Banda Aceh and beyond

Even a short trip to Aceh reveals the legacy of the terrible 2004 tsunami, and the resilience of locals in rebuilding their lives. Sarah Porter reports.

Flying in to Banda Aceh from North Sumatra’s capital of Medan, it’s not hard to see how the area was devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami.

The city dangles its residential legs into the water, like a child daring to disappear when no one’s looking. Massive puddles are visible from the air – rice fields and construction zones appear completely underwater.

“We’ve just had some rain, again,” says Anton Clark, an Australian working for the Indonesian free trade organization PT Pekerti Nusantara.

As we drive through town, he points out where floodwaters have completely squashed riverside trees and foliage. There’s a soft trail of destruction where debris has been deposited on the riverbanks, but it’s nothing compared to what this town has seen before, and smaller shrubs at the water’s edge are already re-angling their way upward toward the sun.

I have come to Banda Aceh to stay with Anton and to find out what aid organizations are still working on in Aceh. I also want to see for myself the town and region the world watched drown three years ago.

“It’s old news,” said one friend of my decision to go to Sumatra’s most northern tip. “Why would you spend your time and money getting up there, no-one’s interested in Aceh anymore, it’s been and gone.”

But that’s the thing. Post-tsunami efforts are still going on and conflict resolution organizations have their work cut out for them, and probably will have for years to come.

Former GAM (Free Aceh Movement) combatants, women who once fought with guns and knives for a movement in which they still believe, are being surveyed to find out if they know anything of Aceh’s current political landscape, or of their rights. And education-focused teams have deposited themselves in the back of beyond to try and right what 30 years and more of conflict has done to three generations of Acehnese.

For my very short visit, there is just too much to learn. It is an introductory trip, I tell myself, and to help things along, Anton has organized four interviews for me on day one alone, in the space of about three hours.

We will conduct these interviews from a popular bule coffee spot or pizza house in town, before we make the three-hour drive southeast to his village and part-time home, Trienggadeng in Pidie Jaya, GAM heartland, east of Sigli and just short of Bireuen. I’m told there will be elephants on the way.

On Saturday we have been invited to a huge Save the Children official celebration (700 are expected for lunch) for 100 new homes built for Meunasah Tu villagers in Pante Raja, Pidie Jaya, before we head back to Banda Aceh on Saturday night in a public bus, to eat at Banda Aceh’s famous night markets, meet some more of Anton’s co-workers, go to sleep, get up, run back out to the airport and return to Jakarta.

No one I meet at the Meunasah Tu opening can believe how much Anton wants to pack into my trip, or that I have to fly back Sunday morning to work that night. By Friday afternoon, I have begun to question my sanity.

But it is worth it. If only to try and understand a little more of the rich history of this region, to visit the land my 81-year-old grandfather spent nearly four years as a World War II prisoner of war, and to pay some dues to the incredible non-government, education and aid workers committed to the people of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam.

Banda Aceh the city
With a population of about 300,000, Banda Aceh took me by surprise. It is a bustling mini metropolis, alive and bursting with energy. No-one I speak with can say exactly how many aid organizations are still claiming it as their home, or their own, but it doesn’t seem to matter. There is not an aid worker for every two townsfolk wandering the streets, as I had imagined there might be, and reconstruction of devastated areas is everywhere.

Roads are wide and clear and businesspeople and market vendors go about their day as if in any other Indonesian city. There’s a bit of staring, a reasonable quota of sideways glances and giggles, but sharia law, despite its reputation, hasn’t seen me arrested yet for hanging out with Anton.

A drive to the city’s reconstruction zones right on the water, about 15 minutes from the center of town, provides a pretty good overview of post-tsunami work completed and still underway.

Tiny homes in different colors, but very similar shapes, are dotted across expansive, open, soggy plains. Some new homes are branded with an NGO label, or a sign out front saying “From the American People”, and other such notices. These signatures are a sign of the competition among NGOs and religious groups, and are part of a branding exercise, perhaps ahead of the hoped-for return of the tourism trade.

