I know it has been months but in my defence I've actually tried to transfer blogs from my mac to the company IBM to post but have not yet quite figured out how to make that transfer stick. So my flashdisk has several entries that I can't decode to post! all would be fine if I could find a landline in Banda Aceh that works, as the airport seems to be on th eblink so I can't seem to access all those super-fast wireless networks floating around out there... anyway that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Quite a few changes since June.
1. I've got a house out near the guv's office complete with Twin Towers, matching above-ground two-meter-high cement reservoirs I've had installed to handle 4,000 liters of water. Bitched for weeks before the contractor got the job done properly, and cursed the owner for leaving me with a useless well. Subsequently humbled by the fact that so many in the adjacent middle-class neighborhood are having to drive down twice daily to load up their buckets and 20 L water bottles at outdoor taps.
Place has its own musholla in the front room - owner is the ex-regent of North aceh and presumably in need of Divine Intercession to prevent his corrupt soul from being relegated to a place of flame and suffering. Niggling now over the $45 DVD machines, both of which have crapped out within a month of purchase. My fault for going with knockoffs instead of Sony etc.
Pemantu refuses to clean the bathrooms so tiles on the bottom of the mandi are as slick as a carp's back now. Tomorrow is showdown time "my way or the highway" and I'm hoping it'll be the former because she's very nice.
2. Survived the six-month rush - did something like 120 interviews - but despite best efforts to avoid all the minefields the org's work seems to be getting bogged down in contractor wrangling, disfunctional relationships and bureaucratic blundering so there's no way we're going to meet our year-end targets. That mean's there will be a lot of questions come mid-December and no way of framing the whole thing that's going to make sense. We're far more advanced than most so there will be plenty of pain to spred around.
3. Went home for a couple of weeks with The Han for bro's wedding and weeks of fattening-up time eating cheese and steaks every night. Beautiful Montreal weather, Jazz Fest, days lazing in Montebello etc. Came back fat and sleek and committed to taking at least a day off each week. Actually managed to stick to it for about a month. Stopped smoking, left the office before 7 in the evening, played Rugby in the empty stadium every Sunday afternoon etc.
But that has all stopped now and there's no reason to believe it's going to happen again: here I am on a Sunday back in my cave!
4. We've had an amazing 10 days coordinating behind the scenes, the release and return of more than 1,400 political prisoners from jails around the country. All were released as part of the peace agreement between Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement. Can't write much about it now because of sensitivities but can say that the days at Jantho prison outside banda aceh were informative and I really took heart from the the apparent commitment on the part of the government to go this right.
Considering all the things that could have gone wrong it was a huge success, a real feather in the cap of all here and a shot in the arm for the process.
5. The upshot is that my desk is creaking beneath the volumes of work ahead. I'm now pointman for the socialization of this deal, working with local government and GAM to come up with a public information campaign that will engage the entire province, explain the naunces of the Memorandum of Understanding to all, and trying to overcome three decades of fear and suspicion.
I feel like I have a lot invested here after so many years. I wake in the morning full of optimism and hope for the future but by the time I get home, it's been bled away, whittled down by the realities on the ground. It's an emotional roller-coaster ride and I'm strapping in the the long run.
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Sunday in Banda. Took a couple of hours this morning to chill out and read a book. Couple on the go right now: Joan Didion’s Where I’m From, a look back at, well, where she’s from: California. Up to here in pithy-ness and insight and still de-constructing matters till all you’re left with is air and the queasy feeling I associate with post-Dim Sum MSG-overload.
The other is BBC journo Jane Corbin’s account of al Qaeda, The Base. It’s a brisk read and informative about the early roots of the organization but sometimes lazy and trite:
“Some were genuine, on missions of humanitarian value,” says a CIA station chief of the first groups of ‘Afghan Arabs’ who arrived following the Soviet occupation, “while others were adventure-seekers looking for paths to glory, and still others were psychopaths.”
Osama bin Laden… at this time fitted into the first category. In the next decade Afghanistan would turn him into a man looking for paths to glory. Ultimately he would find his niche in the final category, that of the psychopath.
Cool, how convenient!
Anyway, coffee was good and sweet so I took my caffeine/glucose rush to the office for 10 am. Pretty quiet here though most of the shelter crew were about, getting ready to move from the base to “The Mansion” as the former staff house is called. Folks there are being spread out between “The Palace” and “The White House” which translates as more living on top of or in permanent contact with office-mates, a recipe for disaster.
I’m happy to have my little pad, even if the swirling masses of dispossessed and homeless extended family members that get thrown up in the adjoining rooms occasionally gets emotionally tiring. The introductions normally begin with “…and she lost her husband, four kids and the house. So she will stay here for some time.” Or “his mother and father were killed by the tsunami so he is alone in the world.” These wounds laid out only diminishes to the point of absurdity any complaints I have… but, y’know, sometimes you need to vent anger and its hard in these circumstances to feel like you’re not petty and venal.
We’ll be moving out of there soon anyway, once we find a place where the rent hasn’t been driven into the stratosphere by this UN economy. Muffi, formerly of the Washington Post and now working with Han at UNICEF says his architect uncle has a place but the old guy’s main concern is whether or not we pray. He’s been told to treat me with respect (friend of Aceh, often here before the tsunami) and though I’m told he’s a fine fellow, he also keeps his pants hiked about mid-calf like a good little khol-eyed Pashtun so I’m not sure it’s gonna work out.
The office has been invaded by kittens. I’m stomping around in my Grebs and every time I step outside to grab a coffee and a smoke, my big heavy boot hits the ground right about the time the little bell goes off in my head telling me that for some reason I shouldn’t be doing it quite like that. Swear, one of these days I’m going to squish one of the little fellas and, well, it’s a real bugger to clean them out of the treads…. Woah, PETA-person, back up… just kidding.
The article below arrived in my mailbox this morning. I know the author and have circulated it widely among our staff in another vain effort to educate. I’ve tried this on several occasions in recent months with little success. The military is the single biggest potential barrier to the successful reconstruction of Aceh. You’d think people would be interested in knowing more about it…
The article is a bit long but worth a read:
Foreign Service Journal
Vol. 82, No. 5
May 2005
Speaking Out
Making a Tragic Mistake in Indonesia
By Edmund McWilliams
Edmund McWilliams entered the Foreign Service in 1975, serving in Vientiane, Bangkok, Moscow, Kabul, Islamabad, Managua, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Jakarta (where he was political counselor from 1996 to 1999) and Washington, D.C. He opened the posts in Bishkek and Dushanbe and was the first chief of mission in each. In 1998, he received AFSA's Christian Herter Award for creative dissent by a senior FSO. Since retiring as a Senior Foreign Service officer in 2001, he has worked with various U.S. and foreign human rights NGOs as a volunteer.
Is the United States making the same mistakes in its search for partners in the "war on terror" as it did during the Cold War? During that earlier global conflict, the United States pursued alliances with governments, militaries and rebel groups, even those whose policies and activities were in conflict with core American values and the goals we professed to be promoting in our struggle against the Soviet Union. The list of unsavory regimes Washington courted and counted as allies is long and notorious.
It includes the merely corrupt, such as the Marcos kleptocracy in the Philippines, as well as some which were savagely brutal, such as Shah Pahlevi's dictatorship in Iran. Some, such as Indonesia's despotic Suharto regime, were both corrupt and brutal.
The political costs of these alliances continue to burden U.S. policies and interests today. We see the baggage in fractured societies like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti, where decades of U.S.-supported misrule have impaired the development of stable, democratic governments. Our interventions have also left legacies of deep resentment among local populations around the world, including Iran, Iraq and much of Central America.
Despite that history, since the 9/11 attacks Washington once again has sought out allies whose corruption, human rights abuses and undemocratic records render them pariahs in the international community. These include the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, which routinely employs torture against opponents; the Musharaf regime in Pakistan, where democratic progress has been thwarted by the president/general; and the Indonesian military, the "Tentara Nasional Indonesia." In late February, Secretary Rice announced that the U.S. would resume International Military Education and Training assistance there, overturning a 14-year congressional ban imposed to protest the TNI's human rights abuses, operation of criminal "business enterprises" and lack of accountability to civilian authorities.
This action was not a surprise, to be sure. Last year, the Bush administration convinced Congress to adopt new criteria for restoration of IMET assistance that were far looser than the restrictions authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Specifically, Congress agreed that restoration of IMET (though not Foreign Military Sales assistance) could be triggered by a State Department certification that the government of Indonesia and the TNI were rendering "full cooperation" to an FBI investigation of the Aug. 31, 2002, killing of two U.S. citizens and wounding of many more in Timika, West Papua.
Pursuant to that authority, Sec. Rice formally confirmed Indonesian "cooperation" on Feb. 27, 2005. She did so despite the failure of the Indonesian authorities to detain the one person thus far indicted for those crimes by a U.S. grand jury, and despite an eight-month hiatus in the FBI investigation, during which our agents have still not been invited back to Indonesia to resume the case.
A History of Brutality
Even if one accepts claims of Indonesian cooperation at face value, this decision ignores the TNI's broader record, which remains indefensible. In Southeast Asia, that record is rivaled for sheer brutality only by the murderous Khmer Rouge. From 1965 to 1968 alone, the Indonesian military engineered the slaughter of more than a half-million of its own compatriots, following an alleged "coup" attempt against President Sukarno. Employing a tactic it would resort to again and again, the TNI allied itself with Islamic forces that did much of the actual killing.
The Suharto regime which rose to power as a consequence of the coup and which directed the massive killings sought to justify them in American eyes by labeling the victims as "communists."
Following the Indonesian military's invasion of East Timor in 1975, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese, one quarter of the population, died as a consequence of living conditions in TNI-organized relocation camps or as direct victims of Indonesian violence. In remote West Papua, it is estimated that over 100,000 Papuans died in the years following the forced annexation of West Papua under a fraudulent "Act of Free Choice"
perpetrated by the Suharto regime in 1969. An April 2004 study by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School concluded that the atrocities in West Papua constituted "crimes against humanity" and may have constituted genocide.
Yet throughout this period, extending from 1965 to the early 1990s, the U.S. military maintained a close relationship with the TNI, providing it with IMET training and arms. Those arms were employed not against foreign foes but against their own people: during the 1970s and 1980s, the TNI frequently bombed villages in East Timor and in West Papua with U.S.-provided OV-10 Broncos. Military offensives, conceived and directed by IMET-trained officers against usually miniscule resistance, caused thousands of additional civilian deaths.
Even with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. embrace of the dictator Suharto and his military continued for a time as if U.S. policy were on autopilot. The relationship endured largely unquestioned until 1991, when the Indonesian military was caught on film by U.S. journalists slaughtering peaceful East Timorese demonstrators. The murder of over 270 East Timorese youth by soldiers bearing U.S.-provided M-16's so shocked the U.S. Congress that it imposed tight restrictions on further U.S.
military-to-military aid and training.
Ever since Congress cut off such assistance, successive U.S.
administrations, with the support of nongovernmental organizations that received strong financial support from U.S. corporations with major interests in Indonesia, have sought to restore military-to-military ties.
Those efforts were accompanied by contentions that the Indonesian military had reformed or was on a reform course. But such claims of Indonesian military reform were refuted in 1999, when, following an overwhelming vote by East Timorese for independence from Indonesia, the TNI and its militia proxies devastated the tiny half-island. United Nations and other international observers were unable to prevent the killing of over 1,000 East Timorese, the forced relocation of over 250,000 more, and the destruction of over 70 percent of East Timor's infrastructure. Six years later, the Indonesian justice system has failed to hold a single military, police or civil official responsible for the mayhem.
That failure to render justice demonstrates that, even when confronted by unanimous international condemnation, the Indonesian military remains unaccountable either to civilian authorities or to world opinion.
Moreover, TNI human rights abuses continue to this day. Since mid-2004, it has been conducting military operations in West Papua, forcing thousands of villagers into the forests, where many are dying for lack of food and medicine. A ban on travel to the region by journalists and even West Papuan senior church leaders has limited international awareness of this tragedy and prevented provision of humanitarian relief.
The recent devastating Indian Ocean tsunami turned international attention to another remote arena where the TNI has conducted a brutal campaign for over 20 years. In Aceh, over 12,000 civilians have fallen victim to these military operations. The State Department's most recent Human Rights Report, like its predecessors, notes that most of those civilians died at the hands of the TNI.
What Has Changed?
Sadly, the latest trends recall the worst features of the Suharto period (1965-1998), when critics and dissenters were seldom tolerated, at best, and often met harsher fates. Despite the genuine democratic progress made since Suharto's fall in 1999, critics of the military and anyone else the TNI regards as enemies remain in grave jeopardy.
Reflecting the power of the TNI in "democratic" Indonesia, those critics who meet untimely ends are often the most prominent. In 2001, Theys Eluay, the leading Papuan proponent of Papuan self-determination, was
assassinated. In a rare trial for such crimes, his military killers
received sentences ranging up to just three-and-one-half years. Army Chief of Staff Ryamazad Ryacudu publicly described the murderers as "heroes."
Last year, the country's leading human rights advocate, Munir, a prominent critic of the TNI, died of arsenic poisoning in 2004. (Like many Indonesians, he only used one name.) In 2000, Jafar Siddiq, a U.S.
green-card holder who was in Aceh demanding justice for Achenese suffering TNI abuses, was tortured and murdered. Since 2000, 14 prominent human rights advocates have been murdered and no perpetrators have been prosecuted.
Even more recently, Farid Faquih, a leading anti-corruption campaigner who has targeted military and other government malfeasance, was badly beaten by military officers as he sought to monitor tsunami aid distribution. He was then arrested and is now facing trumped-up charges of theft of the assistance he was monitoring. And the Papuan human rights advocates who supported FBI investigations of the U.S. citizens murdered in 2002 in West Papua are undergoing continuing intimidation by the military.
More generally, the TNI constitutes a threat to the fledgling democratic experiment in Indonesia. The many businesses it operates generate over 70 percent of its budget, freeing it from accountability either to the civilian president (himself a retired general) or the parliament. Much of this income comes from extortion, prostitution rings, drug-running, illegal logging and other exploitation of Indonesia's great natural resources and -- as documented in the State Department's Annual Human Rights Report and an August 2004 Voice of Australia report -- human trafficking. With its great institutional wealth, the TNI maintains a bureaucratic structure that functions as a shadow government, paralleling the civil administration structure from the central level down to sub-district and even village level.
For much of the last decade, advocates of closer ties between the Indonesian and American militaries have contended that a warmer U.S.
embrace, including training programs and education courses for TNI officers, could expose them to democratic ideals and afford a more professional military perspective. Of course, this ignores the decades of close U.S.-Indonesian military ties extending from the 1960s to the early 1990s, when the Indonesian military committed some of its gravest atrocities and when a culture of impunity became ingrained. The argument for reform through engagement also ignores the fact that the U.S. Defense Department already maintains extensive ties and channels for assistance with the TNI under the guise of "conferences" and joint operations billed a humanitarian or security-related.
In the wake of 9/11, proponents of restored U.S.-Indonesian military ties have adduced a new argument for restoring IMET funds: however unsavory the Indonesian military may be, we need it as a partner in the war on
terrorism. But the TNI has close ties to numerous indigenous
fundamentalist Islamic terror groups, including the Front for the Defense of Islam and the Laskar Jihad. It even helped form and train the latter group, which engaged in a savage communal war in the Moluku Islands between 2000 and 2002 that left thousands dead.
So long as the Indonesian military refuses to curb its human rights abuses, submit itself to civilian rule, end corruption and end its sponsorship of terrorist militias, it will remain a rogue institution and a threat to democracy. And until that changes, the longstanding restrictions on military-to-military ties between the United States and Indonesia must remain in place.
-END-
The other is BBC journo Jane Corbin’s account of al Qaeda, The Base. It’s a brisk read and informative about the early roots of the organization but sometimes lazy and trite:
“Some were genuine, on missions of humanitarian value,” says a CIA station chief of the first groups of ‘Afghan Arabs’ who arrived following the Soviet occupation, “while others were adventure-seekers looking for paths to glory, and still others were psychopaths.”
Osama bin Laden… at this time fitted into the first category. In the next decade Afghanistan would turn him into a man looking for paths to glory. Ultimately he would find his niche in the final category, that of the psychopath.
Cool, how convenient!
Anyway, coffee was good and sweet so I took my caffeine/glucose rush to the office for 10 am. Pretty quiet here though most of the shelter crew were about, getting ready to move from the base to “The Mansion” as the former staff house is called. Folks there are being spread out between “The Palace” and “The White House” which translates as more living on top of or in permanent contact with office-mates, a recipe for disaster.
I’m happy to have my little pad, even if the swirling masses of dispossessed and homeless extended family members that get thrown up in the adjoining rooms occasionally gets emotionally tiring. The introductions normally begin with “…and she lost her husband, four kids and the house. So she will stay here for some time.” Or “his mother and father were killed by the tsunami so he is alone in the world.” These wounds laid out only diminishes to the point of absurdity any complaints I have… but, y’know, sometimes you need to vent anger and its hard in these circumstances to feel like you’re not petty and venal.
We’ll be moving out of there soon anyway, once we find a place where the rent hasn’t been driven into the stratosphere by this UN economy. Muffi, formerly of the Washington Post and now working with Han at UNICEF says his architect uncle has a place but the old guy’s main concern is whether or not we pray. He’s been told to treat me with respect (friend of Aceh, often here before the tsunami) and though I’m told he’s a fine fellow, he also keeps his pants hiked about mid-calf like a good little khol-eyed Pashtun so I’m not sure it’s gonna work out.
