Reaction to Aussie Imam's Rape Comments Heats Up
It is a long way from the shore of Aceh, but the controversial comments by an Australian imam are creating heat across the Islamic world. It remains to be seen if this will this evolve into another 'cartoon controversy'.
The commentary below appeared in the Nov. 3 issue of The Herald newspaper in Australia. It is a strongly-worded analysis of the reaction within that country's Muslim community to some exceedingly offensive statements made by a leading Mufti.
Sheik Taj el-Din al-Hilaly in a recent address to the faithful likened immodestly dressed women to "uncovered meat" inviting assault.
The comments come several months after a series of virulent, tit-for-tat bashing incidents between 'white' men and Lebanese-Australians that began when a drunken mob of Australia-first thugs swarmed dozens of non-Caucasian men, and two highly-publicized gang rapes by men of Paksitani and Lebanese descent.
Beneath the story I have included a large portion of the transcript of what the Mufti actually said. It comes during an obtuse and rambling lecture about the nature of God and punishment that includes the statement - that for some reason the press has not picked up on -that "behind every man who is a thief, a greedy woman. She is pushing him. Not our women in Australia, the women of Canada... And no matter how much he brings her, she wants more. She wants to change the car, and change... Of course, the woman keeps demanding from her husband more than his ability. Either she will tell him to go and deal in drugs, or to go and steal."


