For nearly three decades the people of Aceh, the northernmost province of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, have been paying the price for trying to maintain their sense of identity and history. This week, three key leaders of the Aceh movement - Hasan Tiro, Malik Mahmud and Abdullah Zaini - were arrested by the authorities in Sweden, the country they had fled to in search of exile and asylum in the 1980s.

Although the Swedish authorities have cited unspecified 'crimes violating international law' as the reason for these arrests, many Acehnese activists and human rights groups claim that Jakarta was behind the detentions.

What is worse, with Indonesia being pressured to play according to Washington's rules in the so-called 'global war against terror', the label 'terrorist' has now been put on the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) as well.

Thus far the outcry against the arrests have been muted, and the powers-that-be in Indonesia claim that the detentions are part of their efforts to bring peace and stability to the country. But few observers have cared to enquire about the tortured history of Aceh, or ask the obvious question why the people of that region have been fighting for their rights for so long.

Foreign observers of Indonesian politics tend to forget that 'Indonesia' is an artificial entity that spans the geographical space of Europe. Comprising of more than 350 recognised ethnic groups and 250 linguistic communities, the country is a virtual assembly of a myriad of different communities, many with a language, culture and history that is uniquely its own.

Among the communities of present-day Indonesia, one community in particular stands out for its contribution to Indonesia's independence struggle against the Dutch; its transnational linkages to the rest of the world and its cosmopolitan make-up: Aceh.