious and ethnic tension in other regions, the central government and many Indonesians reasonably fear that the loss of Aceh would trigger the eventual breakup of their troubled nation.

Having reported from Aceh numerous times, for The Chronicle and newspapers on four continents, I had no problem arranging with GAM to accompany a 50- strong company of fighters in their villages near Lhokseumawe, Aceh's industrial center. Despite GAM's eagerness to host foreign journalists, in the past I'd been the only one to make more than a perfunctory visit to the guerrillas or to the 80 percent of Aceh that the central government conceded lay outside its control.

Some in Jakarta's press community thought my keen interest in the story made me a sort of pro-GAM activist. I couldn't understand how journalists could hope to get to the truth in a place like Aceh without getting their shoes dirty and their hair mussed up.

On the second morning of the new offensive, which shattered a fivemonth- long ceasefire, I stood with some 20 GAM fighters at the entrance to Rise Baru village, awaiting the approach of 1,000 Indonesian soldiers.

While I nervously scouted routes of retreat for myself through thick brush and barbed-wire fence, village elders, civilian GAM activists and relatives of the fighters strolled down the road to chat with "their boys." Young girls and old women brought tea, coffee and sweets made of sticky rice and shredded coconut.

Unlike me, the locals in this village of several hundred souls seemed confident they could cope with the latest chapter in Aceh's long-running conflict with the central government in Jakarta, more than 1,100 miles away on the island of Java.

To dispel my fear, English, the 28-year-old company commander,

tutored me on GAM guerrilla tactics: "When they advance, we retreat; when they leave, we return. When they grow tired or weak or careless, we attack."

Nasir, a 24-year-old who once headed a GAM squad assassinating Indonesian soldiers and police in Lhokseumawe, added, "We don't have to win the war, we only have to stop them from winning."

So far they'd done at least that. Growing in number, support and arms since long-ruling Indonesian dictator Suharto fell from power in mid-1998, GAM's increasingly well-coordinated fighters had consistently outmaneuvered tens of thousands of Indonesian soldiers while suffering inconsequential losses.

During many months of travel through Aceh, I had heard numerous believable accounts from GAM men about the one-by-one killing of hundreds of the Indonesian military's intelligence operatives in 1999 and 2000. The military (known as the TNI) has never discussed GAM's ruthless but efficient operation, which strongly bolstered the rebels' ability to move in the countryside.

By 2002, the army could hardly venture off Aceh's main road without deploying hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers at a time. But the TNI's operational commander in Aceh, Brig. Gen. Bambang Darmono, a veteran of the long occupation of East Timor, had assured me back in January that he had not yet gone all out. "We know how GAM operates, and we can finish them if we want, " he said.

The military didn't enter Rise Baru that morning or the next, and English's men shot two soldiers having a smoke outside a new TNI encampment. A day later,

the fighters ambushed two patrols, killing one soldier.

GAM guerrillas are neither well-trained nor exceedingly fit. But my time in Aceh showed me again and again that as long as villagers - long angry about Indonesian rule and craving independence - continue to give information to the guerrillas, GAM can attack with little risk to themselves.

The dilemma for guerrillas and civilians alike is that frustrated soldiers often take it out on the first farmer they encounter. Nearly 13,000 Acehnese, most of them civilians, have died in the past decade of military repression and local resistance in this province of 4.2 million residents.

Finally, on the fourth day of the offensive, we heard that the TNI was coming en masse and English knew it was time to move.

GAM fighters, their civilian activists, hundreds of male refugees and I simply retreated a few miles to Cot Calang, the next village up the road. The TNI left an occupying force in Rise Baru and two days later moved toward Cot Calang. We pulled back again. Soldiers razed the houses of two GAM men in the village and after a fruitless interrogation shot dead several GAM activists, according to refugees I met later.

After more than a week of cautious retreat up the road into Aceh's mountainous interior, English steered our unwieldy assemblage into the forest.

