Michael
Bachelard’s article came out in The Age
on the 20th. He had warned me that he didn’t have enough space to
include palm oil destruction, the many EDFF blunders or the AAA/Keumang
disappearing $6.7 million. “In the midst of the tsunami reconstruction
stuff,” he wrote, “it was too hard to explain why a highland cocoa plantation
was relevant.”
Well, okay. I guess.
He did express sadness that he couldn’t include it but reminded me
that the story was “full of other things: empty housing and personal stories of
the wave, misgovernance, sharia law, environmental doom and electoral
misbehavior.” So that’s good. He also said that our “ideas and help were
invaluable in shaping the piece as something other than just a tsunami
reconstruction.”
So I’ll forgive him.
And share his article with you.
I do have to say, however, that he put most of the blame at the feet
at one or another Indonesian or Acehnese entity (government, GAM, BRR, etc) and
pretty much gave a hall pass to the international NGOs who lined their pockets
with a significant portion of the reconstruction in the name of consultants,
salaries and “administrative fees.”
But we still love him, and he will still keep an eye on Aceh.
[I’ve inserted a few comments, in blue.]
Aceh:
after the wave
December
20, 2014
--Michael Bachelard
Alongside the loss of
lives, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami wiped out a long-time separatist conflict in
Aceh. Ten years on, Michael Bachelard finds renewed tensions in the Indonesian
province.
A diorama recreates the horror of 2004 at
Aceh's Tsunami museum. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti
First,
the earthquake struck. Roads buckled and houses cracked. Two explosions rent
the air and thousands of voices cried out in fear. Then the waves swelled up
from the sea and scoured Aceh's west coast with water, bringing debris and
death.
But
it's not the memory of noise that keeps fisherman Andi Yusuf awake at night
when he thinks of the tsunami 10 years ago - it's the silence that followed.
Yusuf
was asleep when the earth started shaking at 7.59am on Sunday, December 26,
2004. Informed by half-remembered family lore about earthquakes and killer
waves, this fisherman from Aceh's coastal village of Calang fled to higher
ground with his wife, baby and young child. Clinging with grim determination to
a hillside durian tree, his wife fainting from shock, Yusuf watched as some of
his neighbours ran away from the beach while others ran towards it, looking for
open ground. The tsunami's towering, 30-metre second wave consumed them all,
coming or going.
A
hilltop settlement of recently built houses in Lhok Kruet is mostly abandoned,
as they have no running water. Photo: Ulet
Ifansasti
"Before
the water came, I heard people panicking, shouting, screaming. They looked like
chickens," Yusuf recalls, his fisherman's eyes, which are habituated to
the horizon, turning inwards and to the past. "I saw the roof of the
school flying into the air, big timber floating. But after the second wave, the
big one, I heard nothing. Not a single voice. Silence."
Into
this silence, an estimated 167,000 voices fell in Aceh alone. Hearing Yusuf
speak, it's amazing not that so many died, but that any survived. He saved his
wife and children, but lost perhaps 50 members of his extended family.
In
Sri Lanka, 35,000 were killed; in India, 18,000. Thailand lost more than 8000
including 24 of the 26 Australians who died. Globally, 230,000 people lost
their lives and perhaps 1.7 million were displaced.
Tsunami survivor Andi Yusuf.
Photo: Ulet Ifansasti
This
was a freak geological event: a "mega thrust" earthquake measuring up
to 9.3 on the Richter scale that pushed a 1600-kilometre stretch of the Indian
Ocean 15 metres higher. The resultant wave - the biggest tsunami in history -
reshaped 800 kilometres of the Indonesian province's western coastline,
penetrating three to six kilometres inland. More than 120,000 houses were
flattened, 500,000 left homeless, the road system obliterated. Administrative
data - birth and death records, property ownership details - were destroyed and
public servants killed or incapacitated by grief. The rebuilding of western
Aceh started from scratch.
But
the tsunami was not just a physical event, it was also a profound political
event - the single most important spur to ending a 30-year civil war between
the Indonesian government and the separatist Free Aceh Movement (known as GAM for
its Indonesian initials).
It's
easy, in the tsunami's awesome wake, to diminish the conflict that predated it.