Backing a bigot
Andrew Bolt
November 03, 2006
Excuses over. The disgraced mufti of Australia set Muslims a test last month and they failed. That test couldn't have been easier: make Sheik Taj el-Din al-Hilaly pay for preaching that unveiled women invited rape. Prove that Muslims can't be led by a man who says raped women must be "jailed for life". Prove we have nothing to fear from your faith.
Simple? Yet yesterday 34 Muslim groups signed a petition backing this bigot, while others plan a big rally for Sydney tomorrow, denouncing not Hilaly but the non-Muslims who criticise him. The results are in: Islam here -- as represented by many of its leaders -- is now a threat. What's more: our culture of self-hate makes us too weak to properly resist. I know saying such things is hard on the many moderate Muslims I keep insisting are out there. I am sorry for that, but where in God's name are those people? How much longer must we wait for them to speak?
For more than 20 years they said nothing as their most prominent imam, in their biggest mosque, damned Jews as perverts, called suicide bombers heroes, praised terror groups, vilified non-Muslims and hailed the September 11 terror attacks on the United States as "God's work against oppressors".
They said nothing as he gave the run of his mosque to a pro-bin Laden youth group and hired one of its translators as his spokesman. For years they let this man, their mufti, represent Islam in this country, whose language he never really bothered to learn in nearly 30 years of living here.
But I never lost hope, and so for a few days last week thought . . . at last! At last we heard Hilaly being damned by Muslims, too -- by women's groups, a Melbourne University academic and even the Islamic Council of Victoria, which had foolishly helped to make this Egyptian the mufti so no government would dare deport him.
At last Muslims were disowning this man. He was disinvited from a Brisbane festival. There was talk of stripping him of his title. The Lebanese Muslim Association, which runs the Lakemba mosque, even debated sacking him as imam, before banning him from preaching for three months. No, this wasn't much, but many in the media grabbed it hungrily. We badly want to find Muslims who'll renounce the values of the hate-preachers, to show that it's not us against Islam. Mind you, we shouldn't have had to be so pathetically grateful.
What sane person could want a woman jailed for being raped? But we should have known already this was a bigger problem than just Hilaly. Last year Lebanese Sheik Faiz Mohammed also gave a speech in Sydney, which said raped women had themselves to blame. And which of the 500 men who heard Hilaly say the same at his sermon complained? Only when it was reported in the English-speaking press did some concede Hilaly had gone too far.
Yet even then supporters sent him vanloads of flowers, and when he returned to his mosque last Friday he was greeted "like a rock star", said one paper, by an adoring crowd of 5000.And that criticism of him? It faded away.
Now the Lebanese Muslim Association isn't so ashamed of him, after all: "We did accept his apology and we want to move on." The Muslim Women's Association, which first admitted to being "shocked" by Hilaly's sermon, now said he was "very good to all Muslim women".
Said founding president Aziz El Saddik: "Those who say bad things about him, they have very bad manners."
His sermon on rape was for Muslims only. Not our business. But we can't afford to believe that any more.
They weren't Muslim women, after all, who were raped by a Lebanese gang in Sydney, which called them "sluts" and "Aussie pigs". It wasn't a Muslim teenager who was pack-raped in Sydney by Pakistani brothers, whose father told the court: "What do (the victims) expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don't go out at night."
When Hilaly preaches excuses for such rapes, that concerns us all. Very much.
But it is true that not all those defending Hilaly like what he said. The people behind tomorrow's rally say, rather, that our criticism of him has degenerated into just Muslim-bashing. Yesterday's statement by 34 Muslim groups -- most representing Islamic colleges and students, or the Muslims of tomorrow -- says the same, even as it confirms something far more scary.
"We believe that the public scrutiny of this matter should have ended with the sheik's apology," it says. "We believe that the Muslim community should be allowed to deal with the ramifications of the incident without interference from people who only wish to promote hostility and incite hatred towards our community. Finally, we consider this matter to be closed."
Closed? In fact, Hilaly has not retracted a word of what he said. If this matter is "closed" then he has won. But what is most frightening is not that he's won, but how. Both this statement and the rally show he's won because even educated Muslims, born right here, think it's better to defend a Muslim bigot than to have him criticised by infidels.
It's the code of the tribe: the worst of us is better than the best of you. It's a closed community speaking -- a paranoid one that sees itself at war even with people whose only worry is that their preacher excuses rapists. And menace is in the air.
What other congregation at prayer needs to be reminded -- as Hilaly reminded those at his mosque last week -- not to punch people on the way out? Which other rally for a religious leader needs to be warned -- as the NSW Police Minister warned this week -- that police would not tolerate any violence?
I'm not surprised one of Hilaly's former advisers, Jamal Rifi, warns that if he hangs on as Lakemba's imam he may trigger "racial tensions, much bigger than what we had over the Cronulla riots".
But what are we doing to help Muslims to break from him and leave this cultural ghetto, this encampment, before things get truly ugly? Not enough.
For a start, we make too many excuses for the Hilalys, as if they were mere children, or Australia the real villain. Yesterday Suzanne Bassette, national secretary of the Australian Democrats, even said: "I'm willing to stand up with anybody else in this country who happens to agree with Sheik Hilaly's sentiments . . . Unfortunately, how a woman dresses does affect her level of likeliness to be chosen." She said the "real lesson" from this fuss was this "latest opportunity to get angry".
The problem wasn't the mufti who wants to jail raped women, but his critics. Bassette wasn't alone. The Age ran a big cartoon likewise blaming sluttish white girls for putting themselves in danger, and federal Labor's Peter Garrett, the former singer, said Hilaly's comments were terrible, but "at the same time, the levels of violence against Australian women is something happening in the bars, in the clubs, in the bedrooms, in the boardrooms".
Again, we are the truly wicked. Leave Hilaly alone.
How can a culture so sick of itself resist the kind of challenge that Hilaly and his angry supporters represent? How can it inspire young Muslims to side not with him but with us? I don't know, when we teach the young we are a country of child-stealing, land-raping, Muslim-murdering, Yank-licking, gas-belching vandals. Until that changes, expect the traffic to flow more into Hilaly's ghetto than out of it.
Just consider the radical mother of two of the Australian Muslims arrested in Yemen last week on terrorism charges, and accused of ties to al-Qaida -- a so-called former "hippy chick" from Mudgee, who found in Islam what she couldn't in the society that raised her.As I said: Muslims have failed. But so have we all. We now have urgent work to do, if we want to save ourselves from far more strife than we dare yet imagine or say.

Portion of Transcript of Sheik Taj el-Din al-Hilaly's comments
But in the event of adultery, the responsibility falls 90% of the time with women not men.
Why? Because the woman possesses the weapon of seduction. She is the one who takes her clothes off, cuts them short, acts flirtatious, puts on make up, shows off, and goes on the streets acting silly.
She is the one wearing a short dress, lifting it up, lowering it down... then a glance, then a smile, then a word, then a greeting, then a word, then a date, then a meeting, then a crime, then Long Bay Jail, (laughs - one word not clear), then comes a merciless judge who gives you 65 years.
But the whole disaster, who started it?
The Al-Rafihi scholar says in one of his writings, he says: If I receive a crime of rape - kidnap and violation of honour - I would (...) the man and teach him a lesson in morals, and I would order the woman be arrested and jailed for life.
Why, Rafihi? He says, because if she hadn't left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn't have snatched it.
If you take a kilo of meat, and you don't put it in the fridge, or in the pot, or in the kitchen, but you put in on a plate and placed it outside in the yard.
Then you have a fight with the neighbour because his cats ate the meat. Then (...). Right or not?
If one puts uncovered meat out in the street, or on the footpath, or in the garden, or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover... then the cats come and eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat?
The uncovered meat is the problem! If it was covered the cat wouldn't have... it would have circled around it and circled around it, then given up and gone.
If the meat was in the fridge and it smelled it, it can bang its head as much as it wants, but it's no use.
If she was in her room, in her house, wearing her hijab, being chaste, the disasters wouldn't have happened.
The woman possesses the weapon of seduction and temptation.
That's why Satan says about the woman, "You are half a (...). You are my messenger to achieve my needs.
You are the last weapon I would use to smash the head of the finest of men.
There are a few men that I use a lot of things with, but they never heed me.
But you? Oh, you are my best weapon.