The office has been invaded by kittens. I’m stomping around in my Grebs and every time I step outside to grab a coffee and a smoke, my big heavy boot hits the ground right about the time the little bell goes off in my head telling me that for some reason I shouldn’t be doing it quite like that. Swear, one of these days I’m going to squish one of the little fellas and, well, it’s a real bugger to clean them out of the treads…. Woah, PETA-person, back up… just kidding.
The article below arrived in my mailbox this morning. I know the author and have circulated it widely among our staff in another vain effort to educate. I’ve tried this on several occasions in recent months with little success. The military is the single biggest potential barrier to the successful reconstruction of Aceh. You’d think people would be interested in knowing more about it…
The article is a bit long but worth a read:
Foreign Service Journal
Vol. 82, No. 5
May 2005
Speaking Out
Making a Tragic Mistake in Indonesia
By Edmund McWilliams
Edmund McWilliams entered the Foreign Service in 1975, serving in Vientiane, Bangkok, Moscow, Kabul, Islamabad, Managua, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Jakarta (where he was political counselor from 1996 to 1999) and Washington, D.C. He opened the posts in Bishkek and Dushanbe and was the first chief of mission in each. In 1998, he received AFSA's Christian Herter Award for creative dissent by a senior FSO. Since retiring as a Senior Foreign Service officer in 2001, he has worked with various U.S. and foreign human rights NGOs as a volunteer.
Is the United States making the same mistakes in its search for partners in the "war on terror" as it did during the Cold War? During that earlier global conflict, the United States pursued alliances with governments, militaries and rebel groups, even those whose policies and activities were in conflict with core American values and the goals we professed to be promoting in our struggle against the Soviet Union. The list of unsavory regimes Washington courted and counted as allies is long and notorious.
It includes the merely corrupt, such as the Marcos kleptocracy in the Philippines, as well as some which were savagely brutal, such as Shah Pahlevi's dictatorship in Iran. Some, such as Indonesia's despotic Suharto regime, were both corrupt and brutal.
The political costs of these alliances continue to burden U.S. policies and interests today. We see the baggage in fractured societies like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti, where decades of U.S.-supported misrule have impaired the development of stable, democratic governments. Our interventions have also left legacies of deep resentment among local populations around the world, including Iran, Iraq and much of Central America.
Despite that history, since the 9/11 attacks Washington once again has sought out allies whose corruption, human rights abuses and undemocratic records render them pariahs in the international community. These include the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, which routinely employs torture against opponents; the Musharaf regime in Pakistan, where democratic progress has been thwarted by the president/general; and the Indonesian military, the "Tentara Nasional Indonesia." In late February, Secretary Rice announced that the U.S. would resume International Military Education and Training assistance there, overturning a 14-year congressional ban imposed to protest the TNI's human rights abuses, operation of criminal "business enterprises" and lack of accountability to civilian authorities.
This action was not a surprise, to be sure. Last year, the Bush administration convinced Congress to adopt new criteria for restoration of IMET assistance that were far looser than the restrictions authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Specifically, Congress agreed that restoration of IMET (though not Foreign Military Sales assistance) could be triggered by a State Department certification that the government of Indonesia and the TNI were rendering "full cooperation" to an FBI investigation of the Aug. 31, 2002, killing of two U.S. citizens and wounding of many more in Timika, West Papua.
Pursuant to that authority, Sec. Rice formally confirmed Indonesian "cooperation" on Feb. 27, 2005. She did so despite the failure of the Indonesian authorities to detain the one person thus far indicted for those crimes by a U.S. grand jury, and despite an eight-month hiatus in the FBI investigation, during which our agents have still not been invited back to Indonesia to resume the case.
A History of Brutality
Even if one accepts claims of Indonesian cooperation at face value, this decision ignores the TNI's broader record, which remains indefensible. In Southeast Asia, that record is rivaled for sheer brutality only by the murderous Khmer Rouge. From 1965 to 1968 alone, the Indonesian military engineered the slaughter of more than a half-million of its own compatriots, following an alleged "coup" attempt against President Sukarno. Employing a tactic it would resort to again and again, the TNI allied itself with Islamic forces that did much of the actual killing.
The Suharto regime which rose to power as a consequence of the coup and which directed the massive killings sought to justify them in American eyes by labeling the victims as "communists."
Following the Indonesian military's invasion of East Timor in 1975, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese, one quarter of the population, died as a consequence of living conditions in TNI-organized relocation camps or as direct victims of Indonesian violence. In remote West Papua, it is estimated that over 100,000 Papuans died in the years following the forced annexation of West Papua under a fraudulent "Act of Free Choice"
perpetrated by the Suharto regime in 1969. An April 2004 study by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School concluded that the atrocities in West Papua constituted "crimes against humanity" and may have constituted genocide.
Yet throughout this period, extending from 1965 to the early 1990s, the U.S. military maintained a close relationship with the TNI, providing it with IMET training and arms. Those arms were employed not against foreign foes but against their own people: during the 1970s and 1980s, the TNI frequently bombed villages in East Timor and in West Papua with U.S.-provided OV-10 Broncos. Military offensives, conceived and directed by IMET-trained officers against usually miniscule resistance, caused thousands of additional civilian deaths.
Even with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. embrace of the dictator Suharto and his military continued for a time as if U.S. policy were on autopilot. The relationship endured largely unquestioned until 1991, when the Indonesian military was caught on film by U.S. journalists slaughtering peaceful East Timorese demonstrators. The murder of over 270 East Timorese youth by soldiers bearing U.S.-provided M-16's so shocked the U.S. Congress that it imposed tight restrictions on further U.S.
military-to-military aid and training.
Ever since Congress cut off such assistance, successive U.S.
administrations, with the support of nongovernmental organizations that received strong financial support from U.S. corporations with major interests in Indonesia, have sought to restore military-to-military ties.
Those efforts were accompanied by contentions that the Indonesian military had reformed or was on a reform course. But such claims of Indonesian military reform were refuted in 1999, when, following an overwhelming vote by East Timorese for independence from Indonesia, the TNI and its militia proxies devastated the tiny half-island. United Nations and other international observers were unable to prevent the killing of over 1,000 East Timorese, the forced relocation of over 250,000 more, and the destruction of over 70 percent of East Timor's infrastructure. Six years later, the Indonesian justice system has failed to hold a single military, police or civil official responsible for the mayhem.
That failure to render justice demonstrates that, even when confronted by unanimous international condemnation, the Indonesian military remains unaccountable either to civilian authorities or to world opinion.
Moreover, TNI human rights abuses continue to this day. Since mid-2004, it has been conducting military operations in West Papua, forcing thousands of villagers into the forests, where many are dying for lack of food and medicine. A ban on travel to the region by journalists and even West Papuan senior church leaders has limited international awareness of this tragedy and prevented provision of humanitarian relief.
The recent devastating Indian Ocean tsunami turned international attention to another remote arena where the TNI has conducted a brutal campaign for over 20 years. In Aceh, over 12,000 civilians have fallen victim to these military operations. The State Department's most recent Human Rights Report, like its predecessors, notes that most of those civilians died at the hands of the TNI.
What Has Changed?
Sadly, the latest trends recall the worst features of the Suharto period (1965-1998), when critics and dissenters were seldom tolerated, at best, and often met harsher fates. Despite the genuine democratic progress made since Suharto's fall in 1999, critics of the military and anyone else the TNI regards as enemies remain in grave jeopardy.
Reflecting the power of the TNI in "democratic" Indonesia, those critics who meet untimely ends are often the most prominent. In 2001, Theys Eluay, the leading Papuan proponent of Papuan self-determination, was
assassinated. In a rare trial for such crimes, his military killers
received sentences ranging up to just three-and-one-half years. Army Chief of Staff Ryamazad Ryacudu publicly described the murderers as "heroes."
Last year, the country's leading human rights advocate, Munir, a prominent critic of the TNI, died of arsenic poisoning in 2004. (Like many Indonesians, he only used one name.) In 2000, Jafar Siddiq, a U.S.
green-card holder who was in Aceh demanding justice for Achenese suffering TNI abuses, was tortured and murdered. Since 2000, 14 prominent human rights advocates have been murdered and no perpetrators have been prosecuted.
Even more recently, Farid Faquih, a leading anti-corruption campaigner who has targeted military and other government malfeasance, was badly beaten by military officers as he sought to monitor tsunami aid distribution. He was then arrested and is now facing trumped-up charges of theft of the assistance he was monitoring. And the Papuan human rights advocates who supported FBI investigations of the U.S. citizens murdered in 2002 in West Papua are undergoing continuing intimidation by the military.
More generally, the TNI constitutes a threat to the fledgling democratic experiment in Indonesia. The many businesses it operates generate over 70 percent of its budget, freeing it from accountability either to the civilian president (himself a retired general) or the parliament. Much of this income comes from extortion, prostitution rings, drug-running, illegal logging and other exploitation of Indonesia's great natural resources and -- as documented in the State Department's Annual Human Rights Report and an August 2004 Voice of Australia report -- human trafficking. With its great institutional wealth, the TNI maintains a bureaucratic structure that functions as a shadow government, paralleling the civil administration structure from the central level down to sub-district and even village level.
For much of the last decade, advocates of closer ties between the Indonesian and American militaries have contended that a warmer U.S.
embrace, including training programs and education courses for TNI officers, could expose them to democratic ideals and afford a more professional military perspective. Of course, this ignores the decades of close U.S.-Indonesian military ties extending from the 1960s to the early 1990s, when the Indonesian military committed some of its gravest atrocities and when a culture of impunity became ingrained. The argument for reform through engagement also ignores the fact that the U.S. Defense Department already maintains extensive ties and channels for assistance with the TNI under the guise of "conferences" and joint operations billed a humanitarian or security-related.
In the wake of 9/11, proponents of restored U.S.-Indonesian military ties have adduced a new argument for restoring IMET funds: however unsavory the Indonesian military may be, we need it as a partner in the war on
terrorism. But the TNI has close ties to numerous indigenous
fundamentalist Islamic terror groups, including the Front for the Defense of Islam and the Laskar Jihad. It even helped form and train the latter group, which engaged in a savage communal war in the Moluku Islands between 2000 and 2002 that left thousands dead.
So long as the Indonesian military refuses to curb its human rights abuses, submit itself to civilian rule, end corruption and end its sponsorship of terrorist militias, it will remain a rogue institution and a threat to democracy. And until that changes, the longstanding restrictions on military-to-military ties between the United States and Indonesia must remain in place.
-END-
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
The main bug in my bear at the moment is that the UN's security wonks decided to order everyone out of their homes and offices a few days ago in reaction to Sunday's 5.6 magnitude quake. It was a solid hit, almost knocked me out of bed, but was over before you could get your act together.
Seems they want us to live in and work in tents for... well forever I suppose.
Which would be okay maybe if there was some rational reason for it and if we'd sugested to the powers that be that maybe the ACHENESE should follow suit. I mean, if we're so damn concerned about them shouldn't we let them know as well? Aside from the absurdity of building houses for internally displaced people to move into, even as we move out of million dollar palaces, has anyone considered how the news is going to be greeted? Let me tell you:
Q "Mr. Humanitarian Aid Person, why are you living in the mud and not in your $6,000/month home with a swimming pool?"
A: Because, little fellow, we are worried about earthquakes and want to protect our staff.
Q: So, there is going to be another earthquake and tsunami?
A: I didn't say that, what I said is that we are protecting our staff.
Q: So should my family move outside also?
A: We are only advising that UN staff move out of their houses.
Q: So you do have information about a new earthquake but you don't want to tell me?
A: Again, there is no information about another earthquake.
Q: I don't believe you. You are lying to me just the same way the Indonesian government lies to me.
Seems like the TNI and police are back to their old games. Even the most reserved, desk-bound of foreigners here is slowly starting to glom to the reality of dealing with these jerks. The newspapers here are full of stories about contact between TNI and Free Aceh Movement, but thes emust be taken with the requisite grain of salt as the army is the chief reporting line for the info and it is still prohibited for local journos to even speak to GAM.
Down the coast access is increasingly restricted, dusk to dawn curfews are in effect in some areas and armed soldiers are now checking baggage of UN staffers boarding UN aircraft. Some of the agencies are now prohibiting their local and national staff from driving around without a foreigner present because of all the threats and shakedowns. Anyone whose been here knows this is a fact of life for folks in Aceh. More distrubing are the discovery of bodies trussed up and shot in the bakc of the head, and the roll clal of disappeared. This too is starting to happen again after severla months of relative quiet.
Anecdotally, as I returned from a meeting the other day my marked agency vehicle was pulled over by police at a motorcycle-registration check-point and our driver questioned. In addition to asking for numerous pieces of identification and vehicle registration, the officer repeatedly asked the driver where the organization's office is, who the head of the office is, and who is “responsible for the Indonesian staff." My sense, and that of the driver is that he was looking for a payoff. That is a routine event, a small matter, but I am quite surprised that he approached this with a foreign national in the car.
One other item of note is the heavy rotation of senior UN and I-NGO staff in coming weeks as we approach the six-month anniversary. The meeting centered around turning the IASC into a decision-making body. I asked how many heads of agencies will be around six weeks from now. The tally is as follows:
UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sumatra leaves after the Clinton visit and no replacement has been named. OCHA Head of Office leaves July 3; the job is posted. In addition, the heads of CARE, UNFPA, IOM, WHO and several others are all leaving by the end of June.
In addition, it has been noted that international staffing in most of the agencies are well below required levels. In OCHA’s case they are running at about 50 per cent capacity. The rest are between 60-80 per cent.
Explanations very but much comes down to the fact that there area finite number of qualified people prepared to commit to a place like Aceh for a year's minimum. We've fallen off the UN's hiring hit parade, its taking extra days for important phone calls to be returned, Dafur is blowing up again and Afghanistan is, well, Afghanistan. All very disappointing and inevitably going to impact the way we do things here.
Seems they want us to live in and work in tents for... well forever I suppose.
Which would be okay maybe if there was some rational reason for it and if we'd sugested to the powers that be that maybe the ACHENESE should follow suit. I mean, if we're so damn concerned about them shouldn't we let them know as well? Aside from the absurdity of building houses for internally displaced people to move into, even as we move out of million dollar palaces, has anyone considered how the news is going to be greeted? Let me tell you:
Q "Mr. Humanitarian Aid Person, why are you living in the mud and not in your $6,000/month home with a swimming pool?"
A: Because, little fellow, we are worried about earthquakes and want to protect our staff.
Q: So, there is going to be another earthquake and tsunami?
A: I didn't say that, what I said is that we are protecting our staff.
Q: So should my family move outside also?
A: We are only advising that UN staff move out of their houses.
Q: So you do have information about a new earthquake but you don't want to tell me?
A: Again, there is no information about another earthquake.
Q: I don't believe you. You are lying to me just the same way the Indonesian government lies to me.
Seems like the TNI and police are back to their old games. Even the most reserved, desk-bound of foreigners here is slowly starting to glom to the reality of dealing with these jerks. The newspapers here are full of stories about contact between TNI and Free Aceh Movement, but thes emust be taken with the requisite grain of salt as the army is the chief reporting line for the info and it is still prohibited for local journos to even speak to GAM.
Down the coast access is increasingly restricted, dusk to dawn curfews are in effect in some areas and armed soldiers are now checking baggage of UN staffers boarding UN aircraft. Some of the agencies are now prohibiting their local and national staff from driving around without a foreigner present because of all the threats and shakedowns. Anyone whose been here knows this is a fact of life for folks in Aceh. More distrubing are the discovery of bodies trussed up and shot in the bakc of the head, and the roll clal of disappeared. This too is starting to happen again after severla months of relative quiet.
Anecdotally, as I returned from a meeting the other day my marked agency vehicle was pulled over by police at a motorcycle-registration check-point and our driver questioned. In addition to asking for numerous pieces of identification and vehicle registration, the officer repeatedly asked the driver where the organization's office is, who the head of the office is, and who is “responsible for the Indonesian staff." My sense, and that of the driver is that he was looking for a payoff. That is a routine event, a small matter, but I am quite surprised that he approached this with a foreign national in the car.
One other item of note is the heavy rotation of senior UN and I-NGO staff in coming weeks as we approach the six-month anniversary. The meeting centered around turning the IASC into a decision-making body. I asked how many heads of agencies will be around six weeks from now. The tally is as follows:
UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sumatra leaves after the Clinton visit and no replacement has been named. OCHA Head of Office leaves July 3; the job is posted. In addition, the heads of CARE, UNFPA, IOM, WHO and several others are all leaving by the end of June.
In addition, it has been noted that international staffing in most of the agencies are well below required levels. In OCHA’s case they are running at about 50 per cent capacity. The rest are between 60-80 per cent.
Explanations very but much comes down to the fact that there area finite number of qualified people prepared to commit to a place like Aceh for a year's minimum. We've fallen off the UN's hiring hit parade, its taking extra days for important phone calls to be returned, Dafur is blowing up again and Afghanistan is, well, Afghanistan. All very disappointing and inevitably going to impact the way we do things here.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
The skies have opened and the rain we mercifully didn’t get in the weeks after the tsunami has now arrived.
For those fortunate enough to have found or built shelter it’s an aggravation. For the miserable masses huddled in flooded tents and beneath tarps the mind boggles. The temperatures have plunged from seasonal 34C to a damp, bone-chilling 24C. We’re living in a world of deep-chest coughs, flu, and I’m expecting inevitable spikes in levels of typhoid caused by overflowing latrines, and dengue and malaria as the mosquitoes take advantage of all the standing water: some Italian who has never left his office, contracted falciparum malaria in the seven days since he arrived. It almost killed me a couple of years back but he was treated before his brain cooked and seems to be on the mend.
Of course, if you can get that sick in our dry, WIFI-ed, air-con, environments I invite you to image how bad it must be in the camps and the loathsome government-built barracks.