But ordinary people do not forget the separatist era's disappearances, the
random killings, the relatives dead in the street. Calang villager Rosmalia
remembers constant fear. "You heard shootings in the nearby town. You
heard stories that people were killed by the security apparatus - shot from
head to toe by bullets so that their body just split in half," she says.
This mosque, 20 kilometres from Aceh’s
capital Banda Aceh, was the only building left in the area
after the tsunami.
Photo: Ulet Ifansasti
"In
2004, after 30 years of conflict, there was no development in Aceh: schools
were being burned down, the social fabric was in pieces," says Heru
Prasetyo, the former deputy head of the Indonesian tsunami reconstruction
authority. "The only thing that was safe was the forest, because the
rebels lived there and nobody was brave enough to go in and cut down
trees."
In
his view, nature did Aceh a favour. "Aceh was like a person who was almost
dead from a heart attack. The tsunami was a jolt that brought it back to
life."
Asked
about Prasetyo's analogy, Rosmalia barely pauses before agreeing: "The
trauma of the conflict was worse than the tsunami."
Lhok Nga school students practice a tsunami
drill. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti
The
size of the disaster was incomprehensible, the global response unprecedented. A
2008 Brookings Institution paper estimated the total damage to Aceh at $US4.45
billion. In response, the international community pledged $US7.7 billion.
Two-thirds of that was spent in just three years by 463 organisations across
2200 projects. Remote Meulaboh had, at one point, 20 surgeons in field
hospitals.
The
aid was "like a second tsunami", says Prasetyo. "Catholic relief
worked with Muslim aid and non-government organisations (NGOs) from Israel were
working in the land of sharia, and working effectively. It was like the John
Lennon song Imagine: no religion, no country. It was so powerful."
Huge
international organisations, including the World Bank, USAID, the United
Nations Development Programme and Australia's AusAID, co-operated with a
quickly formed Indonesian agency, the Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency,
under a straight-talking former minister, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto.
Australia
contributed $600 million - more than half of it donated by the public. Our
money trained people and built capacity in education and health, livelihoods,
infrastructure and the public service.
Mangkusubroto's
reconstruction authority stands as a "remarkable success", according
to Australian National University academic Ed Aspinall. "It's a landmark
in Indonesia's modern political economy about how to run a large development or
construction endeavour in a way that significantly avoids or minimises
corruption."
But
it was never going to be perfect. The first priority was housing: 140,000
houses were eventually required, and agencies were under pressure to spend
their funds quickly to satisfy donors and watchful journalists.
In
the northern suburbs of Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, lies a beachside community
called Lhok Nga. Here, the mountains funneled the wave into a torrent which
wiped away everything but the mosque. Not long after, though, it had regrown
like a simulacrum of a 1950s suburb: identical, box-like, 36-square-metre
rendered concrete houses standing in symmetrical rows. Many now stand empty.
"They
are empty because for most of them only the children are left: the parents are
dead. They were only small [when the wave hit], so they live with extended
family," says Umran Amril, smoking a quiet afternoon cigarette in a Lhok
Nga cafe. Some are rented out, but the Acehnese attachment to land means few
want to sell: "We wanted it rebuilt because the land belongs to our
great-grandparents," Amril says. "We won't sell for same
reason."
It's
a similar story all down the tsunami-devastated western coast. In Lhok Kruet,
about 30 minutes from hard-hit Calang, Canadian money built a settlement of 250
houses atop a hill, at the request of local fishermen. They are certainly high
enough to survive any future tsunami, but only 28 are now occupied. The
fishermen changed their minds when they realised there was no running water
and, until recently, no electricity.
In
Calang, itself, Yusuf takes shelter from the heat of the day in a
rubbish-strewn village harbour. He's unwinding old nylon ropes, preserving the
individual strings to re-weave into nets. Nearby is a concrete pier, an office
building, a small market area and a petrol station, all built (and decorated
with maritime themes) by international donors. All now are abandoned.
The
pier, Yusuf says, splashes back waves which swamp their boats, so locals built
a replacement from wood. The market has none of the equipment they need and
there's no toilet or other facilities in the office building, so people won't
work there. Salt, wind and rain are now picking these buildings apart as surely
as Yusuf dismembers old ropes. Two large boats are keeled over in the shallows
and also decaying. They were donated but never used - too light, too dangerous,
he says.