Gen. Bambang's strategy, right out of the counter-insurgency handbook, was to separate the guerrillas from the people who supported them - and, in this one place at least, it seemed to be working. In the forest, the TNI could use its superior firepower, communications and logistics to overwhelm the guerrillas. If they could find them.

The next morning, we heard planes pass high overhead. Later that day, two agitated men caught up with us while we were cooking rice and salted fish on the shaded banks of a wide river. They recounted how they'd been sleeping in the mountains along with 200 other refugees when planes began circling over them. Everybody came out from under the trees and stood in the field looking up.

Suddenly, one plane appeared to fall, and one of the men joked to his friend that the Indonesians didn't even know how to fly a plane. A second later the first bomb exploded in their midst.

The pair fled for their lives and couldn't say how many had been killed at the spot known as Kilometer 26, marking its distance up from the main road.

English sent out scouts to gather news, but there was little to be found. We were traveling almost blind and the enemy was all around.

When members of our party started finding TNI food wrappers on forest paths,

English decided to blend deeper into the landscape.

Bushwhacking a route any way we could, we lowered ourselves on long vines to boulder-strewn streams and then up again. We saw tiger tracks,

giant pythons and forest eagles skimming the treetops.

The rice ran out. The fighters fished with nets, and we dug tubers and sucked sugar cane in fields that the TNI had prevented farmers from reaching. The land seemed emptied of people and we stopped for several days at a time in garden huts, bathing in deep rivers and washing our clothes.

Early one morning sitting on a boulder, my feet dangling in the water, I traced the decisions in my life that had led from an easy boyhood on Manhattan's west side to the harrowing war in Aceh 40 years later.

Looking back, it seemed that I'd not really had a choice at all but that my life's arrow had been ever aimed to this time and place. What else was written? Was this to be my journey's end? So be it, I thought, and dove in.

The refugees we found in the forest and fields made clear the TNI was going full-out in its attempt to crush the rebels.

The refugees said soldiers had relocated entire villages and made the men walk in front of them as protection against ambush by GAM fighters. The government had long ago cut electricity, limited transport of goods and denied access for even Indonesian journalists willing to parrot the official line.

Fear sat restively in my gut, haunting every step I took. Any sudden or rough sound - a dead palm leaf dropping to the ground, an unnoticed chicken scratching in the dirt, the rustle of clothing as the man next to me turned in his sleep - sent my heart racing.

The mounting tension took its toll. I berated the GAM fighters for leaving a trail of half-eaten fruit and obvious campsites, and argued with Nasir and 19-year-old Panji, the men closest to me, over trivial matters.

Three weeks into the offensive, catastrophe struck. Indonesian soldiers spotted our strung-out column crossing a river and opened fire.

With 40 pounds of gear on my back, I pounded up a steep path in the open, cursing to myself because I knew some of us were going to die. In front of us, the forest exploded with automatic fire.

Cocky little Nasir fell dead on the path. Somewhere below, Indonesian bullets hit Panji, who was a natural with my video camera. I believe he died filming, not fighting, the TNI.

English grabbed me and we angled to our right, the other men following at full speed. We ran into the forest, the pinging of bullets and the roar of gunfire all around us. As English spurred us ahead, five men in camouflage approached him. In the deep shadows, the men mistook him for a fellow Indonesian soldier, and he momentarily thought they were his own.

The split second he saw the red and white bandannas around their necks, English pointed his gun and pulled the trigger. What he recalled most was the shock on the faces of the TNI men as they realized their lives were at an end. Despite getting the drop on our company, the Indonesian army lost nine men that day, all shot at close range.

A deep sense of loss shrouded all of us as we waited in a village and slowly regrouped. As each day passed and other colleagues didn't return, the guerrillas barely talked. Guilt for the death of Panji weighed heavily on me.

One fighter told of turning over Nasir and seeing his lifeless eyes and the blood trickling from his mouth. Another said, "We are Acehnese men and we are crying inside."

