Ugly little demo last night and today in Banda Aceh. Some shadowy organ calling itself FORAK (Forum Inter Shelter Communication) rolled up to the BRR offices in Banda Aceh last night with a crowd of 500 people, forced the doors closed and basically held the staff hostage for several hours.
Publically they say the issue is insufficient reconstruction but behind the scenes folks say the mob is a front for business interests (read, contractors) who have not received the plum building contracts they feel they are entitled to.
Unclear what set people off this morning but it seems the crowd was moving away from the offices, the Brimob were a little too abbrasive and the whole thing degenerated into a nasty rock-throwing incident that injured several cops. Instead of gunning down the demonstrators - as they would have done here until the tsunami struck - the cops opened up with the water cannon.
The pix of the scene show paving stones and bricks littering the front lawn of the BRR offices and several trucks with smashed windows.
This is the first in what I expect to be a series of increasingly nasty confrontations between now and the year's end involving ordinary civilians with a legitimate beef, bitter little Hizbt-tahrir wanna-be jihandis, covert elements of the security apparatus who are always happy to stir the pot, and political types hoping to cash in on local anger over a variety of different issues by scapegoating BRR, the infidel international community, NGOs, the behavior of some foreign women, in hopes of gaining more votes.
We can expect all these riptides to converge in the coming months and no one seems to be paying attention to it, least of all the gormless humps who set policy for the UN's security apparatus. They recently forced through recommendations that have seen the security phase in Aceh, Ambon and other national flashpoints reduced from Phase 3 to Phase 2. Without getting into the operational changes this entails, suffice to say that against all recommendations on the ground New York, under advisement from Jakarta has made this political/financial decision (savings of about $900 per international staff member/month) at the worst possible time.
Be interesting to see how DSS, Jakarta and NYC scapegoat when the first internationals are injured in one of these clashes.