I’ve been out of the loop for the past two weeks, sleeping in my Jakarta bed as I hammered together the first couple promotional videos the organization is putting out to highlight relief operations in Banda Aceh and Nias.
Returned to Banda a couple of days back, in time to celebrate my first wedding anniversary with the Haanster. Hard to believe just a year ago this time (4:20 pm, local) I was looking out the 17-floor window of our suite at the Mandarin at a slate black sky threatening our upcoming outdoor reception in South Jakarta…. The call from the restaurant manager asking if he should go ahead and put up the massive tents (“Do it, bubba.”) and me calculating another $600.00 on the bill while munching on an eight dollar club sandwich and watching the hairdresser (who'd earlier propositioned Tim's driver for a quicky in the garage before the Ulema arrivied to perform the service) weave flowers into my new wife's hair. Of course, once the beastly tent was up, driving the humidity level into the high 90s, it stopped raining, but that’s just the way things go.
It was a beautiful, memorable occasion and a year later there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t marvel at J and the life we’re living together. Here we are now, both having turned our backs on the freelance familiar to do our bit for these poor folk in Aceh. I’m happier now, more settled despite the 14-hour days and the stress of unfamiliar office environments. My contract has been extended by a further six months (has it been 10 weeks already on the Dark Side?) and job one is to find a house to call home.
Much news to on-pass but I’m gonna leave it for now. I will say this, though. The cops and the army are back to their old games. So bad have the shakedowns and harassment of national staff become that several agencies have prohibited their Acehnese employees in Calang, Lamno and Meulaboh from driving around without an ex-pat in the vehicle. The soldiers won’t fuck with whitey but the gloves are off when we’re not around.
Going to Banda Seafood tonight to celebrate our anniversary over tiger prawns, fresh snapper and cold beers. I’m shelving for one night thoughts about what 600,000 Acehnese will eat.
For those fortunate enough to have found or built shelter it’s an aggravation. For the miserable masses huddled in flooded tents and beneath tarps the mind boggles. The temperatures have plunged from seasonal 34C to a damp, bone-chilling 24C. We’re living in a world of deep-chest coughs, flu, and I’m expecting inevitable spikes in levels of typhoid caused by overflowing latrines, and dengue and malaria as the mosquitoes take advantage of all the standing water: some Italian who has never left his office, contracted falciparum malaria in the seven days since he arrived. It almost killed me a couple of years back but he was treated before his brain cooked and seems to be on the mend.
Of course, if you can get that sick in our dry, WIFI-ed, air-con, environments I invite you to image how bad it must be in the camps and the loathsome government-built barracks.
I’ve been out of the loop for the past two weeks, sleeping in my Jakarta bed as I hammered together the first couple promotional videos the organization is putting out to highlight relief operations in Banda Aceh and Nias.
Returned to Banda a couple of days back, in time to celebrate my first wedding anniversary with the Haanster. Hard to believe just a year ago this time (4:20 pm, local) I was looking out the 17-floor window of our suite at the Mandarin at a slate black sky threatening our upcoming outdoor reception in South Jakarta…. The call from the restaurant manager asking if he should go ahead and put up the massive tents (“Do it, bubba.”) and me calculating another $600.00 on the bill while munching on an eight dollar club sandwich and watching the hairdresser (who'd earlier propositioned Tim's driver for a quicky in the garage before the Ulema arrivied to perform the service) weave flowers into my new wife's hair. Of course, once the beastly tent was up, driving the humidity level into the high 90s, it stopped raining, but that’s just the way things go.
It was a beautiful, memorable occasion and a year later there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t marvel at J and the life we’re living together. Here we are now, both having turned our backs on the freelance familiar to do our bit for these poor folk in Aceh. I’m happier now, more settled despite the 14-hour days and the stress of unfamiliar office environments. My contract has been extended by a further six months (has it been 10 weeks already on the Dark Side?) and job one is to find a house to call home.
Much news to on-pass but I’m gonna leave it for now. I will say this, though. The cops and the army are back to their old games. So bad have the shakedowns and harassment of national staff become that several agencies have prohibited their Acehnese employees in Calang, Lamno and Meulaboh from driving around without an ex-pat in the vehicle. The soldiers won’t fuck with whitey but the gloves are off when we’re not around.
Going to Banda Seafood tonight to celebrate our anniversary over tiger prawns, fresh snapper and cold beers. I’m shelving for one night thoughts about what 600,000 Acehnese will eat.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
I was paddling about the ocean-view pool at the Ritz Carlton Bali last Sunday, the most important decision on my mind being the flavor of the next cold beer I'd order and whether late check-out could be extended till the evening, when bikini-ed J beckoned from the deck, waving my cell and looking concerned.
We're talking a well deserved break from a month of consecutive 14-hour work days in Banda Aceh and luxuriating in the wake of a friend's heart-warming Bali wedding so I'm not handling 'concerned' very well.
"It's Joe. He says its important."
If Big Joe is calling from Bangkok to drag me out of the pool he's gotta have a good reason. I hate these moments.
"Dude, I hate to interrupt you on your holiday but m'afraid I've got bad news. Marla Ruzicka is dead. Looks like a suicide bomber on the road out to Baghdad airport."
For a moment I'm dead silent. The name I know but I'm struggling for a face.
"Sorry, Big Joe. Help me out."
"Marla," he says. "Marla."
Damn. I'm not sure I ever knew her family name.
Lovely, focused, irritating, bubbly, Bay-area surfer-girl, Marla. Marla of Kabul, lately of Baghdad. And a hundred other places none of us will ever go. Marla the shit-disturber. Marla the befriender of bitter South African mercenaries, inebriated war-hardened journalists, or orphaned children, widowed mothers.
Sofa-surfing, satellite-phone borrowing, impecunious, slightly pigeon-toed, Marla. Kaftan-wearing, big-toothed, joint-rolling, cocktail pouring, "let's wander down Chicken Street and... ohmygod is that old Arani under that ratty old burkha begging outside the Mustapha hotel.... AIRRAAAANNIII"... Marla. That Marla.
Marla who single-handedly, through sheer force of character and go-gettum gumption drove the US government to distraction with her quiet demands for an accounting of the civilian dead in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Who - it is not an overstatement - alone developed the political savy of the beltway boys and the tongue of a career diplomat to extract millions of dollars in compensation for the victims of American bombs.
Marla, who despite her noteriety by that time sailed past the concertina wire, security checks and leashed German Shepards into a press conference at the US embassy in Kabul in early 2002 to nail down the oily special representative from DC in the $1,500.00 suit on the issue of compensation. And in the process, did a clinic on "conforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" that shamed the assembled A-list of journos.
And now some evil sonofabitch has gone and killed her.
One report a couple of days ago quoted a US soldier at the scene saying she survived the initial blast with severe burns to 90 per cent of her body. He told a reporter that she said, "I'm still alive."
(Here's a couple of recent pieces; Pam from the WashPost knew her better than most.)
A Disarming Presence In a Dangerous World
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 19, 2005; Page C01
It was an especially bleak moment on a frozen night in Afghanistan, just before Thanksgiving in 2001. An assortment of grizzled correspondents was crammed into a filthy hotel. That week four of our colleagues had been ambushed and killed by gunmen on the highway to Kabul, and we were all in shock. One evening several of us were lingering over coffee in the dining room, too depressed to head back to our rooms to work.
Out of nowhere, a perky blond apparition materialized at the table. She looked about 16, and she was wearing pajamas with cartoon animals under an Afghan robe. She introduced herself as Marla and started chirping about how she had just come from California to work on human rights issues.
We all stared at each other in disbelief. She seemed so young and vulnerable that we were seized with the identical, protective thought: Marla, go home.
But Marla Ruzicka stayed on, working to bring public awareness and official help to the plight of war victims in Afghanistan. Later she moved her one-woman human rights crusade to Iraq, where she was killed Saturday in a suicide bombing at age 28.
In Kabul, she flitted like a cheerful sprite through our hard-bitten war correspondents' world, alighting on our couches for the night and floating off with a backpack in the morning. She never had any money, but she had an amazing knack for organizing parties, procuring hidden vodka and making foreigners in a war-ruined Muslim capital feel at home.
Everyone stationed in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban knew her. The men fell in love with her and the women were reminded of themselves, a decade or two younger. At first, Ruzicka seemed too much of a flower child to be taken seriously. Ivan Watson of National Public Radio recalled her kick-boxing with the Afghan cook in the back yard of his house; another correspondent described her giving everyone back rubs after long days.
I remember her scribbling little thank-you notes and invitations with smiley faces on them, and yet another correspondent recalled that when she was leaving Kabul, Ruzicka came to her house early that morning with a gift and a long goodbye note. Over each letter "i" was a heart instead of a dot.
Ruzicka was far from a simpering sandalista. There was a determined agenda behind her ditsy persona, an earnest sense of purpose that enabled her to charm her way through military checkpoints and wring pledges of aid for war victims from congressional offices. While no one was paying much attention, she began systematically compiling data on casualties and damages that resulted from the U.S.-led attack on Kabul. In the spring of 2002, she led a group of Afghan families to the gates of the heavily guarded American embassy to demand compensation for the victims.
After that, we all viewed her with new respect.
"Marla had no guile. There was a complete lack of cynicism, a total selflessness in what she did," said Catherine Philp, a foreign correspondent for the Times of London and one of Ruzicka's closest friends, speaking from New Delhi. "We live in such a jaded community, and she alone seemed untouched. She was like an angel of life, but an angel with a broken wing. It made her seem so fragile that everyone wanted to help her."
After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Ruzicka shifted her efforts to Iraq. By then she had founded a Washington-based organization called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. She shifted from handwritten notes to a barrage of e-mails to friends, journalists and congressional offices. She was still broke, but by the time she arrived in Iraq, many Kabul correspondents had also shifted to Baghdad, so she found a plethora of couches to crash on.
Her mission was the same: to document the damage done to Iraqi civilians and their homes by the war. Baghdad was a far more dangerous place to work than Kabul, with foreigners exposed to far greater risks from suicide bombings, sniper fire and kidnappings. Major news organizations acquired armored cars and armed guards, and many Western journalists were confined to their homes or hotels much of the time.
Once again, Ruzicka took on the role of hostess and hovering angel for the exhausted and stressed-out Baghdad press corps. Richard Leiby of The Washington Post recalled her throwing a party called "Baghdad Needs Some Love." I saw her only a few times during my brief visits to Iraq, but she forged close friendships with full-time correspondents, and her e-mails mixed breezy, Valley Girl jargon with emotional appeals for her project to document and seek compensation for victims of wartime violence.
"She happily reminded me of many of the Greenpeace kids I worked with in the 1980s . . . a bulldog of energy with absolutely no constituency or power," said William Arkin, a peace activist and military affairs writer who worked with Ruzicka in Iraq. Even hardened generals and policymakers, he wrote in an e-mail to a friend Sunday, were disarmed by a beautiful "spitfire of disorganization" who badgered and begged for their help.
Despite her youth, Ruzicka, a native of Lakeport, Calif., had spent much of the last decade as a volunteer for political causes, visiting Cuba and Israel while attending Long Island University, and later joining Global Exchange, a nonprofit group that promotes concern for world poverty and suffering.
While in Iraq, the diminutive Ruzicka ventured out to places few other foreigners dared go, visiting families who had lost relatives or homes in military or terrorist attacks. She took limited precautions, traveling with a single Iraqi assistant and driver, Faiz Ali Salim, who was also killed Saturday by the suicide bombing on a road near the Baghdad airport. Her only protection was the thin disguise of a traditional black abaya, from which wisps of telltale blond hair constantly strayed.
Peter Baker, a Post reporter, first met her in Afghanistan in 2001. "She looked like a high school girl. I remember thinking she was going to get herself killed," he said.
But over time, she became such a familiar presence in war-torn settings, and exuded such an ethereal quality, that she seemed somehow impervious to the evils of war.
"There are so few truly good souls anywhere, but especially in that part of the world," Baker said. "It never occurred to me to think she would be in danger."
For all her moxie, Ruzicka confided to friends that she endured periods of deep self-doubt and anxiety. Despite her nurturing nature, she sometimes seemed to hint at the realization of her own vulnerability. In one recent e-mail to a journalist friend, she signed off with a casual "good vibes to you," but she also added this darker sentence: "I need angels in my life."
Angel of Mercy Marla Ruzicka was one of a kind. The Baghdad death of the unorthodox young aid worker has devastated those who knew her.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Christopher Dickey
Paris Bureau Chief, Middle East Regional Editor
Newsweek
Updated: 2:48 p.m. ET April 19, 2005
April 19 - The last e-mail Marla Ruzicka sent me was in January, when I’d just gotten out of Iraq after a brief visit, and she was getting ready to go in for a long one. She said she’d had a rough few months, since the last time we’d seen each other there, and I asked her what she meant, and how she was doing. Marla, 28, was unforgettably energetic and excited and committed and funny, a quintessential ultra-blonde California girl as goofy at first glance as a young Goldie Hawn, but as genuinely committed to helping people as, well, as anybody I ever met in my life, and more effective than most. Her cause was support for the victims of war; her specialty was cajoling and compelling the United States military to compensate the innocent people it injured and the families of those that it killed. But work in Iraq had gotten so risky that even Marla thought it prudent to stay away for a while.
How had she been feeling? Her note on Jan. 12, so frank and so trusting, was very, very Marla: “You are soooo sweet—yes I had a hard time getting used to not living in the action and some depression—which I want to be open about. I am fine now, in fact I just got out of Nepal where I was doing human rights work and now I am in Kabul—the city has changed so much and I am sooooo emotional about every building etc… I think when you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all—I am working on that—with time, I will get better. X, Marla”
But now there’s no time left. Last weekend, Marla and the Iraqi who worked with her, Faiz al Salaam, were killed along with two other people when a suicide bomber struck on the short, nasty, brutal road to Baghdad airport. And now those of us who knew Marla—the journalists she befriended, the politicians and soldiers she lobbied, the families she helped support—all of us are quite simply devastated.
Joe Cochrane, one of NEWSWEEK’s correspondents in Afghanistan during the post-9/11 war, remembers that Marla “took over Kabul almost as fast as the Northern Alliance seized it from the Taliban.” She’d been a passionate do-gooder since she was in high school. She’d flirted with different leftist organizations and causes, and she’d gotten one to pay her way to the war zone. But once she was there, she started operating on her own, and in her own special way.
“Within weeks after the city fell in 2001,” Joe recalls, “Marla was arguably the most well-known person there. It didn’t matter who you were: U.N. official, diplomat, American soldier, journalist. If you didn’t know Marla, you didn’t know s---. Dressed in a fuzzy winter coat and boots, she was a tornado, spinning into the inner circles of every cliché there to pitch the cause of civilian casualties. Then, when the work was done, you always knew Marla, a regular at the NEWSWEEK house, would have something fun to do that night. She organized dinners, barbeques, parties—even a St. Valentine’s Day dance where she played matchmaker. She was fun, she was cute, she was vibrant. She was, well, Marla.”
We keep saying that, don’t we? She was “Marla.” She was that unique.
“One of her most legendary ideas was to open a bar to raise money for her project,” Joe recalls, “and I did my part by being the guest bartender. Opening night at ‘Club Kabul’ was a smash hit, with more than 125 people ranging from aid workers to journalists to the ambassador of Italy turning out for some much needed drinks and conversation. Marla dressed in a dark lavender dress, played hostess, single-handedly allowing us to forget that we were in a conflict zone thousands of miles from home.” As if she were some Washington hostess with the mostest, she was always networking and lobbying, albeit on a shoestring and in the middle of enormous danger.
Marla asked herself wisely, and perhaps too brutally, if there was not something about war that she loved. She knew the sorrow and the fear, certainly, but she also knew there were adrenaline highs to be had, and she understood there could be something ennobling about the most horrible events. Such conflicting emotions are not uncommon in combat zones, but they are never easy to reconcile inside yourself. “When you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all.”
It’s not surprising that soldiers, always suspicious of Marla at first, often grew to revere her energy, determination and bravery. It’s also not surprising that some fellow aid workers remained hostile. Marla didn’t play by their rules, in fact. “Marla was alienated from much of the human rights community because she chose to work with the military instead of always against it,” says Scott Johnson, NEWSWEEK’s new Baghdad bureau chief, who got to know Marla in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When reporters discovered, soon after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, that the Baghdad neighborhood of Dhoura was littered with little grenade-like munitions from American cluster bombs—some of them hanging from trees, others on the hoods and roofs of cars—the journalists wrote their stories but despaired of actually getting anything done to help the people, even after three in the neighborhood were killed. One reporter told Marla. Two days later the military was in Dhoura cleaning up the bomblets and giving assistance to the families.
“In Afghanistan, she staged protests outside the U.S. embassy and a few weeks later she had won a multi-million-dollar compensation package for Afghan civilian victims,” Scott remembers. Since then, she has won more than $10 million in appropriations for Iraqi victims. Yet the last time Scott saw Marla, in Brooklyn earlier this year, he was still surprised, as one always was, by the way her wide-eyed naïveté would become cold-eyed focus whenever she talked about civilian casualties and what had to be done for them. “She went through the litany of protagonists, talking about [Sen. Bill] Frist and [Sen. Patrick] Leahy and God knows how many other senators, and what bill was coming up in what Senate appropriations committee and when, and who was going to vote for it, and who not, and if not, why not. And so on.” And then, Marla would stop herself, and laugh ebulliently, and reminisce about the bar in Afghanistan or some other adventure. And you would see how sad she was.
