Ian Fisher, Banda Aceh – Business is coming back to Banda Aceh, a city hit hard by the tsunami, and not all of it fits into neat moral boxes.
On Diponegoro Street, at what was once the commercial heart of this city, a muddy man named Husnaidi, 30, picked through the debris ejected from the shops first by the tsunami and then by the looters. He knew that what he took - mostly bits of metal and plastic he could sell as scrap – was not his.
But he said he had no choice in order to survive after the wave carried away his home, his wife, his only child. "If I could not collect these things, I don't know what I would do," he said.
Down the street, a merchant worked to empty his clothing shop of everything that was salvageable, before the looters finished the job for him. He was only partly sympathetic.
"The owners may still be alive," said the merchant, Nasruddin, 28, who like many people here has only one name. "Why are people looting? Just because they don't have a home doesn't give them the right to steal."
The wave that changed so much here has also changed economic life, and in complicated ways. Scrap dealers are thriving, as people rifle through rubble often only just before bulldozers remove the mucky debris forever. A market stall in the devastated city of Meulaboh, south of here, sells scrounged household goods like pots and pans. Landlords are demanding wildly inflated rents from the rich army of foreign aid workers and journalists.
One of Indonesia's biggest tobacco companies has donated food and several tents for refugees, but at the price of a big blue advertising banner hanging on one tent over the homeless people inside.
"Be Cool. Be Confident," reads the banner for the Sampoerna tobacco company, one of Indonesia's largest. If this seems tasteless at best, or exploitative at worst, the people crowded in lamplight on a recent night inside the tent did not see it that way.
"I'm just grateful that they gave us a place to stay," said Nurmala, 39, a woman who has lived for several weeks with her three children inside the Sampoerna tent at the Mata Ie refugee camp here. "They sincerely want to help."
In short, the lines between giving assistance and taking advantage, crime and survival, are all being blurred nearly four weeks after the tsunami hit.
Capt. Afrizal, chief of the criminal section of the Banda Aceh police department, admits to no small amount of confusion. Looting, he said, has become the No. 1 crime problem here, and on Monday alone, police officers arrested 43 people accused of the crime.
But about 300 of the city's 780 police officers died in the tsunami, and for the overstretched survivors to decide who is a looter – or to what extent people should be allowed to pick up things carried by the waves miles from their owners – is not easy. "We don't really even know if they are relatives of the people who died or not," he said.
Chapter 363 of Indonesia's penal code carries a quirk that increases jail sentences by seven years for people accused of crime during war or natural disasters – it includes earthquakes at sea specifically – and Captain Afrizal said he was determined to uphold the law. But he said that for the moment, with so many people needing money and material goods so badly, the police were arresting only those suspected of serious theft.
"If someone steals a motorbike tire or a lamp from a house, we don't arrest them," he said. The complications grow given that the main jail in Banda Aceh was destroyed in the tsunami – all but two of the prisoners escaped – and anyone arrested has to be trucked 25 miles away to the jail in Jantho.
Such moral difficulties here these days were on display at a roadside scrap shop not far from the police station. A man named Sulaiman, 39, who said he lost 7 of his 13 immediate relatives, including his mother and several siblings, offered a scrap dealer an iron gate that he said once protected his motorcycle repair shop. Mr. Sulaiman said he would never pick up something that was not his.
"It shouldn't be forgiven," he said. "We have already been through a disaster, and people are making another disaster" by selling other people's property, he said.
The scrap dealer, Ibrahim, offering about $7 for the gate, chimed in. "It's forbidden," he said, using a word that connotes a sin against Islam.
Still, the test that Ibrahim, who trucks the scrap south to the city of Medan, uses to determine what is looted and what is not might seem loose in other circumstances. "If the person says it is his, then I will take it," he said. A man, Tarmizi, 40, watching the transaction as he waited for a taxi nearby, was skeptical. "These are just people looting," he said. "It is not humanitarian."
Still, business is booming. One scrap dealer, Maward, 34, said he had collected about 220 pounds of scrap a day before the tsunami. Now he is taking in about four and a half tons a day, with aluminum fetching an especially high price, about $4.50 a pound in Medan, compared with about 70 cents a pound for iron.
Standing in front of piles of scrap – sewing machines, engine blocks, bicycle rims, a noodle maker – he said he had no qualms taking whatever people bring him. "I would not call it looting," he said. "These things were swept away by the water."
Along Diponegoro Street, a man inside the Pasar Aceh Shopping Center, which was looted and burned last week, said he was looking for gold. He was digging through piles of mud in a watch store he said belonged to his dead brother, though he gave only a halting and sketchy account of his brother's business and his fate. "My brother kept gold in here."
Outside, a man with a cart tethered to a scooter drove off with a mirror, a handsaw and a child's blue umbrella. A dump truck left with a load of refrigerators. A pair of policemen stood guard, the question of what to do apparently beyond them.
"Some of the shops had valuable things inside," said one officer, Masriswan, 24. "Most of it has been taken by the looters. A little of it has been taken by the owners."