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.