Marla was never naïve about the risks she ran in Iraq, and an entry on her Web site last summer was horribly prescient:
“A good friend of mine advised me to keep my movements minimal in the coming days, saying ‘Just think of all the work you will be able to do in three months when the situation is better because you were not killed by a bomb.’” But there was a job to be done, and nobody else to do it. “We have been working on submitting more compensation cases and encouraging the military to pay them out. In order to submit a case we have to drive out to the airport. The ride is not pleasant, military convoys passing every moment. Faiz and I hold our breath—such convoys in that area are the target of rockets and fire from the resistance….” It was while she and Faiz were passing a convoy last Saturday that the bomber struck.
What did Marla Ruzicka achieve? A great deal, but never quite enough to satisfy her. She worked with different organizations and eventually founded her own: The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), http://www.civicworldwide.org/, staffed mainly by volunteers. Over the last couple of days, glowing obituaries and tributes to Marla have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the war zones themselves. (Even the New York Daily News, which might once have seen Marla as an unregenerate leftist, called her “an all-American angel of mercy.”) But whether CIVIC can go on without her, and who actually will help those individuals and families she helped, is an open question.
As flighty as Marla sometimes seemed, and as complicated as she actually was, she drove home one simple and powerful point she never let any of us forget—a terrible, plain truth that too many politicians, soldiers and journalists tend to ignore when they dare to talk about the dead and wounded in war as statistics for history books. “Each number,” she’d say, “is a story of someone who left a family behind.”
We're talking a well deserved break from a month of consecutive 14-hour work days in Banda Aceh and luxuriating in the wake of a friend's heart-warming Bali wedding so I'm not handling 'concerned' very well.
"It's Joe. He says its important."
If Big Joe is calling from Bangkok to drag me out of the pool he's gotta have a good reason. I hate these moments.
"Dude, I hate to interrupt you on your holiday but m'afraid I've got bad news. Marla Ruzicka is dead. Looks like a suicide bomber on the road out to Baghdad airport."
For a moment I'm dead silent. The name I know but I'm struggling for a face.
"Sorry, Big Joe. Help me out."
"Marla," he says. "Marla."
Damn. I'm not sure I ever knew her family name.
Lovely, focused, irritating, bubbly, Bay-area surfer-girl, Marla. Marla of Kabul, lately of Baghdad. And a hundred other places none of us will ever go. Marla the shit-disturber. Marla the befriender of bitter South African mercenaries, inebriated war-hardened journalists, or orphaned children, widowed mothers.
Sofa-surfing, satellite-phone borrowing, impecunious, slightly pigeon-toed, Marla. Kaftan-wearing, big-toothed, joint-rolling, cocktail pouring, "let's wander down Chicken Street and... ohmygod is that old Arani under that ratty old burkha begging outside the Mustapha hotel.... AIRRAAAANNIII"... Marla. That Marla.
Marla who single-handedly, through sheer force of character and go-gettum gumption drove the US government to distraction with her quiet demands for an accounting of the civilian dead in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Who - it is not an overstatement - alone developed the political savy of the beltway boys and the tongue of a career diplomat to extract millions of dollars in compensation for the victims of American bombs.
Marla, who despite her noteriety by that time sailed past the concertina wire, security checks and leashed German Shepards into a press conference at the US embassy in Kabul in early 2002 to nail down the oily special representative from DC in the $1,500.00 suit on the issue of compensation. And in the process, did a clinic on "conforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" that shamed the assembled A-list of journos.
And now some evil sonofabitch has gone and killed her.
One report a couple of days ago quoted a US soldier at the scene saying she survived the initial blast with severe burns to 90 per cent of her body. He told a reporter that she said, "I'm still alive."
Marla's being buried today in California and I'm going to go home and read Annie Proulx till sleep comes.
(Here's a couple of recent pieces; Pam from the WashPost knew her better than most.)
A Disarming Presence In a Dangerous World
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 19, 2005; Page C01
It was an especially bleak moment on a frozen night in Afghanistan, just before Thanksgiving in 2001. An assortment of grizzled correspondents was crammed into a filthy hotel. That week four of our colleagues had been ambushed and killed by gunmen on the highway to Kabul, and we were all in shock. One evening several of us were lingering over coffee in the dining room, too depressed to head back to our rooms to work.
Out of nowhere, a perky blond apparition materialized at the table. She looked about 16, and she was wearing pajamas with cartoon animals under an Afghan robe. She introduced herself as Marla and started chirping about how she had just come from California to work on human rights issues.
We all stared at each other in disbelief. She seemed so young and vulnerable that we were seized with the identical, protective thought: Marla, go home.
But Marla Ruzicka stayed on, working to bring public awareness and official help to the plight of war victims in Afghanistan. Later she moved her one-woman human rights crusade to Iraq, where she was killed Saturday in a suicide bombing at age 28.
In Kabul, she flitted like a cheerful sprite through our hard-bitten war correspondents' world, alighting on our couches for the night and floating off with a backpack in the morning. She never had any money, but she had an amazing knack for organizing parties, procuring hidden vodka and making foreigners in a war-ruined Muslim capital feel at home.
Everyone stationed in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban knew her. The men fell in love with her and the women were reminded of themselves, a decade or two younger. At first, Ruzicka seemed too much of a flower child to be taken seriously. Ivan Watson of National Public Radio recalled her kick-boxing with the Afghan cook in the back yard of his house; another correspondent described her giving everyone back rubs after long days.
I remember her scribbling little thank-you notes and invitations with smiley faces on them, and yet another correspondent recalled that when she was leaving Kabul, Ruzicka came to her house early that morning with a gift and a long goodbye note. Over each letter "i" was a heart instead of a dot.
Ruzicka was far from a simpering sandalista. There was a determined agenda behind her ditsy persona, an earnest sense of purpose that enabled her to charm her way through military checkpoints and wring pledges of aid for war victims from congressional offices. While no one was paying much attention, she began systematically compiling data on casualties and damages that resulted from the U.S.-led attack on Kabul. In the spring of 2002, she led a group of Afghan families to the gates of the heavily guarded American embassy to demand compensation for the victims.
After that, we all viewed her with new respect.
"Marla had no guile. There was a complete lack of cynicism, a total selflessness in what she did," said Catherine Philp, a foreign correspondent for the Times of London and one of Ruzicka's closest friends, speaking from New Delhi. "We live in such a jaded community, and she alone seemed untouched. She was like an angel of life, but an angel with a broken wing. It made her seem so fragile that everyone wanted to help her."
After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Ruzicka shifted her efforts to Iraq. By then she had founded a Washington-based organization called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. She shifted from handwritten notes to a barrage of e-mails to friends, journalists and congressional offices. She was still broke, but by the time she arrived in Iraq, many Kabul correspondents had also shifted to Baghdad, so she found a plethora of couches to crash on.
Her mission was the same: to document the damage done to Iraqi civilians and their homes by the war. Baghdad was a far more dangerous place to work than Kabul, with foreigners exposed to far greater risks from suicide bombings, sniper fire and kidnappings. Major news organizations acquired armored cars and armed guards, and many Western journalists were confined to their homes or hotels much of the time.
Once again, Ruzicka took on the role of hostess and hovering angel for the exhausted and stressed-out Baghdad press corps. Richard Leiby of The Washington Post recalled her throwing a party called "Baghdad Needs Some Love." I saw her only a few times during my brief visits to Iraq, but she forged close friendships with full-time correspondents, and her e-mails mixed breezy, Valley Girl jargon with emotional appeals for her project to document and seek compensation for victims of wartime violence.
"She happily reminded me of many of the Greenpeace kids I worked with in the 1980s . . . a bulldog of energy with absolutely no constituency or power," said William Arkin, a peace activist and military affairs writer who worked with Ruzicka in Iraq. Even hardened generals and policymakers, he wrote in an e-mail to a friend Sunday, were disarmed by a beautiful "spitfire of disorganization" who badgered and begged for their help.
Despite her youth, Ruzicka, a native of Lakeport, Calif., had spent much of the last decade as a volunteer for political causes, visiting Cuba and Israel while attending Long Island University, and later joining Global Exchange, a nonprofit group that promotes concern for world poverty and suffering.
While in Iraq, the diminutive Ruzicka ventured out to places few other foreigners dared go, visiting families who had lost relatives or homes in military or terrorist attacks. She took limited precautions, traveling with a single Iraqi assistant and driver, Faiz Ali Salim, who was also killed Saturday by the suicide bombing on a road near the Baghdad airport. Her only protection was the thin disguise of a traditional black abaya, from which wisps of telltale blond hair constantly strayed.
Peter Baker, a Post reporter, first met her in Afghanistan in 2001. "She looked like a high school girl. I remember thinking she was going to get herself killed," he said.
But over time, she became such a familiar presence in war-torn settings, and exuded such an ethereal quality, that she seemed somehow impervious to the evils of war.
"There are so few truly good souls anywhere, but especially in that part of the world," Baker said. "It never occurred to me to think she would be in danger."
For all her moxie, Ruzicka confided to friends that she endured periods of deep self-doubt and anxiety. Despite her nurturing nature, she sometimes seemed to hint at the realization of her own vulnerability. In one recent e-mail to a journalist friend, she signed off with a casual "good vibes to you," but she also added this darker sentence: "I need angels in my life."
Angel of Mercy Marla Ruzicka was one of a kind. The Baghdad death of the unorthodox young aid worker has devastated those who knew her.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Christopher Dickey
Paris Bureau Chief, Middle East Regional Editor
Newsweek
Updated: 2:48 p.m. ET April 19, 2005
April 19 - The last e-mail Marla Ruzicka sent me was in January, when I’d just gotten out of Iraq after a brief visit, and she was getting ready to go in for a long one. She said she’d had a rough few months, since the last time we’d seen each other there, and I asked her what she meant, and how she was doing. Marla, 28, was unforgettably energetic and excited and committed and funny, a quintessential ultra-blonde California girl as goofy at first glance as a young Goldie Hawn, but as genuinely committed to helping people as, well, as anybody I ever met in my life, and more effective than most. Her cause was support for the victims of war; her specialty was cajoling and compelling the United States military to compensate the innocent people it injured and the families of those that it killed. But work in Iraq had gotten so risky that even Marla thought it prudent to stay away for a while.
How had she been feeling? Her note on Jan. 12, so frank and so trusting, was very, very Marla: “You are soooo sweet—yes I had a hard time getting used to not living in the action and some depression—which I want to be open about. I am fine now, in fact I just got out of Nepal where I was doing human rights work and now I am in Kabul—the city has changed so much and I am sooooo emotional about every building etc… I think when you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all—I am working on that—with time, I will get better. X, Marla”
But now there’s no time left. Last weekend, Marla and the Iraqi who worked with her, Faiz al Salaam, were killed along with two other people when a suicide bomber struck on the short, nasty, brutal road to Baghdad airport. And now those of us who knew Marla—the journalists she befriended, the politicians and soldiers she lobbied, the families she helped support—all of us are quite simply devastated.
Joe Cochrane, one of NEWSWEEK’s correspondents in Afghanistan during the post-9/11 war, remembers that Marla “took over Kabul almost as fast as the Northern Alliance seized it from the Taliban.” She’d been a passionate do-gooder since she was in high school. She’d flirted with different leftist organizations and causes, and she’d gotten one to pay her way to the war zone. But once she was there, she started operating on her own, and in her own special way.
“Within weeks after the city fell in 2001,” Joe recalls, “Marla was arguably the most well-known person there. It didn’t matter who you were: U.N. official, diplomat, American soldier, journalist. If you didn’t know Marla, you didn’t know s---. Dressed in a fuzzy winter coat and boots, she was a tornado, spinning into the inner circles of every cliché there to pitch the cause of civilian casualties. Then, when the work was done, you always knew Marla, a regular at the NEWSWEEK house, would have something fun to do that night. She organized dinners, barbeques, parties—even a St. Valentine’s Day dance where she played matchmaker. She was fun, she was cute, she was vibrant. She was, well, Marla.”
We keep saying that, don’t we? She was “Marla.” She was that unique.
“One of her most legendary ideas was to open a bar to raise money for her project,” Joe recalls, “and I did my part by being the guest bartender. Opening night at ‘Club Kabul’ was a smash hit, with more than 125 people ranging from aid workers to journalists to the ambassador of Italy turning out for some much needed drinks and conversation. Marla dressed in a dark lavender dress, played hostess, single-handedly allowing us to forget that we were in a conflict zone thousands of miles from home.” As if she were some Washington hostess with the mostest, she was always networking and lobbying, albeit on a shoestring and in the middle of enormous danger.
Marla asked herself wisely, and perhaps too brutally, if there was not something about war that she loved. She knew the sorrow and the fear, certainly, but she also knew there were adrenaline highs to be had, and she understood there could be something ennobling about the most horrible events. Such conflicting emotions are not uncommon in combat zones, but they are never easy to reconcile inside yourself. “When you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all.”
It’s not surprising that soldiers, always suspicious of Marla at first, often grew to revere her energy, determination and bravery. It’s also not surprising that some fellow aid workers remained hostile. Marla didn’t play by their rules, in fact. “Marla was alienated from much of the human rights community because she chose to work with the military instead of always against it,” says Scott Johnson, NEWSWEEK’s new Baghdad bureau chief, who got to know Marla in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When reporters discovered, soon after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, that the Baghdad neighborhood of Dhoura was littered with little grenade-like munitions from American cluster bombs—some of them hanging from trees, others on the hoods and roofs of cars—the journalists wrote their stories but despaired of actually getting anything done to help the people, even after three in the neighborhood were killed. One reporter told Marla. Two days later the military was in Dhoura cleaning up the bomblets and giving assistance to the families.
“In Afghanistan, she staged protests outside the U.S. embassy and a few weeks later she had won a multi-million-dollar compensation package for Afghan civilian victims,” Scott remembers. Since then, she has won more than $10 million in appropriations for Iraqi victims. Yet the last time Scott saw Marla, in Brooklyn earlier this year, he was still surprised, as one always was, by the way her wide-eyed naïveté would become cold-eyed focus whenever she talked about civilian casualties and what had to be done for them. “She went through the litany of protagonists, talking about [Sen. Bill] Frist and [Sen. Patrick] Leahy and God knows how many other senators, and what bill was coming up in what Senate appropriations committee and when, and who was going to vote for it, and who not, and if not, why not. And so on.” And then, Marla would stop herself, and laugh ebulliently, and reminisce about the bar in Afghanistan or some other adventure. And you would see how sad she was.
Marla was never naïve about the risks she ran in Iraq, and an entry on her Web site last summer was horribly prescient:
“A good friend of mine advised me to keep my movements minimal in the coming days, saying ‘Just think of all the work you will be able to do in three months when the situation is better because you were not killed by a bomb.’” But there was a job to be done, and nobody else to do it. “We have been working on submitting more compensation cases and encouraging the military to pay them out. In order to submit a case we have to drive out to the airport. The ride is not pleasant, military convoys passing every moment. Faiz and I hold our breath—such convoys in that area are the target of rockets and fire from the resistance….” It was while she and Faiz were passing a convoy last Saturday that the bomber struck.
What did Marla Ruzicka achieve? A great deal, but never quite enough to satisfy her. She worked with different organizations and eventually founded her own: The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), http://www.civicworldwide.org/, staffed mainly by volunteers. Over the last couple of days, glowing obituaries and tributes to Marla have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the war zones themselves. (Even the New York Daily News, which might once have seen Marla as an unregenerate leftist, called her “an all-American angel of mercy.”) But whether CIVIC can go on without her, and who actually will help those individuals and families she helped, is an open question.
As flighty as Marla sometimes seemed, and as complicated as she actually was, she drove home one simple and powerful point she never let any of us forget—a terrible, plain truth that too many politicians, soldiers and journalists tend to ignore when they dare to talk about the dead and wounded in war as statistics for history books. “Each number,” she’d say, “is a story of someone who left a family behind.”
Monday, April 11, 2005
It's funny the things that grab people's attention, and gobble up the work day. Today it was a surreal exchange of views about designing t-shirts marking the relationship between my organization and the Japanese government. It started simply enough but took a turn for the weird when someone tossed in the idea of commemorative lighters (cheap to make, useful etc) only to be shot down by someone else who thought it condoned smoking. A day later and they're still at it, firing rounds across cyberspace.
And then there's the stuff that goes off like a wet fart. Two weeks back I circulated a report to all department heads about the situation at Banda Aceh's main hospital that recommend we steer clear of that viper's pit. I've not been asked a single question about it.
Here's the report in full:
Zainal Abidin hospital is in crisis.
- Local nurses and paramedics are threatening to strike.
- In some cases basic medical assistance is not being delivered at all because of poor morale, incompetence, and a lack of access to the necessary donated supplies exacerbated by endemic corruption.
- At least two children have died needlessly at ZA in recent weeks despite the presence there of a team of French doctors, and there are persistent rumors of a third preventable neo-natal death.
- Donated medicine and supplies are vanishing from ZA storerooms to reappear in the private, for-profit clinics who charge for the drugs, and on the black-market.
STRIKE
Local newspapers are carrying stories about demoralized nurses threatening to strike if their demands are not met. Paramedics are angry, exhausted and ready to walk out.
Specifically they feel they are not being adequately paid and are angry at the attitude of many of the doctors. They perceive the doctors benefiting and enriching themselves from the relations with the foreign organizations while they themselves are being shut out.
Many doctors are being seconded as consultants to international organizations (at one point not that long ago, one of the top physicians at ZA was working as a translator for the head of mission of one of the larger organizations in BA) while others spend most of their time in their own private clinics.
PATIENT DEATHS
A seven year old girl named Baitul was recently admitted to ZA in serious condition suffering from TB contracted pre-tsunami. She may well have aspirated tsunami water as well. She responded well to three days of treatment by French doctors working in the children’s ward, including an intervention that removed large quantities of water from her lungs. By the weekend she was laughing, eating and moving around on her own accord. The French returned from their Sunday day off to find she had taken a dramatic turn for the worse.