Draw your own conclusions about this but I'm thinking at the very least there should be some sort of licensing procedure for all those 'weapons of seduction'!

Abundant Ales and Agro Elephants
Just back in Banda Aceh after a week's running around Java. Spent a full day in Yogyakarta for the first time since the I left in early June, a week after the earthquake. Still 800,000 people without decent place to live and the rainy season approaching. The government's position seems to be embodied by "Crisis? What Crisis?" Wait till the vast chickencoops (yes, literally raised wooden chickencoops 120 m long) crowded with birds and homeless families brew up a nasty Avian flu cocktail and maybe that'll get someone's attention.
Stayed in Jakarta for the Eid, had the best visit yet with the in-laws who are doing some renos in defiance of the floodwaters that seem to seep through the foundations twice a year. There was a calm there I'd not seen before which gives me hope.
Mixed business with pleasure. Briefed out some journo friends about how things are progressing in Aceh and actually spending time with 'my staff' in the office - something that happens every two months, so infrequently that the graphic designer breaks out in a sweat every time I walk into the room - while eating fabulous Thai and Indian food and getting completely hosed three consecutive nights at the Face Bar and The Oriental, something I rarely do up here.
The Evil Thieving Ex-Security Guard has vanished from immediate view though he may simply be saving up his energy to take another run at us now that the fast is over. My housekeeper, The Mouse, had a family tragedy to attend to in far-off Tapaktuan (Dad's in a coma and fading) leaving roomie El Gordo to his own devices while I was away. Won't say he's any worse than me in similr circumstances but the litter of dead cockroaches in the kitchen and the empty fridge testified to his sloth.
Learned yesterday that my old driver, Wally, is dealing with a nasty bit of business as well. His young son fell out of the back of a minibus and cracked his head on the pavement three days ago. Apparently in quite serious shape in Harapan Bunda hospital in Banda so I'll visit later today.
Seems there's a never ending series of tragedies here. Young security guard was beaten to death by a couple of cops for unknowingly raising the Indonesian flag upside-down. Dozens of road death here over the holiday period and further rumblings of discontent within the GAM ranks.
Today I stumbled across the story below filed out of South Sumatra. Not an uncommon occurance there and further north in Aceh. Villagers v Starving Elephants is always going to end badly.
And so it goes.
Starving elephants kill Indonesia farmer
Tue Oct 31, 1:32 AM ET
Starving wild elephants trampled a farmer to death and destroyed several houses in a rampage in a village on Indonesia's Sumatra island, witnesses said Tuesday.
The people of Lubuk Embut, a village on Riau province 600 miles northwest of the capital, Jakarta, have been terrorized by a herd of around 20 elephants in search of food, said Jayok, a village chief who goes by a single name.
Sumatra's elephant habitats are quickly shrinking due to illegal logging and land clearing. About 2,500 are believed to live in the wild on the island, Indonesia's largest.
"We cannot sleep at night and are scared in the day by the sound of trumpeting elephants," Jayok said.
The head of the Riau province's nature reserve, Nafsir Siregar, said scores of wild elephants have also vandalized the nearby villages of Siak and Balairaja, about 90 miles northwest of the regional capital, Pekanbaru.
Siregar said there were insufficient funds to relocate the endangered Sumatran elephants to a protected area where they won't pose a threat to people.