"There
was a lot of assistance but they came rushing to help; they didn't ask what we
need." He also has a more fundamental complaint, this one against the
local government authorities. He's one of 25 local victims who missed out on
the new houses, while some "who are not native to this area - civil
servants from [East coast province] Bireuën - got them". This blatant
misallocation "is very much about corruption", he says.
Corruption
is baked into politics in Indonesia, and Aceh probably never stood a chance of
avoiding it.
After
the wave, peace came surprisingly quickly. An informal, though shaky ceasefire
in the last days of 2004 was followed by talks endorsed by then-president
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who had only been in office for two months when the
tsunami hit. He had little choice: donors, aid agencies and journalists were prising open a previously
airtight state in their rush to oversee the recovery. Continuing a war,
or even the prevailing state of martial law, was untenable, though hard-liners
on both sides tried. In August, 2005, in Helsinki, Finland, the two sides ended
30 years of brutality by signing a Memorandum of Understanding. Suddenly, about
30,000 armed and largely uneducated former separatist rebels were demobbed. Hardened by combat and
accustomed to collecting money using extortion justified locally as "war
taxes", many found it hard to mend their ways. [especially when they were promised livelihoods and
compensation in exchange for agreeing to the cease-fire and to this day have
never been compensated.]
The
rampant inflation that came with an influx of foreign funds to Aceh was
accelerated by these former GAM rebels - now rebadged as the Aceh Transitional
Committee, or KPA - "taxing" the reconstruction.
Even USAID's landmark project, a
silk-smooth western highway, was subject to "epic blackmail", one
former consultant recalls, to the extent that the project director publicly
threatened to cancel it.
"The
extortion attempts on NGO projects in Aceh followed a familiar pattern,"
wrote aid worker Bobby Anderson in 2013. "Persons claiming KPA affiliation
would make demands to field staff for protection fees or material, often
vehicles . . . The threats often implied
the arson of vehicles and the killing of staff. Numerous projects were shut
down due to this." [I have to say that in all
that time, during those first months and years after the tsunami, JMD never had
a problem, and we worked in the most remote and conflict-affected areas of the
province. I’m not saying that these
events did not happen, but I think there was, at times, a specific hostility
towards large and fairly presumptuous NGOS who as the article mentions did not
understand the context in which they were operating, nor did they care.]
Come
election time, though, the former rebels, with their history of resistance and
bullish sub-national pride, won overwhelming support. Former combatant Irwandi
Yusuf became Aceh's governor in 2006. More educated than most of his compadres,
he surprised observers and won wide international support as a pro-environment
leader wanting to build an outward-looking economy by taking advantage of
global carbon funding to preserve the province's forests. Aceh is the last
place on earth where tigers, orangutans, elephants and rhinos still live
together.
After
a bitter internal GAM power struggle, though, Irwandi lost the governorship at
the 2012 election to an old-generation combatant, Partei Aceh's Zaini Abdullah.
Thirteen people were murdered during the campaign. [And with the palm
oil extraction interests winning over even large donors like USAID, the rhinos,
elephants and tigers are not far behind.]
To
this day, government loyalists in Aceh are accused of standover tactics,
extortion and corruption, particularly involving construction projects. Aid
worker and activist Muslahuddin Daud sees the ex-combatants as trying to
preserve the "war psychology" that got them into power: "If you
build a house, they'll say, 'The sand should be from me, or we'll blow up your
car,' " he says. [I don’t know if it’s so much a
“war psychology” as an “I need to eat” psychology. These combatants saw a fraction of their
numbers receive government positions and large pensions—and those same leaders
then turned their backs on them. In some
ways they believe themselves to be the only legitimate defenders of the
province left standing, and they are repaid with poverty and isolation.]