She relapsed because the ZA nurses failed to give her the necessary injections needed to prevent water from building up in her lungs. The French team was “scandalized” to learn that donated drugs were kept under lock and key and were not being made available to the nurses. When the child began having trouble breathing, the nurses put her back on oxygen. When the oxygen bottle ran out they simply turned it off and did not replace to empty canister. The result was the child spent an agonizing night during which the oxygen levels in her blood plummeted. Despite the efforts of the French team, Baitul died 24 hours later.
In another case the same French team literally had to break their way into a locked store room in order to retrieve an incubator for a newborn premature baby. They left explicit instructions that the intubator (the tube delivering air to the infant’s lungs) was to be checked regularly through the night. When they returned in the morning the intubator was lying in the bed and the infant died a short time later. It is unclear whether the tube was deliberately removed but the doctors learned that none of the nurses has checked the child during the night.
After this incident the French physicians threatened to leave. Following an angry meeting with hospital administrators some equipment and medicine did appear in their ward.
There is also a story making the rounds that I cannot verify. It relates to a second premature baby who was placed in a donated incubator. The nurse turned the temperature inside the incubator to 70C and the child died under the most appalling circumstances. I’m told this incubator was donated from Europe and none of the instructions on the unit were written in Bahasa Indonesia.
If two children (possibly three) have died while under the direct care of the French, I invite you to imagine what is going on in other wards. For their part, the French team has returned home in the past few days traumatized and extremely upset about what was going on in ZA hospital. It is unclear whether they will return.
CORRUPTION
It is common knowledge in ZA that medicine and equipment are being sold on the Black-market, in some cases as far away as Medan. In recent weeks observers at ZA have watched stores of drugs and equipment like wheelchairs, trolleys, medical lamps and items like gastro-intestinal scopes vanish.
There are also unconfirmed reports that an entire German operating theatre has disappeared.
Witnesses report local doctors writing up extensive “wish-lists” of medical equipment for foreign donors that in many cases they have no idea how to operate and/or are already sitting un-used in their original plastic wrap in locked store rooms.
Similarly there is strong evidence that outside physicians are buying large quantities of donated medicine and equipment directly from the hospital stores in order to restock their personal pharmacies. They then charge for this medicine.
ZA administrators keep large quantities of donated equipment and medicine under lock and key and it is extremely difficult to get access to what is needed. The problem is particularly acute when the person with the key to the main storeroom goes home for the day. Thus the need for the French to break down the door.
I’m also told that in some cases impoverished family members of patients are being told that no medicine is available and are being directed to the national pharmacy down the road from ZA where they are being charged full cost for domestic brands.
COMMENTS
With the exception of the recent news reports, I cannot independently verify any of this information but it dovetails with what I personally observed there in the two months after the tsunami. The information was collected by a close friend who spent six days at the hospital over two weeks observing conditions and conducting interviews with patients and their families, the French physicians and local nurses. My source is extremely reliable, speaks Bahasa Indonesia and has many years experience in Aceh specifically and Indonesia generally.
I’ve been to ZA many times over the past five+ years. The negligence and endemic graft that are a feature of most large hospitals in Indonesia has been amplified in the case of ZA and by extension the entire provincial medical system.
ZA was allowed to decay pre-tsunami because of promises that BA would get a new hospital when the existing facility was no longer usable. There was no investment in the hospital for years prior to the tsunami: the drains in the hospital for example backed up regularly for years before the tsunami because of a lack of proper maintenance.
Even the local press, when asked about backdoor deals, graft and prevantable patient deaths at ZA, say it is back to “business as usual”. All indications are that as direct international oversight at ZA is withdrawn, the situation for patients and staff is going to get even worse.
I bring it to you because we facilitate the delivery of medicine and supplies to ZA. I believe well-intentioned donors mistakenly think that once delivered, their donations are going to find there way into competent and caring hands when in fact the opposite is often the case.
-END-
And then there's the stuff that goes off like a wet fart. Two weeks back I circulated a report to all department heads about the situation at Banda Aceh's main hospital that recommend we steer clear of that viper's pit. I've not been asked a single question about it.
Here's the report in full:
Zainal Abidin hospital is in crisis.
- Local nurses and paramedics are threatening to strike.
- In some cases basic medical assistance is not being delivered at all because of poor morale, incompetence, and a lack of access to the necessary donated supplies exacerbated by endemic corruption.
- At least two children have died needlessly at ZA in recent weeks despite the presence there of a team of French doctors, and there are persistent rumors of a third preventable neo-natal death.
- Donated medicine and supplies are vanishing from ZA storerooms to reappear in the private, for-profit clinics who charge for the drugs, and on the black-market.
STRIKE
Local newspapers are carrying stories about demoralized nurses threatening to strike if their demands are not met. Paramedics are angry, exhausted and ready to walk out.
Specifically they feel they are not being adequately paid and are angry at the attitude of many of the doctors. They perceive the doctors benefiting and enriching themselves from the relations with the foreign organizations while they themselves are being shut out.
Many doctors are being seconded as consultants to international organizations (at one point not that long ago, one of the top physicians at ZA was working as a translator for the head of mission of one of the larger organizations in BA) while others spend most of their time in their own private clinics.
PATIENT DEATHS
A seven year old girl named Baitul was recently admitted to ZA in serious condition suffering from TB contracted pre-tsunami. She may well have aspirated tsunami water as well. She responded well to three days of treatment by French doctors working in the children’s ward, including an intervention that removed large quantities of water from her lungs. By the weekend she was laughing, eating and moving around on her own accord. The French returned from their Sunday day off to find she had taken a dramatic turn for the worse.
She relapsed because the ZA nurses failed to give her the necessary injections needed to prevent water from building up in her lungs. The French team was “scandalized” to learn that donated drugs were kept under lock and key and were not being made available to the nurses. When the child began having trouble breathing, the nurses put her back on oxygen. When the oxygen bottle ran out they simply turned it off and did not replace to empty canister. The result was the child spent an agonizing night during which the oxygen levels in her blood plummeted. Despite the efforts of the French team, Baitul died 24 hours later.
In another case the same French team literally had to break their way into a locked store room in order to retrieve an incubator for a newborn premature baby. They left explicit instructions that the intubator (the tube delivering air to the infant’s lungs) was to be checked regularly through the night. When they returned in the morning the intubator was lying in the bed and the infant died a short time later. It is unclear whether the tube was deliberately removed but the doctors learned that none of the nurses has checked the child during the night.
After this incident the French physicians threatened to leave. Following an angry meeting with hospital administrators some equipment and medicine did appear in their ward.
There is also a story making the rounds that I cannot verify. It relates to a second premature baby who was placed in a donated incubator. The nurse turned the temperature inside the incubator to 70C and the child died under the most appalling circumstances. I’m told this incubator was donated from Europe and none of the instructions on the unit were written in Bahasa Indonesia.
If two children (possibly three) have died while under the direct care of the French, I invite you to imagine what is going on in other wards. For their part, the French team has returned home in the past few days traumatized and extremely upset about what was going on in ZA hospital. It is unclear whether they will return.
CORRUPTION
It is common knowledge in ZA that medicine and equipment are being sold on the Black-market, in some cases as far away as Medan. In recent weeks observers at ZA have watched stores of drugs and equipment like wheelchairs, trolleys, medical lamps and items like gastro-intestinal scopes vanish.
There are also unconfirmed reports that an entire German operating theatre has disappeared.
Witnesses report local doctors writing up extensive “wish-lists” of medical equipment for foreign donors that in many cases they have no idea how to operate and/or are already sitting un-used in their original plastic wrap in locked store rooms.
Similarly there is strong evidence that outside physicians are buying large quantities of donated medicine and equipment directly from the hospital stores in order to restock their personal pharmacies. They then charge for this medicine.
ZA administrators keep large quantities of donated equipment and medicine under lock and key and it is extremely difficult to get access to what is needed. The problem is particularly acute when the person with the key to the main storeroom goes home for the day. Thus the need for the French to break down the door.
I’m also told that in some cases impoverished family members of patients are being told that no medicine is available and are being directed to the national pharmacy down the road from ZA where they are being charged full cost for domestic brands.
COMMENTS
With the exception of the recent news reports, I cannot independently verify any of this information but it dovetails with what I personally observed there in the two months after the tsunami. The information was collected by a close friend who spent six days at the hospital over two weeks observing conditions and conducting interviews with patients and their families, the French physicians and local nurses. My source is extremely reliable, speaks Bahasa Indonesia and has many years experience in Aceh specifically and Indonesia generally.
I’ve been to ZA many times over the past five+ years. The negligence and endemic graft that are a feature of most large hospitals in Indonesia has been amplified in the case of ZA and by extension the entire provincial medical system.
ZA was allowed to decay pre-tsunami because of promises that BA would get a new hospital when the existing facility was no longer usable. There was no investment in the hospital for years prior to the tsunami: the drains in the hospital for example backed up regularly for years before the tsunami because of a lack of proper maintenance.
Even the local press, when asked about backdoor deals, graft and prevantable patient deaths at ZA, say it is back to “business as usual”. All indications are that as direct international oversight at ZA is withdrawn, the situation for patients and staff is going to get even worse.
I bring it to you because we facilitate the delivery of medicine and supplies to ZA. I believe well-intentioned donors mistakenly think that once delivered, their donations are going to find there way into competent and caring hands when in fact the opposite is often the case.
-END-
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Its been an absolute whirlwind since the 31st of last month when the latest 'Big One' hit. Poured out of the house within a minute of the earthquake announcing its arrival in now-familiar fashion ten minutes past 11 in the night: headboard banging against the wall, floors undulating beneath my feet as I grab the bag sitting by the bed containing passport, money, flashlight etc. and the house plunges into darkness. A glass shatters on the floor and I bang my knees off unfamiliar pieces of furniture herding J through the living-room and into the driveway. Note to self: proper grab-bag is a must. Water, military rations, candles, both cell phones, my Motorola GP340 and some clothes.
Outside the streets are filling with people racing for the local mosque. Children sobbing, the cemetery dogs baying and a curtain of dust rising from the street. The ancient trees that line the median are wobbling like a picket fence in a wind; you can taste the fear. The radio crackles to life and now the anxiety is broadcast for all to hear.
"Bravo Foxtrot Base. This is Bravo Foxtrot one-one-zero. Come in, over."
Within minutes the lack of preparedness is clear as day. Voices cracking with emotion, the oh-so slightly distorted sounds of people crying and yelling across the bandwidth.
"Bravo Oscar Base, there's been an earthquake!"
No shit.
Mercifully the lights come on fairly quickly, bringing with it a general calm.
Both my mobiles are buzzing impatiently with a dozen text-messages from journos in Jakarta. ABC News in the States is the first to get through but I blow them off saying I've got to keep the line open for the next few minutes.
Amidst it all, Anim and the boys who share the house, J and I are perfectly calm. I'm pleased I don't have to put out emotional fires, comfort or 'be there' so I can better concentrate on finding out exactly what has happened.
(I've now subscribed to an SMS service that is supposed to alert me in real time to all earthquakes in Southeast Asia greater than 6.0. It's a measure of how far we have come that I'm not remotely interested in a 5.5 for example, which can be a nasty piece of work all on its own, especially if its shallow.)
By 23:40 I know that first readings measure the quake at 8.3 somewhere off the west coast of Sumatra. Later it'll be upgraded to 8.7 and we'll know more precisely that its was centered just off the coast of the Banyak Islands, that it caused extensive damage to the neighboring islands of Simeulue and Nias, that 1,300+ people are believe to have died - through a mathematical formula the UN employs, if you can believe this - plotting the extend of damage to individual structures with the number of people living inside.
I will do a dozen+ interviews until 2.30 am. Fortunately there's a couple of coolies in the fridge and I've got plenty smokes.
The following morning I attend the emergency meeting of the heads of agencies at the offices of the UNFPA, the 'population control' people, which has a taste of irony I can't quite fathom. Only one topic of conversation of course.
Information is starting to dribble in from the affected islands. Masood Haider, the UN's deputy humanitarian aid coordinator for Sumatra (top guy on the ground), Michele Lipner, the head of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) and the top managers from the seven of eight largest agencies are all their.
Given the dearth of information from the coast there's actually very little concrete to say except that the previous night was proof, as if further were needed, that if the earth split beneath our feet as I type, we're all screwed.
There really is no "plan" in the event of an emergency. Even if there were, the differing agencies would squabble for turf and media coverage. Best just to plan for individual survival and leave the big picture to others. Fact is, if things went south in Aceh right now you'd pretty much have to take me at gunpoint to an outbound plane or helicopter. The instinct to remain, to push past the curtain of flames is far too strong.
I'm reduced to a snickering puddle when the head of one of the agencies describes in dramatic terms how he bolted the gate of a staff home to prevent folks from fleeing the grounds (and if the house had collapsed?) Later he bootlicks to beat Wormtongue, detailing his enormous relief at hearing Massod's "calm and reassuring" voice on the radio 30 minutes after the earthquake, urging him to use the radio in all emergencies as a salve to the huddled, fearful masses of international staff yearning for direction. Even Masood has sufficient modesty to look embarrassed.
It'll be several frustrating days before I finally land in Nias. In the interim I've been at it from dawn till late, all of us have. Lost count of the number of interviews and meetings. It's amazing to watch the 'system' wake up. Umpteen hundred ton boats arrive in Banda Aceh, Calang and Meulaboh waiting to be filled with every aid item conceive of; the UN's air service kicks in with Mi8s, Bells, SuperPumas and other makes and models of helicopter, and points Beechcraft and deHavilands, c-160s and Fokkers at the ruined runway on Nias. All must be fueled and serviced.
Many warehouses are stocked up - in some cases over-supplied with items delivered in the wake of the tsunami - so there's a rush to find out who's got what, where. For all OCHA's attempts to 'coordinate' the most effective and rapid responses are those cobbled together on the side-lines of the daily emergency meetings:
"I've got a 400 metric ton ship in the harbour leaving in 36 hours."
"We've got 350 family-sized tents... there's 5,000 family packs and 5,000 hygiene kits over here... this woman's organization has four 16-foot, motorized dinghies that can carry a ton of supplies each, might be useful in Simeulue whose capitol's port was reduced to match-sticks by 4-meter waves following the earthquake... is there room for our solar-powered water purification unit? It can produce 6,000 liters of fresh water every hour.... WFP is hauling 300 MT of food; maybe the vessels can sail together. IOM has 30 10-wheelers in Banda Aceh so we can pick-up all your freight and deliver it to the port, 30 minutes from town."
A day-and-a-half later, while I'm cooling my heels in Medan for 24 hours waiting for a UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) flight to Nias, that ship slips out and south to the epicenter.
The Nias/Simeulue situation is almost a perfect confluence of events to test the international agency’s' ability to react. On the one hand, there are enormous logistical hurdles to overcome. Roads, bridges and ports are out, there's no power, running water, the phones don't work and the local administration is sleepy and rotten to the core, overwhelmed by events and fearful of a vengeful population steeled by their hunger. The affected areas are remote islands known for surf beaches so the sea is an issue, especially now as the Westerlies throw up five-meter swells. Many survivors refuse to come out of the mountains. If you'd survived a 20-meter tsunami only to watch your house collapse in the middle of the night 100 days later in the seventh largest earthquake in the past century AND your kids are crying 24/7 because there have been 136 aftershocks in the past eight days, would you come out of the mountains or sit pretty eating bananas and sipping spring water for a few weeks?
On the flip side, there are plenty of experienced people available to help. There are lots of boats, choppers and planes. There's food, water, shelter, generators, fuel, and medical help in spades. The TNI is (mostly) playing ball - they refused some agency flight privileges and continue to insist they are the primary agency through which aid will flow - so there are fewer hurdles. The N Sumatra governor is a moron - he refused to allow aid to be shipped through the provincial capital Medan if it was going to Simeulue (Aceh) instead of Nias (N Sumatra) - but at least he is on the ground in Nias. While 630 bodies have been recovered and the smell is pretty atrocious in places, and perhaps 3,500 require varying degrees of medical assistance, it is a manageable load if you frame it against the post-tsunami situation.
If one were to use a single barometer, say, the rapid deployment of the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination group, one might get some taste of how history might judge the response. This is pulled from the website:
"Upon request of a disaster-stricken country, the UNDAC team can be deployed within hours to carry out rapid assessment of priority needs and to support national Authorities and the United Nations Resident Coordinator to coordinate international relief on-site. Members of the UNDAC team are permanently on stand-by to deploy to relief missions following disasters and humanitarian emergencies anywhere in the world."
Today, nine days after the earthquake, was UNDAC's first day in Nias and no one can explain why.
Outside the streets are filling with people racing for the local mosque. Children sobbing, the cemetery dogs baying and a curtain of dust rising from the street. The ancient trees that line the median are wobbling like a picket fence in a wind; you can taste the fear. The radio crackles to life and now the anxiety is broadcast for all to hear.
"Bravo Foxtrot Base. This is Bravo Foxtrot one-one-zero. Come in, over."
Within minutes the lack of preparedness is clear as day. Voices cracking with emotion, the oh-so slightly distorted sounds of people crying and yelling across the bandwidth.
"Bravo Oscar Base, there's been an earthquake!"
No shit.
Mercifully the lights come on fairly quickly, bringing with it a general calm.
Both my mobiles are buzzing impatiently with a dozen text-messages from journos in Jakarta. ABC News in the States is the first to get through but I blow them off saying I've got to keep the line open for the next few minutes.
Amidst it all, Anim and the boys who share the house, J and I are perfectly calm. I'm pleased I don't have to put out emotional fires, comfort or 'be there' so I can better concentrate on finding out exactly what has happened.
