01-03-2005, 01:52 PM
Assalamu aleikum,
Just want to share with you something that a friend of mine has written in a local paper in Australia. I have asked for his permission to post it here. A little more insight when concerning Indonesia.
''I am deeply distressed for the people of Aceh.
I undertook linguistic field work over many years in Aceh, included the areas most heavily hit by the Quake and Tsunami. The Acehnese are coastal dwelling people, who almost entirely live on coastal plains, growing rice and fishing. Their lives are backgrounded by steep and impenetrable mountains No infrastructure will be found once you get past the narrow coastal strips: few roads, no resources, very few people. This disaster will have affected close to a thousand kilometres of coast-hugging communities, village by village, and region by region. The one long road that joined them all up will have now been cut in a thousand placed by water and quake.
Casualties in Aceh alone will surely number over a hundred thousands. Just from watching the film reports, and knowing the geography, this much is obvious. Most of the damaged areas have not even been been mentioned in the media. The main airport is half an hour's drive inland from the water's edge, and well above sea level, yet it too was affected by the sea. Even the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, now reported to have lost a third of its population, is several kilometres from the river mouth. Yet between Banda Aceh and the sea were still more villages and the destruction which reached the capital had already passed through these!
It is unbearable to think of village after village which I visited and knew well, now completely destroyed, communities dwelling there for centuries now a ruined memory. More than a million Acehnese will be left with no water, no means of livelihood, rice fields ruined by salt and flood, livestock and gardens destroyed.
The village Cot Trieng, near Bireuen, where I lived during my linguistic research was only a few metres above sea level. The families who hosted me and whom I drank coffee with and ate rice with every day will now be dead, or in the greatest torment of grief and shock imaginable as but a surviving remnant.
The Acehnese people number in the millions. Of those millions, this disaster will have affected every family and every community. Numberless villages will have been erased from the map. After a few hours of nature's work, whole dialects only exist now only in memory, or on our tape recordings. For the people who spoke them are no more.
After more than a decade of brutal military repression from the Indonesian authorities, and indeed after one hundred and thirty years of invasions, attacks and conflicts of one kind or anothers, this disaster eclipses them all for the battered people of Aceh. My heart weeps for them after this, the greatest calamity of them all.
Mark Durie''