Mr. Gloom & Doonesbury

I was going to put a few words together about how the political in-fighting within the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) has reached a head in recent days and the Old Guard loyalists to the Swedish and Malaysian exiles are now on a collision course with the Young Guard, the guys who didn’t run but stuck it out here through decades of bloodshed and repression.
Sounds vaguely familiar: I’m no expert bit I don’t know a post-conflict situation where similar schisms haven’t emerged.
I was going to write about how there has been a marked increase in shakedowns, truck-jackings and robberies and how guys with handles like Rambo and Deadheart are unwrapping their oiled and cached weapons – by some estimates as many as 1,200 were not decommissioned post-peace deal – and running amok with the tacit support of their commanders while the European Union organ AMM works diligently to whitewash the whole situation in the interests of personal and professional expediency.
I was going to write about how on the eve of the elections (that among other things will set the two GAM factions against one another for the governor’s job much to the glee of the existing power structures) all the prerequisites are in place for the emergence of the perfect storm: the hot winds of a fragmented, armed independence movement colliding with the cooled expectations of homeless, unemployable, landless and poorly represented populations (who may or may not be who they claim-plenty fraud out there) two years after the tsunami.
But I’ll leave further explorations of that gloomy prospect for another night. For now, I’ll direct you to The Sandbox, (http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox) a creation of Doonesbury illustrator Gary Trudeau, a forum not unlike a blog, where ordinary US servicemen and women can post their thoughts and experiences.
Today’s postings include one soldier’s description of being mortared while on guard duty in Iraq; an American soldier in Afghanistan writes about his admiration for his civilian translators and an officer stateside contrasts Cheney’s visit to his base with his job at the time, packing the worldly possessions of a dead 23-year-old female soldier into boxes to be sent to her family.
Gripping stuff.

Sexy SI Bikini Girls Oil Up In The Tsunami-Zone?
Grinch’s spies report the arrival in Banda Aceh of supermodel tsunami-survivor Petra Nemcova in with a support gaggle of stork-legged young belles and enough camera gear to outfit a small nation.
The Czech 2006 Sports Illustrated Magazine covergirl was vacationing in Phuket, Thailand, when the tsunami struck. Her boyfriend photographer was among those killed. She suffered a broken pelvis and spent several hours in a tree before being rescued.
So will the lovely Perta and chums oil up for a shoot aboard the beached PLN Electrical barge, among survivors at a local barrack or perhaps in the ruins of mosque? All enquires should be directed to you friendly, neighborhood Syariah law enforcement unit because her personal soft-porn website has very little information.
Aceh has seen its fair share of celebs since Dec. 2004 though mercifully aging opportunists like boy-toy Ricky Martin gave us a wide berth. I seem to remember ManU football star Chrisiano Ronaldo swunf by on a three-hour whistle-stop pausing long enough for the cameras to catch him kicking around a soccer ball with a select group of kids before jetting off to Bali to shoot a Powerdrink commercial.
Nemcova has created a fund-raising organ called the Happy Hearts Fund which, if I understand the hype, is administered by a charity called Give2Asia (which I’ve never heard of) but apparently was created by The Asia Foundation. Hmmm. Wonder if they’re the one’s organizing this trip?
The HHF’s focus is “to aid children who have suffered from natural disasters”. They held a fundraiser last week in the US (gimped tennis diva Serena Williams etc) around the release of a coffee table book called the Big Red Book, which is described thus: ... features iconic personalities and ordinary people who have made extraordinary contributions. The coffee table book has been photographed by well-known photographers that use the thematic exploration of the color red via poetry, photography and art.
Huh?
HHF claims to have donated $130,000 to a Thai foundation that built a dorm for 80 school kids, another $38,000 to a Thai university “for psychological and emotional programs for children in tsunami-affected areas”n and $12,000 for Orphan Aid (whozat?) to support 20 kids.

Samaritan's Purse Orders Out of North Sumatra
Medan, North Sumatra, Oct 3 (ANTARA) - Indonesia`s social affairs minister has issued an instruction asking a foreign non-governmental organization (NGO), Samaritan`s Purse, to immediately leave North Sumatra, for illegal practice of converting people`s faith in the province.
"The social affairs minister has issued an order for Samaritan`s Purse to leave immediately and stop operating in North Sumatra," Raden Muhammad Syafi`i, chairman of the Reform Star Party (PBR) faction at the North Sumatra regional legislative council (DPRD), said here on Tuesday.
Syafi`i said that he got the information about the instruction from the ministry`s director general for social development, Gazali H. Situmorang, when they met in Jakarta, last Saturday (Sept 30).
"So, in the future, Samaritan`s Purse is allowed to operate only in East Nusa Tenggara," he said. The US-based NGO has been spreading certain religious teachings under a disguise of humanitarian mission, he said. Syafi`i was of the view that a number of foreign NGOs operating in Indonesia had claimed that they were on humanitarian mission, while they were actually bringing other missions. "They are also loaded with certain missions, including converting people to a particular belief, as what have allegedly done by 12 foreign NGOs in Aceh," he said.
The North Sumatra DPRD called managers of Samaritan`s Purse last September 18, 2006, following complaints by some people on the activities of the NGO.