(I've now subscribed to an SMS service that is supposed to alert me in real time to all earthquakes in Southeast Asia greater than 6.0. It's a measure of how far we have come that I'm not remotely interested in a 5.5 for example, which can be a nasty piece of work all on its own, especially if its shallow.)
By 23:40 I know that first readings measure the quake at 8.3 somewhere off the west coast of Sumatra. Later it'll be upgraded to 8.7 and we'll know more precisely that its was centered just off the coast of the Banyak Islands, that it caused extensive damage to the neighboring islands of Simeulue and Nias, that 1,300+ people are believe to have died - through a mathematical formula the UN employs, if you can believe this - plotting the extend of damage to individual structures with the number of people living inside.
I will do a dozen+ interviews until 2.30 am. Fortunately there's a couple of coolies in the fridge and I've got plenty smokes.
The following morning I attend the emergency meeting of the heads of agencies at the offices of the UNFPA, the 'population control' people, which has a taste of irony I can't quite fathom. Only one topic of conversation of course.
Information is starting to dribble in from the affected islands. Masood Haider, the UN's deputy humanitarian aid coordinator for Sumatra (top guy on the ground), Michele Lipner, the head of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) and the top managers from the seven of eight largest agencies are all their.
Given the dearth of information from the coast there's actually very little concrete to say except that the previous night was proof, as if further were needed, that if the earth split beneath our feet as I type, we're all screwed.
There really is no "plan" in the event of an emergency. Even if there were, the differing agencies would squabble for turf and media coverage. Best just to plan for individual survival and leave the big picture to others. Fact is, if things went south in Aceh right now you'd pretty much have to take me at gunpoint to an outbound plane or helicopter. The instinct to remain, to push past the curtain of flames is far too strong.
I'm reduced to a snickering puddle when the head of one of the agencies describes in dramatic terms how he bolted the gate of a staff home to prevent folks from fleeing the grounds (and if the house had collapsed?) Later he bootlicks to beat Wormtongue, detailing his enormous relief at hearing Massod's "calm and reassuring" voice on the radio 30 minutes after the earthquake, urging him to use the radio in all emergencies as a salve to the huddled, fearful masses of international staff yearning for direction. Even Masood has sufficient modesty to look embarrassed.
It'll be several frustrating days before I finally land in Nias. In the interim I've been at it from dawn till late, all of us have. Lost count of the number of interviews and meetings. It's amazing to watch the 'system' wake up. Umpteen hundred ton boats arrive in Banda Aceh, Calang and Meulaboh waiting to be filled with every aid item conceive of; the UN's air service kicks in with Mi8s, Bells, SuperPumas and other makes and models of helicopter, and points Beechcraft and deHavilands, c-160s and Fokkers at the ruined runway on Nias. All must be fueled and serviced.
Many warehouses are stocked up - in some cases over-supplied with items delivered in the wake of the tsunami - so there's a rush to find out who's got what, where. For all OCHA's attempts to 'coordinate' the most effective and rapid responses are those cobbled together on the side-lines of the daily emergency meetings:
"I've got a 400 metric ton ship in the harbour leaving in 36 hours."
"We've got 350 family-sized tents... there's 5,000 family packs and 5,000 hygiene kits over here... this woman's organization has four 16-foot, motorized dinghies that can carry a ton of supplies each, might be useful in Simeulue whose capitol's port was reduced to match-sticks by 4-meter waves following the earthquake... is there room for our solar-powered water purification unit? It can produce 6,000 liters of fresh water every hour.... WFP is hauling 300 MT of food; maybe the vessels can sail together. IOM has 30 10-wheelers in Banda Aceh so we can pick-up all your freight and deliver it to the port, 30 minutes from town."
A day-and-a-half later, while I'm cooling my heels in Medan for 24 hours waiting for a UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) flight to Nias, that ship slips out and south to the epicenter.
The Nias/Simeulue situation is almost a perfect confluence of events to test the international agency’s' ability to react. On the one hand, there are enormous logistical hurdles to overcome. Roads, bridges and ports are out, there's no power, running water, the phones don't work and the local administration is sleepy and rotten to the core, overwhelmed by events and fearful of a vengeful population steeled by their hunger. The affected areas are remote islands known for surf beaches so the sea is an issue, especially now as the Westerlies throw up five-meter swells. Many survivors refuse to come out of the mountains. If you'd survived a 20-meter tsunami only to watch your house collapse in the middle of the night 100 days later in the seventh largest earthquake in the past century AND your kids are crying 24/7 because there have been 136 aftershocks in the past eight days, would you come out of the mountains or sit pretty eating bananas and sipping spring water for a few weeks?
On the flip side, there are plenty of experienced people available to help. There are lots of boats, choppers and planes. There's food, water, shelter, generators, fuel, and medical help in spades. The TNI is (mostly) playing ball - they refused some agency flight privileges and continue to insist they are the primary agency through which aid will flow - so there are fewer hurdles. The N Sumatra governor is a moron - he refused to allow aid to be shipped through the provincial capital Medan if it was going to Simeulue (Aceh) instead of Nias (N Sumatra) - but at least he is on the ground in Nias. While 630 bodies have been recovered and the smell is pretty atrocious in places, and perhaps 3,500 require varying degrees of medical assistance, it is a manageable load if you frame it against the post-tsunami situation.
If one were to use a single barometer, say, the rapid deployment of the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination group, one might get some taste of how history might judge the response. This is pulled from the website:
"Upon request of a disaster-stricken country, the UNDAC team can be deployed within hours to carry out rapid assessment of priority needs and to support national Authorities and the United Nations Resident Coordinator to coordinate international relief on-site. Members of the UNDAC team are permanently on stand-by to deploy to relief missions following disasters and humanitarian emergencies anywhere in the world."
Today, nine days after the earthquake, was UNDAC's first day in Nias and no one can explain why.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
There’s an eight-year-old Canadian boy serving as a sort of roving ambassador for UNICEF, a reward for having raised $50,000 in tsunami-relief money through a website he built in the days following Dec. 26. The Mums & Kids agency have taken him to India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives and now, Aceh province.
He is by all accounts a precocious young man with a sharp mind. But, you’ve gotta wonder what fundraisers are thinking bringing a child tourist and his parents into the midst of the greatest natural disaster of the past 200 years!
While the roads are passable and there really is a degree of “normalcy” returning to my backyard, the excavators on Friday scooped 38 bodies out of a canal that bisects the main east-west road through the capital, the city is dotted with mass graves and the typical VIP sight-seeing tour features a ruined landscape of homes literally erased from the earth’s surface along with the lives off tens of thousands of people, a disproportionate number of whom were children under the age of 12!
Even the elephants that featured prominently in early news reports, hauling cars from the rubble, have begun to die: Tantor or what ever his name was, died a few weeks back from tetanus. His tough hide was no protection from the fields of rusting metal and shattered pipe littering the ground where he walked.
The young Canadian may well have wanted to come to see for himself the devastation wrought by the tsunami but its about as appropriate as allowing an eight-year-old to watch slasher flix or triple-X porn.
This is not a PG entertainment experience. This is bloody Mordor, a rank place of pain and tears and damaged psyches, not a Pixar experience.
You want to reward him for work well done, and not insult someone who is obviously a bright bulb send him to the Smithsonian in DC for a couple of days or something along those lines. Sending a child to Aceh should be seen as a punishment, not a reward.
He is by all accounts a precocious young man with a sharp mind. But, you’ve gotta wonder what fundraisers are thinking bringing a child tourist and his parents into the midst of the greatest natural disaster of the past 200 years!
While the roads are passable and there really is a degree of “normalcy” returning to my backyard, the excavators on Friday scooped 38 bodies out of a canal that bisects the main east-west road through the capital, the city is dotted with mass graves and the typical VIP sight-seeing tour features a ruined landscape of homes literally erased from the earth’s surface along with the lives off tens of thousands of people, a disproportionate number of whom were children under the age of 12!
Even the elephants that featured prominently in early news reports, hauling cars from the rubble, have begun to die: Tantor or what ever his name was, died a few weeks back from tetanus. His tough hide was no protection from the fields of rusting metal and shattered pipe littering the ground where he walked.
The young Canadian may well have wanted to come to see for himself the devastation wrought by the tsunami but its about as appropriate as allowing an eight-year-old to watch slasher flix or triple-X porn.
This is not a PG entertainment experience. This is bloody Mordor, a rank place of pain and tears and damaged psyches, not a Pixar experience.
You want to reward him for work well done, and not insult someone who is obviously a bright bulb send him to the Smithsonian in DC for a couple of days or something along those lines. Sending a child to Aceh should be seen as a punishment, not a reward.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
March 18, 2005 was my 40th Birthday
Wake up 612 a.m. by my watch to the bed rocking.
(Those who know the Grinch will surprised to know that he’s back into personal time management after 22 years consulting bank clocks and strangers in the street. A story for another day involving a $32,000 timepiece going cheap in Hanoi.)
Dawn wake-ups of this type are rarely bad news but in this case it kinda set the tone for the day. I’m alone and deep into the Mmmm part of REM and the bed is doing things one associates with rodeos and Hollywood.
Think Buffalo Bill and Linda Blair. Think Poltergeist. Bed’s hammering the ground, while the room's all floating walls and swinging picture frames, the white tiled floor pitching like a tugboat in high seas and me perched on the edge eying the walls for new cracks and evidence to support the “flight” messages being sent from some nerve bundle at the base of my skull. You know, the place that keeps you alive.
I check with the US Geological Survey website a bit later to find out it was a magnitude 6.1 earthquake located 55 kms off the coast of Banda Aceh. These aftershocks are getting closer and closer. Not as heavy as some in the early days after the tsunami, the ones that turned the streets into cartoons, so powerful they prevented those who slept or fell from standing up. But strong enough.
Frigid bucket bath because the shower is on the fritz, quick shave ahead of the morning press conference and wander into the kitchen to get the coffee pot going. Unplug the water-bottle dispenser, plug in the coffee-maker and take 220-volts through my shoulder for the seconds it takes me to pry my locked-up mummy-fingers off the plug. Damn, foul mood begins so take it out on the lovely and clueless Anim, busty proprietress of the home opposite BA’s Hero’s Cemetery where I now live.
Walk away massaging my arm, cursing. Brush teeth and return to the living-room to consider the latest issue of The New Yorker, and happy news from correspondent Michael Specter that we’re all going to die from some mutation of bird flu. Grand.
15 minutes later Anim has braved the fiery inner workings of the home’s electrical system to get the pot boiling so that at least when Iqbal arrives to take me to work my blue Ace Hardware ubermug is full to the cap with a solid litre of Aceh’s finest Arabica.
The kid with the rotten teeth who I usually buy the local paper “Serambi Indonesia” from on the way into work has vanished from his post inside the bus-stop near Iskandar Muda mosque, the one with the great, Disney-esque dome that’s meant to be a traditional Acehnese man’s wedding hat but comes off as a four-tiered wedding cake painted Rasta red, green and yellow. Seriously. It must be seen to be truly appreciated. Years ago, in happier times, I drifted into the same building on a cloud of local ganja courtesy of the guards outside the home of a senior local politician, and developed a serious case of the giggles.
Iqbal suggest that maybe the kid is in school but I have my doubts.
I’ve got a full calendar today. I’m to attend the Heads of Agencies Meeting at 8, a powwow with all the top brass from the major missions in Aceh. By 10 I’ve gotta be at the local Information Ministry offices to give my two cents worth at the joint UN press conference.
The agency heads are all atwitter about the government saying all foreigners have to be out of Aceh by the 26th to get new visas. We'll see. Government will cave and extend the deadline, methinks. (Four days later my prediction comes true)
dash back ot the office at 9:15. Of course, the fellow who is supposed to translate the press releases into Bahasa Indonesia has not so. Mum calls while I’m at the photocopier to say “I feel old”. Yeah, me too.
Did a dozen post-press conference interviews with everyone from a popular on-line service detik.com to Radio France Intl. No one is asking the right questions so I get out with my scalp intact.
At some point after I get back, the boss wanders into the closet I call an office, tosses a bag of addictive Vietnamese candies on the desk and says happy birthday. Vanishes. Later the birthday well wishes start to pour into my mailbox. Awww, you guys.
Lunch of rice and veg and chicken at my desk trying to make sense of the volumes of mail bearing a bewildering host of acronyms.
I’m besieged by requests for information, most of it from people internal. Some government bigwig needs to be wined and dined and convinced that the organization should remain in Aceh through the long-term. Fair enough but I’m not sure how a press folder is going to tip the scales.
Do best to fill it but the hard-drive crash that occurred while I was on RnR has taken with it all Indonesian language files so I’m scrambling to get the package finished for his 5 pm meeting. At some point my new printer, a Canon iP1000 attempts to eat my scarf, sucking it into the guts of the machine. Thankfully adulthood has mellowed me somewhat so it actually takes me 15 minutes (instead of the usual 5) to rip the bloody thing out, taking with it half a dozen of the teeth that are used to secure the paper. Still works. Good Canon. Nice Canon.
At the same time juggling face-to-face interviews with Daily Telegraph, Christian Science Monitor and a host of others. Things start to blur.
I stagger out of the office at 7:30, into the gloom. It’s a wordless drive home. I’m knackered. Pour a long cold Jaimeson and the phone rings with Pat. 15 minutes later he’s over and reclined and his good humor is infectious. His wife Karen appears with another product of the Canadian foreign service in tow and a bottle of Bushmills.
I talk to J back in Jakarta and the peripherals start to get warm and fuzzy. We sit up deconstructing Canadian and Australian immigration policy before moving over to wannabe Nazi Ernst Zundel and Freedom of Speech until the midnight curfew looms. By the time they pull out of the driveway it’s after 12 and I’m officially 24 hours into my 41st year.
Wake up 612 a.m. by my watch to the bed rocking.
(Those who know the Grinch will surprised to know that he’s back into personal time management after 22 years consulting bank clocks and strangers in the street. A story for another day involving a $32,000 timepiece going cheap in Hanoi.)
Dawn wake-ups of this type are rarely bad news but in this case it kinda set the tone for the day. I’m alone and deep into the Mmmm part of REM and the bed is doing things one associates with rodeos and Hollywood.
Think Buffalo Bill and Linda Blair. Think Poltergeist. Bed’s hammering the ground, while the room's all floating walls and swinging picture frames, the white tiled floor pitching like a tugboat in high seas and me perched on the edge eying the walls for new cracks and evidence to support the “flight” messages being sent from some nerve bundle at the base of my skull. You know, the place that keeps you alive.
I check with the US Geological Survey website a bit later to find out it was a magnitude 6.1 earthquake located 55 kms off the coast of Banda Aceh. These aftershocks are getting closer and closer. Not as heavy as some in the early days after the tsunami, the ones that turned the streets into cartoons, so powerful they prevented those who slept or fell from standing up. But strong enough.
Frigid bucket bath because the shower is on the fritz, quick shave ahead of the morning press conference and wander into the kitchen to get the coffee pot going. Unplug the water-bottle dispenser, plug in the coffee-maker and take 220-volts through my shoulder for the seconds it takes me to pry my locked-up mummy-fingers off the plug. Damn, foul mood begins so take it out on the lovely and clueless Anim, busty proprietress of the home opposite BA’s Hero’s Cemetery where I now live.
Walk away massaging my arm, cursing. Brush teeth and return to the living-room to consider the latest issue of The New Yorker, and happy news from correspondent Michael Specter that we’re all going to die from some mutation of bird flu. Grand.
15 minutes later Anim has braved the fiery inner workings of the home’s electrical system to get the pot boiling so that at least when Iqbal arrives to take me to work my blue Ace Hardware ubermug is full to the cap with a solid litre of Aceh’s finest Arabica.
The kid with the rotten teeth who I usually buy the local paper “Serambi Indonesia” from on the way into work has vanished from his post inside the bus-stop near Iskandar Muda mosque, the one with the great, Disney-esque dome that’s meant to be a traditional Acehnese man’s wedding hat but comes off as a four-tiered wedding cake painted Rasta red, green and yellow. Seriously. It must be seen to be truly appreciated. Years ago, in happier times, I drifted into the same building on a cloud of local ganja courtesy of the guards outside the home of a senior local politician, and developed a serious case of the giggles.
Iqbal suggest that maybe the kid is in school but I have my doubts.
I’ve got a full calendar today. I’m to attend the Heads of Agencies Meeting at 8, a powwow with all the top brass from the major missions in Aceh. By 10 I’ve gotta be at the local Information Ministry offices to give my two cents worth at the joint UN press conference.
The agency heads are all atwitter about the government saying all foreigners have to be out of Aceh by the 26th to get new visas. We'll see. Government will cave and extend the deadline, methinks. (Four days later my prediction comes true)
dash back ot the office at 9:15. Of course, the fellow who is supposed to translate the press releases into Bahasa Indonesia has not so. Mum calls while I’m at the photocopier to say “I feel old”. Yeah, me too.
Did a dozen post-press conference interviews with everyone from a popular on-line service detik.com to Radio France Intl. No one is asking the right questions so I get out with my scalp intact.
At some point after I get back, the boss wanders into the closet I call an office, tosses a bag of addictive Vietnamese candies on the desk and says happy birthday. Vanishes. Later the birthday well wishes start to pour into my mailbox. Awww, you guys.
Lunch of rice and veg and chicken at my desk trying to make sense of the volumes of mail bearing a bewildering host of acronyms.
I’m besieged by requests for information, most of it from people internal. Some government bigwig needs to be wined and dined and convinced that the organization should remain in Aceh through the long-term. Fair enough but I’m not sure how a press folder is going to tip the scales.
