The Hindu : International : In Aceh, most have gone forever

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Monday, Jan 03, 2005

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International

In Aceh, most have gone forever

By John Aglionby

BANDA ACEH, JAN. 2. I thought I would know what to expect when I arrived in Indonesia. A few days before I had seen the devastation wreaked by the tsunami in Phuket in Thailand. But nothing prepared me for Banda Aceh: the assault on all my senses of the smell, the sight and even taste, of the rotting bodies.

I had arrived in the Thai resort of Phuket the day after the tsunamis but by then even in the worst affected areas, the majority of the corpses had been collected. The bodies did not look pretty at the morgue; severely distended and many with their clothes ripped off by the sea. But at least they were at the morgue and at least most of the faces were recognisable to those who knew them.

Identification impossible

But in Indonesia's Banda Aceh — close to the epicentre of the earthquake — the scale of the carnage was so much greater. I could tell only if the bodies were male or female, but in most cases little else, the skin turned a reddish shade of black, facial features erased, making identification virtually impossible for the scores of people who streamed down to the ravaged areas to try to find their families and friends.

Those were the corpses you could see. Buried beneath the rubble and the mud are the thousands unlikely ever to be recovered. A similarly large number have been washed out to sea. One day, perhaps, one will drift ashore onto some tranquil beach or another will get caught up in an unsuspecting fisherman's net. But most are gone forever.

Then there is the devastation to buildings. In Thailand it had looked bad enough.

There shop fronts were trashed, cars stacked on cars. Signs had fallen onto a promenade that was impassable in many places.

But the buildings were visible for what they were before the tempest came, recognisable for what they had been before last Sunday's assault by nature.

In Banda Aceh, only a handful of buildings still stand in the affected areas, dotted randomly around the landscape. They offer no clue as to why they escaped the 10-metre walls of water and the rest did not.

In this devastated landscape people pick through the wreckage, hoping to find some of their property, or even a living person trapped in the rubble.

In Banda Aceh, it was not only the severity of the devastation that contrasted so sharply with that in Thailand but also the distance that the damage extended.

In Phuket the tsunami, for the most part, only affected properties along the seafront or perhaps for a couple of blocks deep; the carnage in Banda Aceh went on for miles.

In a city of horrific sights, one of the weirdest was the 50-foot fishing boat that had taken over the car park of the Medan hotel, a good 5 km from the coast. Incredibly it was standing upright and still appeared intact.

I thought the devastation in Banda Aceh was the worst that I would see, I was to be proved badly wrong.

The day I arrived in Banda Aceh the first stories were beginning to trickle out from the west coast, the area closest to the epicentre. Indonesia's President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, described the reports as "frightening," particularly from the largest town in the region, Meulaboh. He said the rate of destruction was 70 to 80 per cent and initial estimates of the dead, based on nothing more than rough guesswork, was a minimum of 10,000.

Television footage confirmed his prediction. Meulaboh made Banda Aceh look serene. Barely a single neighbourhood had escaped the tidal waves that crashed over the town three or four times and left it several metres underwater for a while.

Scenes of World War

It reminded me of the pictures of cities in Germany during the Second World War that had endured a heavy Allied bombing; the odd lucky building had escaped unscathed but the vast majority were unfit for human habitation at best, and only several inches above the ground at worst. My immediate thought was that the number of dead must have been much more than 10,000 of the 40-50,000 population. Then the second night in Banda Aceh I heard about a string of towns north of Meulaboh that had been completely levelled, where six-inch-high rubble was considered high. Where nothing was left at all.

The following day I set off to these towns. We drove about 13 km out of town until we came to the first destroyed bridge, near an army barracks that made Meulaboh look semi-respectable. Then we started walking, accompanied by a few dozen people hurrying off down the coast to see what was left of their relatives' homes. Three-and-a-half hours later we arrived at Leupueng, the first big town outside Banda Aceh. It had disappeared. —

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