If true, this story carried by the national news wire Antara is significant as it is the first time I am aware of of a foreign agency being thrown out of N Sumatra province for preaching since the tsunami. SP is working on Nias island - which is predominantly Christian/animist - and has operations in Meulaboh, Aceh Barat and several other districts here in Aceh province. If they are being tossed out of Nias then one has to wonder how long they'll be allowed to remain in Aceh, which as we all know is 99 percent Muslim. I understand they make a mean cheese-cake and pizza at the Meulaboh office.
Also significant as SP has connections at the highest levels in Washington- headed by Franklin Graham (son of presidential confessor Billy) who is perhaps best known outside Evangelical circles for popping out of his hole long enough to describe Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion".
Actually, the full quote is: "We're not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He's not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion."
I was a little surprised they are allowed to stay this long but the tsunami did attract a diverse set of characters. I have had a few peripheral dealings with SP, particularly in Nias where their chopper was instrumental in providing medical services to remote areas in the wake of the March 2005 earthquake. No doubt they saved lives.
At the same time, if the allegations of proselytizing - a criminal offence in Indonesia that mobs have used to rationalize violent attacks on minority Muslim sects - are true it is extremely serious. Plays into the hands of the hardcore minority who see the 'defence of Islam against Crusader influences' as Job One.
More as events unfold.

Creepy Dead Baby Recruitment Efforts
The following item from The Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2387589,00.html) must qualify as the creepiest item of the day:
THE Pope will cast aside centuries of Catholic belief later this week by abolishing formally the concept of limbo, in a gesture calculated to help to win the souls of millions of babies in the developing world for Christ.
All the evidence suggests that Benedict XVI never believed in the idea anyway. But in the fertile evangelisation zones of Africa and Asia, the Pope — an acknowledged authority on all things Islamic — is only too aware that Muslims believe the souls of stillborn babies go straight to Heaven. For the Church, looking to spread the faith in countries with a high infant mortality rate, now is a good time to make it absolutely clear that stillborn babies of Christian mothers go direct to Heaven, too.
The Pope is expected to abolish only “limbus infantium”, where the souls of unbaptised infants go. The precise status of “limbus patrum”, where the good people went who lived before Christ remains . . . well, in limbo.
Is it just me or is the competition for savable souls getting just a wee bit wacky? What next, microwave ovens and redeemable frequent flier miles for new converts?
This will presumably provide fertile ground for comic relief but there's at least one prankster out there who'll have to give this one a close look. In his seminal album - yes, ALBUM... black disky containing recorded data - Class Clown, George Carlin riffs on Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo. This a few tracks after The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television, which to this day I can (and do) quote chapter and verse. It all seems so genteel now but back in the 70s - when attending a Life of Brian matinee (We-wees Wodewick!) was considered grounds for excommunication - Carlin, Richard Pryor and other graduates of the Lenny Bruce school of social criticism were considered dangerous men.
If the Pope really wants to ramp up the numbers in developing countries he might consider lowering the conversion bar. Most Evangelists just wanna dunk people, the conversion to Islam is only slightly more difficult than getting a video membership card (Recite the Testament of Faith in Arabic before a cleric and it's 'Welcome Aboard'), and Mormons will do for you retroactively after you - and your entire line - are centuries dead.
I recommend drive-through conversions tied into an election-registration program. Resign yourself to a certain vision of the thereafter and take a degree of control over the here-and-now at the same time.
Forgive me, I'm ten days into the fast and feeling a bit lightheaded. Monday was tough; pretty much ready to chew through my seatbelt on the drive to Pizza House (a straight rip-of of Pizza Hut located in the centre of Banda Aceh) to break the fast with a large House Pepperoni with extra-cheese and strawberry milkshake. I really feel for the kids who work there. How tough is it to be preparing food when you haven't had a thing since 430 am?
Word @ Pasar Aceh
- Talk on the street is that the Shariyah enforcement androids want to close down Caswells sandwich shop, one of only two places where the infidels can eat during daylight hours.
- Our lovely cleaning lady at the Banda Aceh office lost her husband yesterday. He was helping a neighbor work on the house and somehow electrocuted himself. She's got four kids under the age of 16.
- Will break fast at the office in 48 minutes and 23 seconds, 22 seconds, 21 seconds... as one of our international staff is returning to Japan. Then off the Italian restaurant for overcooked linguini.
- Grinch Lair has been rewired for wireless Internet. Boys climbed up the mast outside the kitchen (dead owner, the former Regent of North Aceh, was a ham radio nut) and now we've got better connection speeds than folks in Singapore. Full package costs about $90/month. Joy. No excuse not to work 24/7 now.
- Alerted teman-teman in bulk e-mail that the Blog is alive. Also advised about the following Grinch cameo appearance: Earlier this year I helped the folks at a London production house shoot a reenactment for the show ‘Seconds From Disaster’. My role as 'Anonymous Technician #2: Guy with Measuring Tape’ is being described as "a gripping tour-de-farce" – MSNBC; "complex… allegorical" - S Hawking; "Reminiscent of Brando and other complicated fat guys.." – The Drudge Report; "Hoo-Mammy-Tsunami!!!" - Hollywood Insider.
‘Asian Tsunami’ is going to air on National Geographic Channel in the US on the 25th October at 9pm, and again on the 28th October at 3pm. No word on broadcasts north of the 49th parallel or abroad.