But having lived in Darwin, Australia, for a number of years as a child, I remember wet seasons like these and houses on stilts. It strikes me as odd that so many of these little cement tsunami relief houses have been made stilt-less. Some look as if they are permanently nestled into soggy ponds. It’s flat and wet here and these homes are crying out for stilts.

But I’m told they are traditional homes, earthquake proof, and exactly what the beneficiaries want. The homes to be “opened” tomorrow are equally tiny, pre-cut panelized houses, also seismic-proof, but made of timber sourced from Canada. And some further questions that day tell a story of cement versus timber homes and inter-village squabbling over what’s been provided.

The locals apparently want cement homes because they appear modern and sturdy, while engineering, environmental experts and others in-the-know have instructed NGOs to provide beneficiaries with timber homes.

Heading back into town, Anton tells me the pizza house we’re about to stop at is the most expensive place to eat in town, but it’s a good spot to conduct a few interviews, so off we go.

It’s not all about the tsunami
With so many people over the last three years having given their time, money and efforts to Aceh, it’s impossible to single out in 48 hours the story most worth telling. But there are two that stand out.

Chloe Oliver is a 35-year-old Australian with an undergraduate degree in political science and economics, and a post-graduate in Islamic studies. She has dedicated most of her adult life to working for aid institutions and setting up Islam-friendly volunteer and aid-based projects in Indonesia. I first met her in Jakarta and had the privilege to sit down with her again in Banda Aceh. She was on a rare visit to town, and is somewhat excited to drink coffee and eat chocolate with me.

“This is our spot, Anton and I meet up here when we can, when we’re in town, the coffee’s great and there’s this chocolate. I can’t stop eating it,” she says.

Working in Bireuen as a conflict resolution project manager today, Chloe has 60 people on her team and a budget of some A$10 million. She speaks fluent Indonesian and has a firm grip on the Acehnese dialect. And she is committed to making me understand the importance of ongoing conflict resolution work required in Aceh.

Post-tsunami efforts may not work out if donors don’t start looking at this area’s history of conflict, she warns.

“There is a lot of work being undertaken in Aceh by NGOs and other organizations that is focused on post-tsunami activity – but they’re in a conflict area and ignoring its history,” Chloe says.

“Thirty years of conflict -- that leaves behind a lot of behavioral patterns and political machinations that are very unhealthy. Systems of distributing power, making decisions, coercive decisions, then enforcing those decisions with force. There are people not dealing with this history inherent in a conflict situation.

“And donors here do not do it. Here we have two generations that have not seen leadership working in their villages in any other situation than conflict. Things are decided unilaterally and they are backed up by force when they’re challenged. There is no retribution for those decisions,” she says.

“Human rights are abused and there is no recourse for justice. And some donors have inadvertently backed up negative power structures that are really unhealthy.”

How long will she stay with her project? It’s not made clear, she’s not sure, but she says she hopes one day to be able to walk out of the village she calls a part-time home today, knowing she has given others the will and the tools to continue working toward a peaceful existence.

A mass burial, and generosity to boot
The next most important story to tell is of the mass burial sites in Banda Aceh, where two of Anton’s co-workers delivered us on Sunday morning, before they insisted on taking me out to the airport in their clapped out sedan, via their favorite coffee house.

There is only one other place of death I can compare this experience to --  a German World War II concentration camp I visited 15 or more years ago where my legs also shook and tears uncontrollably fell.

To see a place, manicured and green, with a stone path cutting through its middle, inviting visitors to take a stroll, as if in a public garden somewhere.

To know this is the resting place for thousands and thousands of humans who lost their lives three years ago. To see small girls sitting along its stone walls, chanting their prayers, and crying, quietly. To see a group of teenagers park their pushbikes at the entrance gates, take off their sunglasses, put out their cigarettes and move inside the site. To wonder if they have come to be near a lost mother or father, a sibling, a grandparent.

The sense of grief and loss is raw. The stories of bravery are unbelievable, the tales of fear and pain, unbearable. And that was in just 48 hours.

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