Do best to fill it but the hard-drive crash that occurred while I was on RnR has taken with it all Indonesian language files so I’m scrambling to get the package finished for his 5 pm meeting. At some point my new printer, a Canon iP1000 attempts to eat my scarf, sucking it into the guts of the machine. Thankfully adulthood has mellowed me somewhat so it actually takes me 15 minutes (instead of the usual 5) to rip the bloody thing out, taking with it half a dozen of the teeth that are used to secure the paper. Still works. Good Canon. Nice Canon.
At the same time juggling face-to-face interviews with Daily Telegraph, Christian Science Monitor and a host of others. Things start to blur.
I stagger out of the office at 7:30, into the gloom. It’s a wordless drive home. I’m knackered. Pour a long cold Jaimeson and the phone rings with Pat. 15 minutes later he’s over and reclined and his good humor is infectious. His wife Karen appears with another product of the Canadian foreign service in tow and a bottle of Bushmills.
I talk to J back in Jakarta and the peripherals start to get warm and fuzzy. We sit up deconstructing Canadian and Australian immigration policy before moving over to wannabe Nazi Ernst Zundel and Freedom of Speech until the midnight curfew looms. By the time they pull out of the driveway it’s after 12 and I’m officially 24 hours into my 41st year.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Spin Cycle & The Merits Of A Walk In The Woods
I'm now nine days into this new life of spin and fortunately I suppose, it has been a busy time.
Baptism by fire last friday with the first press conference before the slavering masses: Hi EnLai, Heya Jerry... etc. Mind, I never much cared for overly friendly flacks myself so perhaps I'll cull the chummy bits a bit.
There's a bunch of blanks to fill in but I'm going to tip-toe into it over the first wee bit. This is no anonymous blog. There are plenty of folks out there who'll be able to whittle down the list of suspects pretty quickly so I'm going to go against my instincts (publish and be damned) and be a bit coy till I gather my feet beneath me.
Can mention yesterday's crisis, the announcement by the head of the Natl Police aceh task force that my organization and UNHCR will have to leave by 26 March.
Whoa? Is that sound of sphincter's snapping shut in offices around the globe?
Have dealt with it now - more on the weekend about that most excellent spinnage - but for now I'm going to exit with fine words from the 19thC Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (and repeated in Lawrence Scanlan's Harvest of a Quiet Mind: The Cabin as Sanctuary) on the merits of a good walk:
"... above all do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it... The more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. If one just keeps on walking, everything will be alright."
I'm now nine days into this new life of spin and fortunately I suppose, it has been a busy time.
Baptism by fire last friday with the first press conference before the slavering masses: Hi EnLai, Heya Jerry... etc. Mind, I never much cared for overly friendly flacks myself so perhaps I'll cull the chummy bits a bit.
There's a bunch of blanks to fill in but I'm going to tip-toe into it over the first wee bit. This is no anonymous blog. There are plenty of folks out there who'll be able to whittle down the list of suspects pretty quickly so I'm going to go against my instincts (publish and be damned) and be a bit coy till I gather my feet beneath me.
Can mention yesterday's crisis, the announcement by the head of the Natl Police aceh task force that my organization and UNHCR will have to leave by 26 March.
Whoa? Is that sound of sphincter's snapping shut in offices around the globe?
Have dealt with it now - more on the weekend about that most excellent spinnage - but for now I'm going to exit with fine words from the 19thC Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (and repeated in Lawrence Scanlan's Harvest of a Quiet Mind: The Cabin as Sanctuary) on the merits of a good walk:
"... above all do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it... The more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. If one just keeps on walking, everything will be alright."
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Klingon Intel And The Arrival Of The Do-Gooders
I’ll save for another day the story about how I was fired by USA Today while I was in Aceh because I also string for (their words) “publications that have a bias or the appearance of a bias -- be it political, religious or ethnic.” (unlike USA Today for example…) A full explanation will be forthcoming in days to follow compete with zingy letters between me and head-office.
What I will tell you is that all that after 18 years of journalism, I’m putting all that nonsense behind me.
Monday will be my first day of work as the Aceh-based public information officers (PIO) with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a donor-funded agency that does much of the heavy lifting when it comes to situations like post-tsunami Aceh. I like them and I think it's going to be an excellent fit.
Three months to start, the job will keep me in Banda Aceh for upwards of a year and opens up a whole new vista for me personally and professionally. I’m very excited about it and will weather the snide comments of friends and colleagues (you know who you are!) who accuse me of joining Vader and the rest of the forces of evil.
In the meantime, here’s a few yarns you didn’t read in you local rag or hear on TV during the five weeks I was covering the tsunami from Aceh:
On the drive up to Banda Aceh from Medan (Dec. 27) we stopped in Lhokseumawe for two nights. Took a day and filed from the Malacca Strait side of Sumatra island where the devastation was tremendous and response, under-reported.
At one point J and I were grabbed up and interrogated by Indonesian police intel. They’re a pretty brutish bunch generally speaking and these fellows didn’t disappoint.
Their issue was that we’d not reported in when we arrived. That and the fact that it was, and as far as I know remains, illegal to drive the highway linking Medan in North Sumatra and Banda Aceh, the capitol of the afflicted province. The only sanctioned port of entry is the airport in BA.
We explained at length and often that the vice-president had said publicly that ALL journalists and aid workers were welcome and the more, the sooner, the better. That didn’t hold much water.
They insisted on watching all the tape we’d shot of devastated villages and grieving families, the basic morgue set up in a mosque and a bunch of other stuff. It wasn’t a rough interrogation, but a mind-numbingly inane one.
One humourless thug, all shoulders and hair would have had me in irons and dumped in the bay if he’d had his way. The others were pretty ambivalent about the whole thing.
What was immediately obvious was that these were perhaps the dumbest bunch of cops ever to put on a uniform. If they are the elite of the police force one is left to imagine what the regular beat (no pun intended) cop is like.
For example, one fellow was so baffled as to how to type up the police report that Jihan actually had to do it for him. Yes, Windows 98 is a bit of a challenge but this guy broke a sweat just turning the damn machine on.
They also insisted on repeating the fact that BA was the only legal POE in Aceh…. at least 300 times during our stay. I swear, if it was meant as an interrogation technique it was quite successful because if J had not been there I’m pretty sure I would have attacked someone after about the 138th repetition. Then I imagine I would have had to listen to them repeat how hospitalizing police officers was an offence and of course I would have been in cells at that point and they, too far away for me to get someone by the collar.
The only thing missing from the whole process was the inevitable request for money which I think they probably discussed amongst themselves before the one with the functioning cerebral cortex suggested soliciting bribes from foreign journalists carrying al Jazeera accreditation might not be the best idea.
In the end they sort of cut us some slack. I signed off on a ‘confession’ and they released us with the warning not to leave the city until their boss made an official decision as to our fates. We fled, organized two mini-vans, bought supplies and plotted out pre-dawn escape from the city. Never did find out what the decision was.
The one thing that stuck in my mind was that if these Klingons were ready to break my balls over a minor infraction, can you imagine the fate awaiting any poor Acehnese guy who found himself in their clutches?
Once in Banda Aceh there was all kinds of whacked out folks wandering around under the “aid” banner. The Scientologists’ Emergency Response Team was among the first of the fringe operators to show up. Resplendent in yellow t-shirts and offering some sort of power-point re-centering massage beneath tents across from the governor’s mansion where much of the administrative action took place.
The Mormons arrived to lend a hand, bringing with them 40 motorcycles and a posse of scary-looking pasty middle-aged white guys in pressed white shirts and ties. A conservative read of church doctrine pretty much reduces all non-whites to the status of non-humans and their operating in swarthy, Muslim Aceh was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.
Laskar Mujahedin were there in force. They pretty much hate all Christians but at least they kept a fairly low profile and pitched in to load rice and instant noodles into US Navy helicopters in their Osama t-shirts. What the American flyboys thought about that goes unrecorded.
And of course, our night-club-bashing friends from FPI, the Islamic Defenders Front were loaded like cattle onto Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) transport planes and shipped up to “defend” Islam against the foreign infidels.
This is a group of Jakarta-based gangsters who dress up like Arabs and are paid by security forces to trash bars in Jakarta that refuse to cough up protection money.
For the first few weeks FPI confined themselves to sight-seeing before they finally got around to the task of retrieving dead bodies.
They set up shop in a mosque opposite the heroes cemetery in BA and got busy pissing off everyone in the neighborhood.
I was living in a house 100 meters from their camp for much of my time in Aceh. I understand that they kicked out the local imam and started broadcasting some really nasty stuff from the loudspeakers, beginning at about 4 a.m. The new imam, from Jakarta, started off demanding an explanation why the tsunami didn’t hit America “where all the evil people live” and went on from there.
In the run-up to Idul Adha, their Koranic readings became night-long events. Friends who have lived all over the Islamic world say they’ve never heard anything like it. The half-dozen journos in our house bitched about it but figured if it was okay with local folks we’d just deal with it.
Well, apparently it wasn’t okay and since I left there have been several nasty showdowns between Acehnese guys pissed about being told how to pray, and FPI goons with a rudimentary knowledge of Islam who are used to dealing with Javanese folks who roll over at the first sign of trouble. There will be more on this later, I’m afraid. Despite the propaganda published by Indonesian media, the Acehnese are far more excited about having foreigners around than they are about having so many non-Acehnese Indonesians.
Some interesting personalities and professional conundrums emerged as well.
One of the best involved a media-savvy Sydney, Australia, Catholic street priest who arrived with a (metaphorical) suitcase full of money, a black shirt with PADRE written in white block letters, and a plan to build orphanages. Nice idea except for the fact that warehousing kids is the absolute last resort, he was utterly blind to the sensitivity of the issue of housing Muslim kids in a Christian facility (it’s illegal) and didn’t bother to actually ask anyone in Aceh if they wanted this kind of help.
Like many Australian angles to the tsunami story – indeed any story in Oz – mighty Channel 9 had “bought” the story. This is standard operating procedure in Oz, and something that pisses off most folk in the biz. When you hear that 9 has bought someone it becomes your complete focus to blow that exclusivity away, regardless of the value of the story.
It happened after the Bali bombing as well. Oz channels trying to prevent their “bought and paid for” interview subjects from talking to the masses. I usually laugh when a TV producer tells me who I can and cannot speak to but it’s a very serious issue.
I was living with an Aussie media pack that was sharpening its teeth over this clown and set to the day after he arrived. By the time they were done, he was heading for the airport and safety back home.
The addendum to the yarn is that the Herald-Sun newspaper was riding shotgun with 9 and this priest. I’ve no idea how much it cost them but it was a waste. Unbelievably, they sent a young woman reporter who had never been out of the country on assignment to cover the story. She arrived without a laptop or cellular phone, with no translator, local fixer and just $200 in her pocket.
There was much muttering about the house because she seemed nice enough if completely and utterly clueless about Indonesia, the tsunami, Islam etc etc. A couple of guys took her in and saved her from making an utter fool of herself but the general feeling was that whichever editor it was that signed off on the plan to parachute this virgin into post-tsunami Aceh deserved to be shown the door at the very least.
There’s more of this stuff, funnier and maybe more important, but its going to have to wait. I made the mistake of poking J’s arm this evening, just hours after she had five vaccinations and though sleeping now, she’s not a very happy camper.
I’ll save for another day the story about how I was fired by USA Today while I was in Aceh because I also string for (their words) “publications that have a bias or the appearance of a bias -- be it political, religious or ethnic.” (unlike USA Today for example…) A full explanation will be forthcoming in days to follow compete with zingy letters between me and head-office.
What I will tell you is that all that after 18 years of journalism, I’m putting all that nonsense behind me.
Monday will be my first day of work as the Aceh-based public information officers (PIO) with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a donor-funded agency that does much of the heavy lifting when it comes to situations like post-tsunami Aceh. I like them and I think it's going to be an excellent fit.
Three months to start, the job will keep me in Banda Aceh for upwards of a year and opens up a whole new vista for me personally and professionally. I’m very excited about it and will weather the snide comments of friends and colleagues (you know who you are!) who accuse me of joining Vader and the rest of the forces of evil.
In the meantime, here’s a few yarns you didn’t read in you local rag or hear on TV during the five weeks I was covering the tsunami from Aceh:
On the drive up to Banda Aceh from Medan (Dec. 27) we stopped in Lhokseumawe for two nights. Took a day and filed from the Malacca Strait side of Sumatra island where the devastation was tremendous and response, under-reported.
At one point J and I were grabbed up and interrogated by Indonesian police intel. They’re a pretty brutish bunch generally speaking and these fellows didn’t disappoint.
Their issue was that we’d not reported in when we arrived. That and the fact that it was, and as far as I know remains, illegal to drive the highway linking Medan in North Sumatra and Banda Aceh, the capitol of the afflicted province. The only sanctioned port of entry is the airport in BA.
We explained at length and often that the vice-president had said publicly that ALL journalists and aid workers were welcome and the more, the sooner, the better. That didn’t hold much water.
They insisted on watching all the tape we’d shot of devastated villages and grieving families, the basic morgue set up in a mosque and a bunch of other stuff. It wasn’t a rough interrogation, but a mind-numbingly inane one.
One humourless thug, all shoulders and hair would have had me in irons and dumped in the bay if he’d had his way. The others were pretty ambivalent about the whole thing.
What was immediately obvious was that these were perhaps the dumbest bunch of cops ever to put on a uniform. If they are the elite of the police force one is left to imagine what the regular beat (no pun intended) cop is like.
For example, one fellow was so baffled as to how to type up the police report that Jihan actually had to do it for him. Yes, Windows 98 is a bit of a challenge but this guy broke a sweat just turning the damn machine on.
They also insisted on repeating the fact that BA was the only legal POE in Aceh…. at least 300 times during our stay. I swear, if it was meant as an interrogation technique it was quite successful because if J had not been there I’m pretty sure I would have attacked someone after about the 138th repetition. Then I imagine I would have had to listen to them repeat how hospitalizing police officers was an offence and of course I would have been in cells at that point and they, too far away for me to get someone by the collar.
The only thing missing from the whole process was the inevitable request for money which I think they probably discussed amongst themselves before the one with the functioning cerebral cortex suggested soliciting bribes from foreign journalists carrying al Jazeera accreditation might not be the best idea.
In the end they sort of cut us some slack. I signed off on a ‘confession’ and they released us with the warning not to leave the city until their boss made an official decision as to our fates. We fled, organized two mini-vans, bought supplies and plotted out pre-dawn escape from the city. Never did find out what the decision was.
The one thing that stuck in my mind was that if these Klingons were ready to break my balls over a minor infraction, can you imagine the fate awaiting any poor Acehnese guy who found himself in their clutches?
Once in Banda Aceh there was all kinds of whacked out folks wandering around under the “aid” banner. The Scientologists’ Emergency Response Team was among the first of the fringe operators to show up. Resplendent in yellow t-shirts and offering some sort of power-point re-centering massage beneath tents across from the governor’s mansion where much of the administrative action took place.
The Mormons arrived to lend a hand, bringing with them 40 motorcycles and a posse of scary-looking pasty middle-aged white guys in pressed white shirts and ties. A conservative read of church doctrine pretty much reduces all non-whites to the status of non-humans and their operating in swarthy, Muslim Aceh was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.
Laskar Mujahedin were there in force. They pretty much hate all Christians but at least they kept a fairly low profile and pitched in to load rice and instant noodles into US Navy helicopters in their Osama t-shirts. What the American flyboys thought about that goes unrecorded.
And of course, our night-club-bashing friends from FPI, the Islamic Defenders Front were loaded like cattle onto Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) transport planes and shipped up to “defend” Islam against the foreign infidels.
This is a group of Jakarta-based gangsters who dress up like Arabs and are paid by security forces to trash bars in Jakarta that refuse to cough up protection money.
For the first few weeks FPI confined themselves to sight-seeing before they finally got around to the task of retrieving dead bodies.
They set up shop in a mosque opposite the heroes cemetery in BA and got busy pissing off everyone in the neighborhood.
I was living in a house 100 meters from their camp for much of my time in Aceh. I understand that they kicked out the local imam and started broadcasting some really nasty stuff from the loudspeakers, beginning at about 4 a.m. The new imam, from Jakarta, started off demanding an explanation why the tsunami didn’t hit America “where all the evil people live” and went on from there.
In the run-up to Idul Adha, their Koranic readings became night-long events. Friends who have lived all over the Islamic world say they’ve never heard anything like it. The half-dozen journos in our house bitched about it but figured if it was okay with local folks we’d just deal with it.
Well, apparently it wasn’t okay and since I left there have been several nasty showdowns between Acehnese guys pissed about being told how to pray, and FPI goons with a rudimentary knowledge of Islam who are used to dealing with Javanese folks who roll over at the first sign of trouble. There will be more on this later, I’m afraid. Despite the propaganda published by Indonesian media, the Acehnese are far more excited about having foreigners around than they are about having so many non-Acehnese Indonesians.
Some interesting personalities and professional conundrums emerged as well.
One of the best involved a media-savvy Sydney, Australia, Catholic street priest who arrived with a (metaphorical) suitcase full of money, a black shirt with PADRE written in white block letters, and a plan to build orphanages. Nice idea except for the fact that warehousing kids is the absolute last resort, he was utterly blind to the sensitivity of the issue of housing Muslim kids in a Christian facility (it’s illegal) and didn’t bother to actually ask anyone in Aceh if they wanted this kind of help.
Like many Australian angles to the tsunami story – indeed any story in Oz – mighty Channel 9 had “bought” the story. This is standard operating procedure in Oz, and something that pisses off most folk in the biz. When you hear that 9 has bought someone it becomes your complete focus to blow that exclusivity away, regardless of the value of the story.
It happened after the Bali bombing as well. Oz channels trying to prevent their “bought and paid for” interview subjects from talking to the masses. I usually laugh when a TV producer tells me who I can and cannot speak to but it’s a very serious issue.