Ex-Guard Begging Whup-Ass: Redux

As expected, the saga of the thieving guard drags on.
Only in Indonesia (or in this case Aceh) does a guy who is paid to protect your home and then turns around and thieves from you, charge you with slander after he is fired.
Rommie got notice a short while ago that he's expected at Banda Aceh headquarters to answer slander charges.
I suppose we can look forward to further fun and games in coming weeks including a possible summons to the Grinch. Yeah Baby! Pic on the front page of the newspaper! Check here for further updates...
All pales in comparison to news from abroad about the psycho who barricaded himself in a single-room Amish schoolhouse and sharted executing girls aged eight-12. A dozen children in hospital, four dead along with the suspect, a milkman described as a "quiet man" and "a good father."
This is the third school shooting in the States in the past ten days. Last week in Colorado a guy did the same thing but molested the girls first. One teen and the gunman dead when cops burst through the door.
Meanwhile the Repubican congressman who co-chairs the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, has resigned for sending explict emails and sms' to teenage pages at his office. He claims he is a depressed alky and has checked into rehab. His former colleagues are putting as much daylight as possible between themselves and Mark Foley saying they had no idea. Presumably they did know he was an alcoholic but that it wasn't serious enough to effect his performance as a lawmaker for the past 12 years.
One day it's all gonna be too much and I'm going to leave the news behind. The psychic weight is becoming unbearable. Now that I've got my country bolthole - five acres and love shack in coastal BC signed, sealed and delivered Sept 1 - it is even more do-able.

Evil Thieving Guard Begging for a Beating
I thought this situation with our thieving guard was taken care of but nooo.
After copping to stealing the roomie's laptop when 'interviewed' by a sage uncle and his copper buddy in the kampung a couple of nights ago, the guy showed up at the office today claiming he is innocent.
He arrived unannounced with a young cop who lives on my block looking for the roomie. I was called in to observe and maintain a menacing presence. He now catagorically denies having lifted the unit and is demanding his job back and his salary! In fact, my driver told me this morning that last night's guard told him (but not me) that the guy showed up last night to work!
To his credit the cop is not taking sides - at least in my presence - but says it would be better to make an official complaint to the police and let the system, crooked as it is, decide innocence or guilt.
Fair enough. We tried to be nice but now it looks like the gloves are off.
What neither cop nor robber know is that when the uncle and buddy went out to the village to do their interview a couple of nights ago - during which the gormless jerk admitted the theft - the village head asked them to arrest the guy because he's been stealing stuff from his own neighbours!
The other irritant in this case is the fact that the snitch-maid who finally IDed the guard (only after she'd confessed to nicking one of our water dispensers mind you) vanished at noon so when the roomie wanted to sit down with her, she was nowhere to be found.
This is going to get worse before it gets better. Guaranteed.