The guerrillas' toughness was symbolized by a fighter who was wounded in the foot and had to hide for a day only meters away from Indonesian troops. He then crawled and hopped two days to reach us.

When a nurse secretly helping GAM unwrapped the bloody bandage the wounded man had fashioned, I heard a collective gasp from those watching. The back of his foot was missing, the rest a dead purplish gray. Twigs and leaves littered the hollowed-out front, and thousands of bright white maggots were consuming the rank, rotting flesh.

The wounded man uttered not a sound.

English went around to the back of a nearby house. When he returned, I saw his eyes were red from crying. None of the men ever said English had erred in taking us far from the protection of the villagers, but it was clear that he had.

A few days later, fresh disaster. The TNI stumbled onto us and another company of fighters in the village of Alue Sikeh when GAM lookouts failed to give warning.

The Indonesians were as surprised as the guerrillas, and there was a moment of dumb shock on both sides

before the shooting started. With hundreds of others, I got away but without my belongings, including my cameras and videotapes. (By chance, I had deposited most of my photos with a local village leader.)

In the dusky bluish light, our two long columns of fighters and refugees - shoeless, shirtless, a bag of rice on a head, a plastic bag of food in hand - retreated without hope along a dirt road.

Fighters drew their index fingers across their necks, an admission that our time was running out. Our discovery in the village had prompted a several- thousand-strong circle of TNI troops to tighten the noose around us.

As we passed houses along the road that night, women stood with their children, holding candles, weeping, and wailing a stream of Koranic prayer so loud, mournful and full of pain that I felt Aceh bare its soul to me.

"Our men, our men," they cried, "may God, the all-merciful, the all- powerful, save them. May He give harvest to our struggle."

I walked with my arm around English, trying to draw the courage to die from this straight-backed farmer's son 20 years my junior. He said to me, "Those who die teach lessons to the living, and when we die, others will learn and the struggle still live."

I called my wife, Shadia, with a commander's satellite phone. It was time to say goodbye. She had warned me to leave the guerrillas earlier and she sobbed over the phone as I told her the Indonesians had us in a vise.

"No, no, NO!" she screamed with horror. "Can't you… can't you just separate yourself, just get out, just get away?" she stammered, sobbing and struggling for breath.

The Indonesians were close, though still out of sight, and now shooting in the air to drive us toward a wall of their men waiting somewhere.

"I have to go, sayang, my dear. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's time," I said, tears filling my eyes but trying to stay strong for her. "No, no," she begged, "Don't go, don't go." I hung up and that, we both thought, was it. (Headlines around the world a day later read, "U.S. Journalist Feared Dead.")

Quickly, the hundreds of men and I cut off the road and followed paths through islands of forest between the fields. As my will fought to stave off paralysis caused by mounting fear, my mind kept calculating which spot in the column gave me the best odds of survival and whether to run or hide when the inevitable happened.

Whether from strength or weakness I cannot say, but I felt myself give way to fate and my consciousness lift away. And for a long moment in the darkness I was literally looking down through the tall trees at myself and the men as we hurried along.

Our guides decided on a resting place for us that night in a clump of palm trees set in a maze of razor-sharp elephant grass and marsh. No one slept. The men waited for morning's losing battle. Not a religious man, I nonetheless begged God to spare these men, adding a moment later, "and me too."

Much later, sweat-soaked and chilled, I lay back between English and another fighter, an M16 against my back. I closed my eyes and began to drift.

Suddenly something smashed through my glasses. A golf ball-size palm kernel had fallen from a high tree and gashed me just above my left eyeball, splattering blood over half my face. A message from above? What was it saying?

Morning brought a miracle. With new information flowing to the commanders from ever-helpful villagers, we slipped out of the TNI encirclement - 50 at a time, stopping or changing course every 100 meters.

A net has holes; a wall has cracks. And prayer is sometimes answered. By that evening, we were 12 miles away and safe.

A week later, I parted from English, but I saw him and his men once more as they swung back toward Cot Calang. He called me over and asked softly, "Why not come with us again?"

