page_title: Hasan Tiro
section_title: Creating GAM
hierarchical_section_title: Hasan Tiro / Creating GAM
caption_attribution_description: English: Hasan Tiro's grave
context_page_description: Hasan Muhammad di Tiro, M.S, M.A, LL.D, Ph.D., born Hasan Bin Leube Muhammad, was the founder of the Free Aceh Movement, an organisation which attempted to separate Aceh from Indonesia from the 1970s. It surrendered its separatist goals and agreed to disarm as agreed to in the Helsinki peace deal of 2005. He was the great grandson of Tengku Cik di Tiro on maternal side, an Indonesian national hero who was killed fighting the Dutch in 1891. In 2010 he obtained his Indonesian citizenship back shortly before his death.
context_section_description: Di Tiro re-appeared in Aceh in 1974, where he applied for a pipeline contract in the new Mobil Oil gas plant to be built in Lhokseumawe area. He was outbid by Bechtel, in a tender process in which di Tiro thought the central government had too much control. It has been claimed that, as result of this loss and the death of his brother due to what he considered to be deliberate neglect by a doctor of Javanese ethnicity, di Tiro began organising a separatist movement using his old Darul Islam contacts.
  He declared his organisation as the Aceh Sumatra National Liberation Front, better known as the Free Aceh Movement ("Gerakan Aceh Merdeka") on 4 December 1976. Amongst its goals was the total independence of Aceh from Indonesia. Di Tiro chose independence as one of GAM's goals instead of autonomy due to his focus on Aceh's pre-colonial history as an independent state. The ASNLF was distinct from the former Darul Islam rebellion which sought to overthrow the secular Pancasila ideology of Indonesia and create a pan-Indonesian Islamic state based on sharia, if with a high degree of autonomy for Aceh within such a state. In his "Declaration of Independence", he questioned Indonesia's right to exist as it was a multi-cultural state based on the Dutch colonial empire and consisted of numerous prior states and multitudes of ethnicities with little else in common. As such, di Tiro believed that the Acehnese people should restore the pre-colonial state of Aceh and should be separate from the "fraudulent" state of Indonesia.
  Due to this new focus on Aceh's history and distinct ethnic identity, some of GAM's activities involved attacking transmigrants, particularly those who worked with the Indonesian army, in an effort to restore Acehnese land to Acehnese people. Ethnic Javanese transmigrants were among those most frequently targeted, due to what were often their close links to the Indonesian army. GAM's principal military activities, however, involved guerrilla attacks against Indonesian soldiers and police. 
  In 1977, after leading a GAM attack in which an American engineer was killed and another American and South Korean engineer injured, Hasan Tiro was hunted by Indonesian military. He was shot in the leg in a military ambush, and fled to Malaysia.
  From 1980, di Tiro lived in Stockholm, Sweden and had Swedish citizenship. For most of this period Zaini Abdullah, who became governor of Aceh in June 2012, was one of his closest Acehnese colleagues in Sweden. After the tsunami in December 2004, the GAM and the Indonesian government agreed to a peace treaty which was signed in Helsinki in August 2005. Under the terms of the peace treaty, which were accepted by GAM's political leadership and endorsed by di Tiro, expanded autonomy was to be provided for Aceh. Shortly afterwards, a new Law on the Governing of Aceh was passed by the national parliament in Jakarta to support the implementation of the peace treaty. In October 2008, after 30 years of exile, di Tiro returned to Aceh.
  During the course of the conflict, on three separate occasions the Indonesian government mistakenly declared that Hasan di Tiro had died.
caption: Hasan Tiro was buried next to his grandfather, Teungku Chik di Tiro Muhammad Saman National Heroes Cemetery in Meure village.[14]
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