It's only Day 2 of the fast but already I feel like crap.
Woke up after a full "ayam a la J" dinner Sunday morning and guzzled two pots of coffee before realizing I'd already broken the rules... so sat with a couple of liters of Acehnese brew burning a hole in my belly for the better part of the day, trying to read, trying to sleep, trying to do anything but think about laying a couple pieces of bread in my gullet to head off the acid. By the time magrib rolled around I was twisted.
I woke today feeling a bit better. It's 5:08 now so only 90 minute or so to go. Gonna send Dede - my driver - out to pick up something to drink and maybe some bananas shortly.
I don't remember it being this hard last year. I think it is accumulated stress from dealing with issues on the home front.
I never got around to explaining the dynamic at Chateau Grinch in earlier posts. Since taking the place in June 2005 I've had to fire several housekeepers and one of the guards - we are required to have guards - for thieving. Most recently one of the roomies had a laptop pinched - what, did you think he wasn't going to notice? - and my ipod has gone missing as well a day before heading to Maldives on R&R. The other roomie reports his water dispenser has vanished from his room.
Turns out the housekeeper took the water dispenser, which only produced hot and scorching hot water, to her husband to be fixed. When he and various members of the extended family couldn't figure out how to fix it I guess they decided it looked good in the corner of their house so she never bothered to return it.
After recriminations and tears she offered to pay for the damn thing and then coughed up that Dyulfan had come into the house while we were on holidays and the place was empty, and walked off with the laptop.
I've been crushing down the desire to take a length of pipe to his head and instead developed an elaborate rus to get his home address. Roomie has some connections to local cops - having been interrogated, threatened and harassed over several years - and later this evening, once the evil one has returned to his home, they'll pounce.
Now the question becomes 'what next?'
What exactly has he stolen and what are the chances of actually getting any of it back? Will he cop to the thefts or end up in cells? Will he turn up at the house with a mob of his friends and family or try and take revenge on the maid? Arrggh.
Its amazing how many people have similar stories though. Just learned a friend had her camera stolen from her bedroom recently, others have had people slip into their homes at night to empty the refrigerator. Ask anyone you find a story.
At the same time I've got all kinds of work-related deadlines to meet over the next 10 days or so, and this after coming out of a pretty rough production cycle that began in late August.
And I wonder why my stomach is in knots.

Not Quite Dead Yet!
Speaking of near-death experiences, here's a creepy one.
Plugged my birth name into Blogger Search a short while ago and came up with the following note, dated Sept 12 from some Missouri lass' MySpace site:
I heard this morning that (my name) died last night in a car accident. I was so sad when I heard that. I was never great friends with him but i knew people who were and who it was going to affect greatly. Like my sophmore year prom date josh, and tasha atwell who's grandpa comes into where i work a lot. And Raji..his brother. I think i am more sad for them. I wish i could do something besides dedicate a blog to him.
Yikes! And here's me all tanned and healthy after a week's R&R out of Aceh, and freshly stuffed from our staff pre-Ramadan Megang feast in the parking lot of the shop earlier today.
On a more pleasant note, apparently I am also a guitar-packing member of the Humbolt Green Party on walk-about in Peru, a B-list Hollywood movie actor, an Aussie drug policy specialist, a celebrity chef with my own TV show, a 22-year-old Limerick resident up on weapons charges, a Denver fire department captain, a Californian jewelry-maker, a high school newspaper sex columnist, and an on-line auto auctioneer.
No wonder I'm so tired all the time.

Top Gear Host Hospitalized After 300mph Crash
Doctors treating Richard Hammond said last night that the Top Gear presenter had "suffered a significant brain injury" when the jet-powered dragster he was driving crashed after reaching speeds approaching 300mph.
The father of two had to be cut from the wreckage and was flown by air ambulance to Leeds General infirmary, which issued a statement about his condition after his wife and children had been to see him. In the statement, the hospital trust said: "Mr Hammond has suffered a significant brain injury. It's still giving cause for concern as it is still early after the injury. However, we are reasonably optimistic that he will make a good recovery."
Spinal injuries
The two most serious possibilities are that he has suffered damage as a result of his brain slamming against the inside of his skull during the crash. Because of that, arteries could have been ruptured. Doctors will also be fearful of spinal injuries. As well as his family, Hammond, 36, was visited by Top Gear co-presenters Jeremy Clarkson and James May. Clarkson reported that Hammond had smiled briefly at him when he quipped: "The reason you're here is because you're a crap driver."

I really like this guy, a foil to the pompous, motorcycle-hating git Clarkson.
Bloody miracle the guy is alive at all.
Kinda reminds me of the story out of Arizona or Nevada a couple of years back about the fellow who bloted a jet engine to the roof of his station wagon, and opened it up in an open piece of road. Car got airborne at some point and basically vanished. Took weeks but the wreckage was eventually located beneath a black smudge on the side of a nearby mountain, the implication being he'd plowed into it a la Wile E Coyote.
Turned out to be a hoax rather than a Darwin Award candidate but the idea remains hugely entertaining.

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.

