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By implementing Islamic law in Aceh, Jakarta has overlooked the complexities of the problems in the rebellious province, and women are suffering most. Yuli Suriani is a female student at the Syiah Kuala University who also works as a part-time radio broadcaster in Banda Aceh, the capital of Indonesia’s rebellious province of Aceh in northern Sumatra. She is petite and usually wears blue jeans and a canvas jacket. But like most women in Banda Aceh, she wears a jilbab to cover her head, too. "I feel imperfect without jilbab. It is a symbol of women with status," she says. The 27-year-old Yuli decided to use the cotton scarf in 1999 to cover her aurat (in Arabic, literary "scar" or "hole") in accordance to a major interpretation of the Koran. This interpretation says that a man’s aurat is an area between his belly button and his knees, meaning that a Muslim man should not wear shorts. A woman’s aurat is from her hair to her knees. But a stricter interpretation says a woman’s aurat includes her face, prompting some women to use jalabiya (dark robe) and cadar (face cover). In another interpretation, Karen Amstrong, the author of the book, A History of God, writes that the Koran does not prescribe the veil for all women but only for Muhammad’s wives, as a mark of their status. She adds that Muhammad had encouraged women to play an active role in the affairs of the community and they expressed their views forthrightly, confident that they would be heard. Unfortunately, as in Christianity, the religion was later hijacked by men who interpreted texts in a way that negatively impacted Muslim women. Once Islam had taken its place in the civilized world, however, Muslims adopted the customs of veiling women and secluding them in harems from Persia to Christian Byzantium, where women had long been marginalized in this way. Despite the different interpretations and her own dress code, Yuli disagrees with a recent Aceh government regulation that requires all Aceh women to wear the jilbab. She believes that faith is an individual matter. "Islam is flexible," she explains. "It does not force people. Jilbab or not, it’s your own business with God." Aceh is one of Indonesia’s most Muslim-dominated provinces. About 98 percent of its 4.4 million people are officially Muslims. Its towns and villages are graced by thousands of well-kept mosques. Arab merchants introduced Islam to the region 900 years ago, and from there it spread to the rest of what is now Indonesia. But Aceh is also well known because of its long wars against the Dutch, the Japanese, and now over the last 20 years, against Jakarta. In the early 1970s an Aceh aristocrat, Hasan di Tiro, thought that it was no use for Aceh to deal with Jakarta anymore. He was fed up with the injustice and met with his loyal supporters, hid in the jungle and began building an insurgent organization. He introduced the concept of "bangsa Aceh vis-เ-vis bangsa Indonesia" and viewed the Javanese to be Aceh’s historic rival. "Bangsa" is the Malay word for "nation." It is strange among Indonesians to hear the phrase "bangsa Aceh" as they are much more familiar with the notion that Indonesia is already a nation, or "bangsa Indonesia." But not Aceh. On Dec 4, 1976, Hasan declared Aceh’s independence and set up the Free Aceh Movement, locally known as GAM. His later decision to accept help from Libya did not win the movement any foreign friends. But by 1989, the success of the newly Libya-trained rebel army prompted Indonesian President Suharto to mount a ruthless campaign that lasted until he stepped down in May 1998. More than 10,000 Acehnese were killed. The military strategy involved intensive surveillance, checkpoints, dawn-to-dusk curfews, house raids, and arrests on a wide scale. Already in 1989 and 1990 these counterinsurgency activities led to the killing of many civilians at checkpoints, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and a broader pattern of persecution and ill-treatment of civilians in suspected insurgent base areas. Homes were raided and burned, women were taken hostage and raped, and arbitrary arrests, detention, torture, summary executions and "disappearances" were common well into the mid-1990s. After Suharto’s fall, many Acehnese hoped Indonesia would collapse and the province would gain independence, but the Jakarta government insisted it would not allow the country to break up, especially after losing East Timor in the UN-sponsored referendum in 1999. In January 2002, with the special autonomy law passed by the new Indonesian Parliament, Aceh was granted the privilege of implementing Islamic sharia (the Islamic code of conduct that governs all matters). President Abdurrahman Wahid tried to prevent the Acehnese from breaking apart from Indonesia with the sharia tolerance.