But by then, I had decided to turn myself in to Gen. Bambang and face the consequences for daring to seek the truth from the other side of the hills.

The fighters and I had only just learned that my refusal to leave GAM had become the top news story throughout Indonesia, and was attracting attention around the world. I had already gotten an inside view of the war, and without my gear I didn't see much sense in staying.

I had also seen what a high-velocity bullet could do.

Commentators around Indonesia were vilifying me for defying the government and interfering with the war effort.

While I was with the guerrillas, the police had arrested in my Jakarta home a former university lecturer in veterinary science who had become my friend and keenest informant about the conflict in Aceh. He was one of dozens of Acehnese arrested in the capital and charged with membership in GAM. Ministers and generals accused me of spying for GAM and threatened me with the death penalty.

When I called Gen. Bambang by cell phone to arrange my surrender, he barked at me, "You dog!" - possibly the ultimate insult in a nation of dog haters.

Bambang's anger was partly personal. I had met him through Shadia, one of Jakarta's top "fixers" and translators for foreign journalists. None of the TNI knew, however, that Shadia was also half Acehnese and a former organizer for an independence referendum, or that her father had once been among Aceh's most defiant religious and political leaders.

Nor did we ever tell Gen. Bambang that Shadia and I had gotten married. With foreign journalists in tow during the past six months, she had quickly charmed the entire Indonesian military brass.

Shadia and I spent many days with Gen. Bambang on several visits, including a helicopter ride to visit troops in the forest preparing to attack GAM fighters. Unlike most journalists, I never pushed Bambang with a provocative question; I built up trust and let him come to me.

I wanted to get inside his head and look at the world through TNI eyes. At one point, I had seemed so sympathetic to Indonesia's policy in Aceh that Bambang and others he introduced me to hinted - with a wink and a nod - that they "knew" I worked for U.S. intelligence.

When I emerged on a stretch of road to give myself up, Bambang greeted me with armored cars and a bear hug that began with a slug to the back that was missed by the cameras brought to witness his friendly greeting. By the time I arrived at my place of detention - the main police station in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital - I found that reality had been turned upside down.

On the TV news, no Indonesian soldiers were dying, and GAM, portrayed as terrorizing the local population, was nearly finished - just a few remaining rats to trap. The truth, which both Bambang and I knew, was that his men were hunting but rarely hitting the core of GAM's military strength, the thousands of company fighters.

As I had seen, the TNI was killing off some fraction of the tens of thousands of GAM activists, some of whom were locked up with me. Yet after two months of the offensive, not a single one of the hundreds of GAM company commanders had died.

Even the Indonesian policemen guarding me rolled their eyes at the TNI- orchestrated, flag-waving rallies on the news. One of the cops said of the Acehnese: "They are proud people who once had their own country. Jakarta takes their resources, and with the military there is no law. I don't blame them for fighting us."

The fight was thrust upon them, in fact. Six months before my first visit there, in November 2000, Indonesian security forces quashed a massive unarmed movement for an independence referendum, killing nearly 100 people, and prompting many Acehnese to decide that taking up arms was the only solution.

During the ceasefire earlier this year, the TNI's top man in the province, Maj. Gen. Djali Yusuf, had told me that if demonstrators started taking to the streets again in large numbers, "We will shoot them in the head."

In my first days in detention, I received constant attention that felt like a conspiracy to break me. The second night, I was awakened by a strange smacking noise - "Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!" - coming from the office next door, accompanied by laughter and loud talk. I assumed the police were beating GAM prisoners, perhaps to scare me.

Two nights later, I caught a glimpse of police punching and kicking a man tied up and sitting cross-legged on the floor, but I could hear nothing. All the GAM suspects held with me displayed bruises, cigarette burns or lacerations from electrical cords, abuse mostly administered at the time of capture by the TNI or at the station by a handful of bored, immature young cops.