Apologia
It’s been a while.
And I wrote this three weeks ago.. couldn’t figure out my logon for the Blog! How embarrassing is that?
The delay is not because I have nothing to say or that old crutch about being worried about getting busted for publicizing stuff that is too sensitive as almost happened last year… (Funny to be purging my anger about issues only to scurry back into the office in the wee hours to erase my blog entry!), and certainly not because of a lack in things to write about.
But with a wee bit of time now available to me in the evenings – making an effort to cut back on those weeks of 15-hour days – I hope to be able to bring a few things forward. That and a distant cousin’s email the other day that reminded me of why I got into journalism to begin with, have got me set down in front of the Mac listening to Ben Harper and Blind Boys from Alabama.
The weekend’s Sunday Times carried a story about how millions have gone missing from various aid agencies involved in Aceh beneath an eye-catching headline that reads: Massive Fraud in Tsunami Rebuilding.
Beyond the BBC I’ve not had any calls about it today but who knows what the next days will bring. The main source of the information seems to be a local NGO that supposedly monitors corruption-related issues here.
Like most journos, I used to steer clear of citing these kinds of groups, all the while pillaging their files for information that passes the Sniff Test, to follow-up on. The ST guy didn’t bother and the consequence is that the story is garbled, hyperbolic and rather than setting the bar nice and high, is so full of holes that anyone with half a brain can punch it full of holes.
Which is too bad. I have been waiting for months for someone to do this story properly because there’s no doubt that graft is increasingly an issue and a solid right to the chin might snap the powers that be back to life.
The city is awash in banners decrying corruption and urging people to Maju bersama, tampa korupsi (Move Forward Without Corruption), the President has in the past 48 hours again vowed to bust down anyone caught siphoning off money, Wolfowitz was in town making similar noises on behalf of the World Bank etc etc and everyone nods and smiles and then plants their faces back in the trough.
The local government flunkies are as slick and oily as ever, and enjoy a position of great authority over the international agencies: you can’t get the job done on your own and they don’t have the money or capacity to do it on their own. So, when you offer to ‘support’ their efforts in the field and they show up with an envelop full of $200.00 hotel bills following a three-day ‘workshop’ in a one-horse town in the sticks where the executive suite costs $20 a night, what are ya gonna do? Very few have the stomach to do what needs to be done: call in the head of the delegation and tell him you’re not his personal ATM, that you have noted his team’s attempt to rip you off and are preparing a report to his superiors, the BRR’s complaints board and the president’s office for good measure in the event there is a repeat.
That approach won’t work in Java but in Aceh people understand the big stick and sometimes you have to wield it.
Everyone is grappling with this one and no one will talk about a united response.
At the same time, we have not seen to sort of institutional corruption one generally associates with Indonesia. More like nibbling about the edges.
And the ST’s ‘expose’ that contractors are corrupt will come as no surprise to anyone who has renovated their bathroom back home in Brighton, Boston or Bombay.
On the plus side, Banda Aceh now boasts its first Italian restaurant, located in the same alleyway where Steakhouse 1 & 2 are found. The fellow who runs all three operations is canny, paying off local and national police to the tune of $2,500.00 a month, paying off the Religious Police and their yoot Taliban shock-troops by contributing to their charities of choice, getting papered up legally though the local administration etc. He’s gotta sell a lot of lager to make it pay but he is obviously making a go of it, fueled by our demands for beer, wine and more beer.
The Spaghetti joint will take off no doubt, especially as more and more foreign families opt to relocate to Aceh when the UN’s security phase drops as is being considered. Current Phase 3 means no family members are allowed, with a compensatory pay hike to the tune of about $2,500.00 per UN employee/month. With close to 300 people working under that security umbrella that’s a $9 million cost savings over the course of a year.
In the interests of full disclosure, I get that salary top-up so I am not exactly a disinterested party.
I am all for lowering the security phase if it makes sense but in this case I – and many others who are not necessarily looking at the bottom-line – think it is poorly timed.
Provincial elections will be held in August (Insh’allah) so why would you not wait until October/November before lowering the phase? Right now we have no idea what the sort of Law on the Governance of Aceh (LOGA) the House in Jakarta is going to approve, and how that package is likely to be received by many thousands of non-combatants.
Phase adjustment will result in an influx of new foreign faces all of whom will have to go through a period of readjustment to local norms at a time when grassroots fires will be burning in the lead-up to Election Day. We know that some politicians are going to try and make hay bleating about morally corrupt internationals so why add potential fuel to the fundamentalist fires at such a sensitive time?
Some will argue that the Phase could simply be raised in the event of trouble forgetting the huge internal administrative costs associated with this exercise and the potential costs to individuals who opt to bring their families in to join them will wipe out whatever marginal cost savings their might have been.
No. I say wait till we see the outcome of these elections and make a decision based on the situation on the ground rather than the fiscal expediencies laid out by UN bean counters.

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 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 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.

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.

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."

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.”

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-