Since
Abdullah's election, almost all international NGOs have left. Some, no doubt,
believe Aceh no longer needs their help. The Indonesian government's own
reconstruction authority was disbanded in 2009, and under a "special autonomy"
arrangement, Aceh qualifies for generous central government funding, but former
governor Irwandi told Good Weekend
that they'd also been put off by Abdullah's decision to "win the 2012
election by force". [for some reason both
governors have sent back the funding each month. It boggles the mind.] And the forests
- preserved for so many years as redoubts of the rebels - are now under threat
from a proposed spatial plan that would allow massive industrial development. [They became
threatened as soon as the peace accord was signed in 2005 and the government
welcomed international palm oil and mining cartels in to destroy the protected
forest and use no discretion in obliterating the rest of it. Protection laws
are not good if no one reinforces them.
The spatial plan is just closing the barn door after the horse has
left.]
The worst outcome, Muslahuddin
says, has been the government's administrative failures. Nine years
after the peace deal was signed, negotiators for the Aceh and central
governments have still not agreed on implementing laws for power sharing, oil
and gas revenue and land ownership. This leads, for foreign investors in the
oil-rich province, to persistent uncertainty and, for some Acehnese nationalists, to the belief that
Jakarta is denying them fulfillment of their rights. "If [the full
Helsinki agreement] is not granted, of course we will take up arms again,"
a senior Partei Aceh election committee member told Good Weekend. "We
could declare war any time. We could declare war tomorrow."
[And just what have I been saying for a year? Hah?
But does anyone listen to me??]
Aceh's
use of Islamic sharia law in the criminal code likewise deters foreigners. It
was introduced by Jakarta in 2001 to try to buy the support of Aceh's devout religious
leaders, but it only came to international prominence after the tsunami.
According to the director of the Jakarta-based Institute of Policy Analysis of
Conflict, Sidney Jones, among the foreign organisations that flooded into the
province were Islamic hardline lobby groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir. Until their
arrival, Aceh - long known as the "verandah of Mecca" - was devout
but also "very tolerant". Hardline Islamists succeeded recently in
adding to long-standing bans on gambling, drinking and unmarried young people
consorting. Now adultery and homosexuality are also criminal offences,
subjecting to 100 lashes men who have anal sex with each other, and women who
"rub together body parts for stimulation". [It
is interesting, then, that World Vision operates so freely in the province,
being an evangelical Christian organization—or do they not know that in Aceh?]
A
censorious approach to opposition also prevails. "Any organisation which
criticises the government is said to be anti Islamic sharia," says Roslina
Rasyid, the leader of a network of local NGOs in the north-eastern Aceh city of
Lhokseumawe. People are deterred from raising examples of abuses, she says.
"It's
a real problem for Aceh now, and long-term, they have to deal with it if they
want foreign investment and tourism," says Sidney Jones.
Aceh
desperately needs economic growth. About 18 per cent of the population is still
in poverty and new
political schisms, fuelled by poverty and thwarted hopes, are emerging among
former combatants. "You wouldn't want to predict a regression to
any full-scale separatist conflict, but on the other hand, you would have hoped
that 10 years after the peace deal you'd have seen a stronger fading of that
sense of resilient, resistant Aceh identity," the ANU's Aspinall says.
"It bubbles away, but it's much closer to the surface than you'd
expect."
At
Lhok Nga primary school in Banda Aceh's suburbs, where the wave killed all but
90 of its 400 students, the recovery is obvious in the numbers: 435 children
are enrolled this year.
Shifa
Teskia's father died in the wave. Now 12, she says she wants to be a doctor.
For today, she and her classmates are performing one of their regular tsunami
drills - initiated by
World Vision - and Shifa wears a sash proclaiming her a dokter kecil
(small doctor). She's earnestly dabbing a pretend wound of pretend patient
Mohammad Azri, 10, who in real life was orphaned as a baby by the wave.
Their
teacher, Laili Hafna, saved her own four children a decade ago by rushing to
the local mosque. Her sister, husband and baby all perished. As she looked out
at the devastation that day, Hafna says she truly believed she was watching the
world end: "I never thought I would be here today, that there would be
life after all."
Like
many, though, Hafna now wonders if the tsunami, a bit like Noah's flood in the
Bible, was Allah's way of saving them from what went before. "During the
combat, we always lived in fear," she recalls. "Life was very
difficult ... we thank Allah that we can have this life now, and that it's a
different life."
Surely,
though, it was a brutal price to pay?
"That
is His mystery," she replies with a smile.
Add to that their grafted
branches from superior varieties, and cocoa production should really soar. 
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
