Hasan di Tiro, Who Led Indonesia Rebels, Dies at 84

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Hasan di Tiro, the founder of the Indonesian rebel group the Free Aceh Movement, which fought Jakarta in a three-decade war of independence before disbanding under a peace accord in 2005, died Thursday in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. He was 84 and had returned from exile in 2008.

The cause was multiple organ failure, doctors said. The Indonesian government restored his citizenship the day before he died.

Mr. di Tiro was a major figure in the establishment of the group, known as GAM, in 1976, and he continued to oversee it from Europe during years of fighting that killed 15,000 people in the jungles and villages of Aceh, a resource-rich Islamic province on the island of Sumatra.

A frail Mr. di Tiro, who had adopted Swedish citizenship, returned to large crowds in Aceh in October 2008 after the foreign-brokered peace deal ended the fighting.

Teungku Machsalmina, a spokesman for the Aceh Transitional Committee of former GAM rebels, said that Mr. di Tiro was a charismatic leader central to Aceh’s fight for independence. Without his leadership and his lobbying of foreign leaders, Mr. Machsalmina said, “the international community would not have known what was happening in Aceh.”

Mr. di Tiro was born in Aceh on Sept. 25, 1925. He was a descendant of Cik di Tiro, an Acehnese leader who has long been celebrated as an Indonesian national hero for running a 19th-century guerrilla “holy war” against the Dutch.

Mr. di Tiro is survived by his wife, Dora, and a son, Karim, who lives in Ohio, Indonesian newspapers reported.

Mr. di Tiro was the most prominent of the former GAM rebels rehabilitated by Jakarta as part of the peace deal.

The accord, reached in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, with the government of the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, followed the earthquake and tsunami of 2004 that killed nearly 170,000 people in Aceh alone and wiped out vast parts of its capital.

The agreement granted Aceh limited autonomy and allowed for the establishment of local political parties, paving the way for the Aceh Party of former GAM fighters to dominate local politics.

The province, which is historically distinct from much of the rest of Indonesia, is the only region of this Muslim-majority country where large elements of Islamic law are in force.