Hasan di Tiro Tengku Hasan Muhammad di Tiro ( 25 August 1925 – 3 June 2010 ) , born Hasan Bin Leube Muhammad , was the founder of the Free Aceh Movement ( GAM ) , an organization 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 a descendant 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 . Background . Coming from a prominent family , from village of Tiro ( Pidie Regency ) , di Tiro studied in Yogyakarta and fought against the Dutch during the Indonesian National Revolution . He then continued his studies in United States , where he did part - time work for Indonesian Mission to the United Nations . While a student in New York in 1953 , he declared himself the " foreign minister " of the rebellious Darul Islam movement , which in Aceh was led by Daud Bereueh . Due to this action , he was immediately stripped of his Indonesian citizenship , causing him to be imprisoned for a few months on Ellis Island as an illegal alien . The Darul Islam rebellion in Aceh itself ended in a peace deal in 1962 . Under the peace deal Aceh was granted nominal autonomy . Creating GAM . 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 December 4 , 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 taregetted , due to what were often their close links to the Indonesian army . GAM ' s principle military activities , however , involved guerrilla attacks against Indonesian soldiers and police . In 1977 , after leading a GAM attack in which one 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 . Return to Aceh . Hasan di Tiro returned to Aceh after 30 years of self - imposed exile on October 11 , 2008 . As a consequence of previous strokes , he was too frail to deliver his own speech at his welcome rally and did not play any active role in Aceh ' s ongoing political process at the time . He stayed for two weeks before returning to Sweden . A year later in October 2009 he again returned to Aceh and stayed there until his death . On 2 June 2010 he regained his Indonesian citizenship after living for years with a Swedish passport . He died the following day of multiple organ dysfunction syndrome in a Banda Aceh hospital .