The investigators I encountered there were ordinary men, underpaid cogs in an inefficient machine. They played computer games, watched porn films on office computers and roamed the corridors in search of some distraction. While interrogating GAM suspects, the investigators often chatted on cell phones and listened at loud volume to light '90s rock. Asking 10 questions could take eight hours. For them, it was just a job.

As a foreigner who had supposedly cast his lot with the guerrillas, I was plied with endless questions about GAM.

I had resolved that I would hit back if the police ever struck me (something that I would never forget about South African black consciousness leader Stephen Biko, who was murdered in prison).

It turned out I was not a punching bag but an object of their curiosity. They played music to get me to dance and relax, made sure the prisoners and I had enough to eat, and greeted me with elaborate hand slapping.

Early on, one quiet GAM man advised me, "Just don't let them touch your heart." Like oppressed people everywhere, the Acehnese were masters at putting chin to chest and playing dumb.

So I hunkered down, living a day at a time and not allowing myself to think about friends, family and good times outside. The police occasionally let me jog around the 50-yard-long employee parking lot.

One day a short man in his late 40s with a big belly tried to keep up with me. He was chief of police intelligence, but I pretended I didn't know. As we ran, he began asking questions about GAM in a friendly way. I sped up (chuckling to myself) as he talked, and he, panting, could barely get his words out.

I was in the custody of the criminal division, and I soon realized that I was being followed around on my jog because the two departments weren't sharing basic information about the guerrillas with each other.

One night toward the end of my detention, I awoke bathed in sweat, moaning like a wounded animal from an excruciating pain in my kidney area. In the darkness I peed into an empty water bottle and held it up to a shaft of light. The liquid was dark red. The next day, an X-ray showed a kidney stone. Two days later, police moved me to their hospital.

The night before I left the police station, I heard the odd thwacking noise again. By then, I had some freedom to move around and the scene I encountered was unexpected: Six police officers sitting around a large desk slamming double-size black dominoes - not GAM prisoners - to the desk's metal surface.

I was finally tried for two immigration offenses - not espionage. The potential maximum penalty was now six years, not death. In the end, the verdict had little to do with whether I had done anything wrong and largely to do with U.S.-Indonesian relations, my lawyers' political savvy, "gifts" to people who were potential obstacles and Indonesian pride.

Encouraged by a manyfold campaign - mounted by activist friends, the Committee to Protect Journalists and other journalists' and writers' groups, Columbia University journalism professors and former classmates, Republicans on Capitol Hill, led by Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, the State Department and a few powerful Democrats - the U.S. Embassy staff in Jakarta devoted itself to helping me.

On Aug. 2, the panel of three judges sentenced me to 40 days - the time I had already served plus one day - for failing to inform immigration officials of an address change in Jakarta and for not reporting to martial law authorities.

The TNI likely believed that my detention would serve as sufficient warning to anyone else contemplating a trip behind rebel lines in Aceh. The strong effort on my behalf by the U.S. Embassy probably convinced Bambang and his friends that I was working for the CIA. And the general had a useful prize - the thousands of dollars' of camera gear his men had gotten from me.

On my way out of the country,

I spent a moving and humbling 24 hours in Jakarta. At the airport and in one of the city's luxurious air-conditioned malls, hundreds - if not thousands - of people stared at me, smiled and called my name, "Nessen."

They also inquired about my mother, Hermine. Dubbed Ibu

(Mama) Nessen, she had become an object of great affection in Indonesia when with great dignity and the embassy's help, she weaved her way through the country's bureaucratic martial law regulations to get to Aceh. People said they were happy

I was free at last.

Was such sentiment natural compassion for an unfortunate, now-famous foreigner, or a sign that official propaganda about the war and the tug of Indonesian patriotism was not strong enough to overcome distrust of their own government?

Several weeks after being deported to Singapore (and banned for a year), I began calling English on his mobile phone. Each time we spoke, he surprised me with his laughter and calm.

None of the boys had fallen since we'd parted. And the Indonesian

soldiers, less than a half-mile away, already seemed weary of the government's latest "final offensive."