I was living with an Aussie media pack that was sharpening its teeth over this clown and set to the day after he arrived. By the time they were done, he was heading for the airport and safety back home.
The addendum to the yarn is that the Herald-Sun newspaper was riding shotgun with 9 and this priest. I’ve no idea how much it cost them but it was a waste. Unbelievably, they sent a young woman reporter who had never been out of the country on assignment to cover the story. She arrived without a laptop or cellular phone, with no translator, local fixer and just $200 in her pocket.
There was much muttering about the house because she seemed nice enough if completely and utterly clueless about Indonesia, the tsunami, Islam etc etc. A couple of guys took her in and saved her from making an utter fool of herself but the general feeling was that whichever editor it was that signed off on the plan to parachute this virgin into post-tsunami Aceh deserved to be shown the door at the very least.
There’s more of this stuff, funnier and maybe more important, but its going to have to wait. I made the mistake of poking J’s arm this evening, just hours after she had five vaccinations and though sleeping now, she’s not a very happy camper.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Aceh #1
Feb. 8/05
There’s a crack on the wall of my room in Banda Aceh that runs parallel to and about 18 inches below the ceiling before plunging like an Enron profit report, through a narrow, nipple-high band of flowered wallpaper to disappear in the floor.
The one in the john traces all the places where ceiling and walls meet so that every time you reach up to dump a bucket of water over your head you’re confronted by your mortality, and the real possibility the roof is about to drop, squishing you like a bug.
I watched those cracks for several weeks and though every second day brought new aftershocks, including a minute-long 6.1 whopper the day before I returned to Jakarta, the damage seems to have leveled out.
The kids in the school next door didn’t run screaming into the street which I take as a sign they’ve compartmentalized events of the past month almost as well as I.
Aftershocks were a way of life during the month I spent in Aceh after the tsunami. The only night I don’t remember the earth moving was the one J and I spent in a nice hotel in Medan the first day out of the Jakarta. Big, solid cement beast with a flesh and bone interior that’ll probably remain intact until the earth splits open at the end of days.
It really struck me sitting in room 19 of the Kuta Karang Lama hotel in Lhokseumawe, early the same day the intelligence division of the national police – pound-for-pound perhaps the dumbest brutes on the block – picked us up.
If it must 4 a.m. then I’d been at it for almost three days on about five hours sleep.
I’d just filed to the Globe & Mail and the phone rang with FOX! on the line from New York looking for an update. This may be the most enthusiastic & overwrought network in Rupert Murdoch’s television empire. Its employees are like cultists. I remember meeting a hyperactive 20something FOX!!! field producer from New Jersey in Kabul who kept insisting we “swap digits” which apparently means exchange phone-numbers. I had to threaten him with a empty bottle of Uzbek vodka before he backed off, and with me, people usually know when it’s time to back off.
In the world according to FOX!, traffic jams are “devastating” or “crippling”, critics of US foreign policy, “terrorist sympathizers” and Oliver North, “a true American patriot”.
They also pay upwards of $100.00 US per two minute Question & Answer session so we put a cork in it and try to work the phrase “God-fearin’ folks” in to render recognizable the Moslem fishermen and their families who make up the bulk of the Acehnese killed in the Boxing Day tsunami.
I bounced through various layers of their production system before washing up with CHIP! or BOB! or MAX! broadcasting live from something called FOX-CONTROL, the network nerve center and the place where “good” is molded into “bad” and “villains” into “heros”.
I’m not actually sure if FOX-CONTROL is the real name or something I made up but if it’s the latter, it should be the former.
As I struggled to re-form intelligent commentary about what I’d seen the previous day into something simple-syllabic and digestible by FOX!!! anchors and viewers, the floor started to shimmy and wobble. Struggling to contain the giggles, I reworded what was essentially a terrible seismic cause-and-effect Sunday morning event into the actions of a slavering, dangerous and perhaps animated creature with a rudimentary cerebral cortex and a visceral dislike for suburban commuters.
As the words formed, the yellow floor tiles began to undulate, morphing into the scales of the very creature I was conjuring for the lamp-jawed, mouth-breathing masses of middle-America, the swinging florescent ceiling lights slit-eyed cold and malicious, the dull, rolling hum of the ancient air-conditioning unit the bellows of the breast’s great lungs.
My laptop rattled on its grey Formica-topped table, and an ashtray fell to the floor as the doors of adjacent ground-floor units in this segregated (no marriage license meant J and I were not allowed to share a room) down-market hotel in this grey, petro-town swung open spilling terrified, half-awake renters into the rain-soaked parking lot.
At some point the anchor, ignoring the briefing notes, asked what I saw when I looked outside my hotel. It’s a question they ask every time.
I stood in the doorframe watching events unfold, and stuck to scripted descriptions of ruined fishing villages, a mounting death-toll and the three-story-high wall of black water that seemed to actively seek out its victims.
BELOW IS THE PIECE I FILED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL THAT MORNING. IT IS TIMED AT 4:17 AM/DEC 29
Paul Dillon
Lhokseumawe, Indonesia
On a normal day, dozens of brightly colored fishing boats would be tethered to the rickety raised catwalks that meander through the impoverished fishing community of Pusung on the east coast of the island of Sumatra.
Instead the poorest victims of Sunday’s devastating 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the killer tsunamis it spawned spent Tuesday evening trying to rescue their few remaining personal items from their ravaged homes.
“We have nothing left but our lives,” said 25-year-old Nurslah, surveying the thick, putrid pools of mud and broken timbers where her house once stood. “The only good thing is that my husband was fishing when the waves came and his boat was not damaged.”
Others were not so lucky. Three of Nurslah’s neighbours, including a seven year-old boy lost their lives when a wall of water and mud crashed into Pusung at 8:15 a.m., just 15 minutes after residents were jolted to their feet by a powerful earthquake hundreds of miles away in the Indian ocean.
The death toll in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra is expected to reach 25,000, Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said Tuesday in Jakarta. At least one-fifth of the population of 50,000 in the west coast town of Muelaboh are believed dead and a further 9000 died in the provincial capitol Banda Aceh.
The ten-hour drive from Medan in North Sumatra along the east coast of Aceh province to Pusung, offers a vivid snapshot of the power unleashed by the earthquake.
Along this otherwise bucolic stretch of road are communities which have cumulatively lost upwards of 1,000 residents according to the Indonesian ministry of health. At least 400 people were seriously injured and a further 300 are reported missing.
In places closer to the epicenter on the west side of Sumatra, the earth was split apart by the force of an earthquake of Biblical proportions that struck as fathers threw their fishing nets and children played by the water’s edge. The ensuing tsunami blamed for an estimated 48,000 dead in nations as far away Somalia buried towns in Aceh province under mud and water.
In communities like Pusung, other forces were at work. Here the damage was entirely done by the fast rising debris-choked waters
Sgt. Suyitno, an Indonesian Army officer working at a Lhokseumawe camp for people rendered homeless by the tragedy, said the earthquake caused the waters of the Malacca Strait to suddenly drop.
“Many fish were stranded so the people on the beach, mostly women, children and old people, rushed down the beach to collect them,” he said. “A short time later the first waves came in and trapped those poor people. I was told the wave was as high as two coconut trees.”
Evidence of the devastation wrought by the earthquake begins more than an hour’s drive south of Lhokseumawe, in the town of Nibong. The town’s principal mosque, which squats at the side of the Trans-Sumatran highway linking Medan and Banda Aceh, has become a tent-city built of cheap plastic tarps and sleeping mats.
Arranged like pickets along the mosque’s fence are roughly two-dozen boys under the age of 10, who survey the passing traffic and visitors hollow-eyed and mute. Though no one will come right out at say it, the few adults at the mosque hint that the boys have lost one or both of their parents.
By contrast many areas appear to have escaped unscathed. Behind the mosque are healthy green fields of rice and bucolic scenes of men and buffalo working the ground.
In consecutive towns one sees growing numbers of disposed people, some begging hand-outs along the highway. An estimated 25,000 people have been forced from their homes in the communities around Lhokseumawe, and tent-cities like those in Nibong flourish in the many mosques that line the route.
The buildings are the traditional refuges of long-suffering citizens of Aceh who are frequently trapped between the Indonesian army and separatist rebels who have waged a near 30-year campaign against the government in Jakarta.
In Kadung village 15 kms south of Lhokseumawe, the damage is finally visible for all to see. Although almost a kilometer from the sea shore, grad piles of mud and debris have piled up against and between gaudily colored homes.
While no one died here, the tsunami wiped out the vast shrimp farms that support the community.
“What are we going to do, how will we buy food and clothing now that everything is destroyed,” says an elderly man, surveying the ruined pools. “If someone doesn’t rebuild this could be the end of our community.”
Foreign aid is starting to trickle into Aceh. Two planes loaded with humanitarian aid arrived in Banda Aceh on Tuesday and Australia has dispatched four more military transports to the area.
Pusung’s 1,200 residents of a ardscrabble fishing community on the borders of Lhokseumawe are living in army tents in a camp that is a model of efficiency, run jointly by the army and the Indonesian Red Cross.
Sitting cross-legged in one of the tents surrounded by the few possessions she rescued from her home, 35-year-old Halima counts her blessings. She fled with her family ahead of the rising flood waters and despite the damage to her home, believes it is salvageable.
“There are many people who are suffering far more than we are,” she says, drawing her six-year-old son close. “People have lost their families, children have no parents. We are too scared to return home at this time but at least we still have a home that we can go back to one day.”
-30-
Feb. 8/05
There’s a crack on the wall of my room in Banda Aceh that runs parallel to and about 18 inches below the ceiling before plunging like an Enron profit report, through a narrow, nipple-high band of flowered wallpaper to disappear in the floor.
The one in the john traces all the places where ceiling and walls meet so that every time you reach up to dump a bucket of water over your head you’re confronted by your mortality, and the real possibility the roof is about to drop, squishing you like a bug.
I watched those cracks for several weeks and though every second day brought new aftershocks, including a minute-long 6.1 whopper the day before I returned to Jakarta, the damage seems to have leveled out.
The kids in the school next door didn’t run screaming into the street which I take as a sign they’ve compartmentalized events of the past month almost as well as I.
Aftershocks were a way of life during the month I spent in Aceh after the tsunami. The only night I don’t remember the earth moving was the one J and I spent in a nice hotel in Medan the first day out of the Jakarta. Big, solid cement beast with a flesh and bone interior that’ll probably remain intact until the earth splits open at the end of days.
It really struck me sitting in room 19 of the Kuta Karang Lama hotel in Lhokseumawe, early the same day the intelligence division of the national police – pound-for-pound perhaps the dumbest brutes on the block – picked us up.
If it must 4 a.m. then I’d been at it for almost three days on about five hours sleep.
I’d just filed to the Globe & Mail and the phone rang with FOX! on the line from New York looking for an update. This may be the most enthusiastic & overwrought network in Rupert Murdoch’s television empire. Its employees are like cultists. I remember meeting a hyperactive 20something FOX!!! field producer from New Jersey in Kabul who kept insisting we “swap digits” which apparently means exchange phone-numbers. I had to threaten him with a empty bottle of Uzbek vodka before he backed off, and with me, people usually know when it’s time to back off.
In the world according to FOX!, traffic jams are “devastating” or “crippling”, critics of US foreign policy, “terrorist sympathizers” and Oliver North, “a true American patriot”.
They also pay upwards of $100.00 US per two minute Question & Answer session so we put a cork in it and try to work the phrase “God-fearin’ folks” in to render recognizable the Moslem fishermen and their families who make up the bulk of the Acehnese killed in the Boxing Day tsunami.
I bounced through various layers of their production system before washing up with CHIP! or BOB! or MAX! broadcasting live from something called FOX-CONTROL, the network nerve center and the place where “good” is molded into “bad” and “villains” into “heros”.
I’m not actually sure if FOX-CONTROL is the real name or something I made up but if it’s the latter, it should be the former.
As I struggled to re-form intelligent commentary about what I’d seen the previous day into something simple-syllabic and digestible by FOX!!! anchors and viewers, the floor started to shimmy and wobble. Struggling to contain the giggles, I reworded what was essentially a terrible seismic cause-and-effect Sunday morning event into the actions of a slavering, dangerous and perhaps animated creature with a rudimentary cerebral cortex and a visceral dislike for suburban commuters.
As the words formed, the yellow floor tiles began to undulate, morphing into the scales of the very creature I was conjuring for the lamp-jawed, mouth-breathing masses of middle-America, the swinging florescent ceiling lights slit-eyed cold and malicious, the dull, rolling hum of the ancient air-conditioning unit the bellows of the breast’s great lungs.
My laptop rattled on its grey Formica-topped table, and an ashtray fell to the floor as the doors of adjacent ground-floor units in this segregated (no marriage license meant J and I were not allowed to share a room) down-market hotel in this grey, petro-town swung open spilling terrified, half-awake renters into the rain-soaked parking lot.
At some point the anchor, ignoring the briefing notes, asked what I saw when I looked outside my hotel. It’s a question they ask every time.
I stood in the doorframe watching events unfold, and stuck to scripted descriptions of ruined fishing villages, a mounting death-toll and the three-story-high wall of black water that seemed to actively seek out its victims.
BELOW IS THE PIECE I FILED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL THAT MORNING. IT IS TIMED AT 4:17 AM/DEC 29
Paul Dillon
Lhokseumawe, Indonesia
On a normal day, dozens of brightly colored fishing boats would be tethered to the rickety raised catwalks that meander through the impoverished fishing community of Pusung on the east coast of the island of Sumatra.
Instead the poorest victims of Sunday’s devastating 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the killer tsunamis it spawned spent Tuesday evening trying to rescue their few remaining personal items from their ravaged homes.
“We have nothing left but our lives,” said 25-year-old Nurslah, surveying the thick, putrid pools of mud and broken timbers where her house once stood. “The only good thing is that my husband was fishing when the waves came and his boat was not damaged.”
Others were not so lucky. Three of Nurslah’s neighbours, including a seven year-old boy lost their lives when a wall of water and mud crashed into Pusung at 8:15 a.m., just 15 minutes after residents were jolted to their feet by a powerful earthquake hundreds of miles away in the Indian ocean.
The death toll in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra is expected to reach 25,000, Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said Tuesday in Jakarta. At least one-fifth of the population of 50,000 in the west coast town of Muelaboh are believed dead and a further 9000 died in the provincial capitol Banda Aceh.
The ten-hour drive from Medan in North Sumatra along the east coast of Aceh province to Pusung, offers a vivid snapshot of the power unleashed by the earthquake.
Along this otherwise bucolic stretch of road are communities which have cumulatively lost upwards of 1,000 residents according to the Indonesian ministry of health. At least 400 people were seriously injured and a further 300 are reported missing.
In places closer to the epicenter on the west side of Sumatra, the earth was split apart by the force of an earthquake of Biblical proportions that struck as fathers threw their fishing nets and children played by the water’s edge. The ensuing tsunami blamed for an estimated 48,000 dead in nations as far away Somalia buried towns in Aceh province under mud and water.
In communities like Pusung, other forces were at work. Here the damage was entirely done by the fast rising debris-choked waters
Sgt. Suyitno, an Indonesian Army officer working at a Lhokseumawe camp for people rendered homeless by the tragedy, said the earthquake caused the waters of the Malacca Strait to suddenly drop.
“Many fish were stranded so the people on the beach, mostly women, children and old people, rushed down the beach to collect them,” he said. “A short time later the first waves came in and trapped those poor people. I was told the wave was as high as two coconut trees.”
Evidence of the devastation wrought by the earthquake begins more than an hour’s drive south of Lhokseumawe, in the town of Nibong. The town’s principal mosque, which squats at the side of the Trans-Sumatran highway linking Medan and Banda Aceh, has become a tent-city built of cheap plastic tarps and sleeping mats.
Arranged like pickets along the mosque’s fence are roughly two-dozen boys under the age of 10, who survey the passing traffic and visitors hollow-eyed and mute. Though no one will come right out at say it, the few adults at the mosque hint that the boys have lost one or both of their parents.
By contrast many areas appear to have escaped unscathed. Behind the mosque are healthy green fields of rice and bucolic scenes of men and buffalo working the ground.
In consecutive towns one sees growing numbers of disposed people, some begging hand-outs along the highway. An estimated 25,000 people have been forced from their homes in the communities around Lhokseumawe, and tent-cities like those in Nibong flourish in the many mosques that line the route.
The buildings are the traditional refuges of long-suffering citizens of Aceh who are frequently trapped between the Indonesian army and separatist rebels who have waged a near 30-year campaign against the government in Jakarta.
In Kadung village 15 kms south of Lhokseumawe, the damage is finally visible for all to see. Although almost a kilometer from the sea shore, grad piles of mud and debris have piled up against and between gaudily colored homes.
While no one died here, the tsunami wiped out the vast shrimp farms that support the community.
“What are we going to do, how will we buy food and clothing now that everything is destroyed,” says an elderly man, surveying the ruined pools. “If someone doesn’t rebuild this could be the end of our community.”
Foreign aid is starting to trickle into Aceh. Two planes loaded with humanitarian aid arrived in Banda Aceh on Tuesday and Australia has dispatched four more military transports to the area.
Pusung’s 1,200 residents of a ardscrabble fishing community on the borders of Lhokseumawe are living in army tents in a camp that is a model of efficiency, run jointly by the army and the Indonesian Red Cross.
Sitting cross-legged in one of the tents surrounded by the few possessions she rescued from her home, 35-year-old Halima counts her blessings. She fled with her family ahead of the rising flood waters and despite the damage to her home, believes it is salvageable.
“There are many people who are suffering far more than we are,” she says, drawing her six-year-old son close. “People have lost their families, children have no parents. We are too scared to return home at this time but at least we still have a home that we can go back to one day.”
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