Vaudine England – The lonely mosque, the last thing standing in the once-thriving seaside community of Lampuuk just west of Banda Aceh, now plays host to a huddle of tents.
Sand and heat blows through on strong winds, unhindered by any of the hundreds of houses that once stood here before the tsunami of December 26 flattened everything, even the trees. It's a miserable, wasted earth, but for the desperately unhappy people left alive here, this is home and they want to stay here.
Zulkifi Idahim, the sole survivor of his family, wants no place else. He watched from a nearby hill as the wave came and wiped out his wife and four children. Now he hangs around all day and commiserates with Ibu Rohani, who lost two children, four cousins and six grandchildren.
Mohamad Nasir makes up the sad threesome; he lost seven family members. "Tell everyone – we just want a house! Thanks to the foreigners [international aid agencies], the food and water is OK so we can stay here. And we want to stay here! We don't want other places," Nasir insists.
The message is repeated by others. For people who have lost almost everything, their simple wish is to live in the place they know.
Instead, government and Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) officials are moving the displaced out of refugee camps in their home towns and villages and into semi-permanent "barracks," part of what human rights activists and others say is a ploy to use the tsunami to gain strategic control over the population in an area long torn by sectarian strife.
"Non-food logistics are under the control of the TNI and they are using it to force people into temporary shelters. The idea behind it is for TNI to control people," says Wardah Hafidz, coordinator of the Urban Poor Consortium, a Jakarta-based non-government organization active in distributing building materials and other support in Aceh.
"Anyone who refuses to be relocated is then labeled GAM [Free Aceh Movement]," she adds, in reference to the separatist movement which has been at war with TNI for almost three decades. Once people are told to move into a barracks, she says, their name is deleted from lists at the refugee camps and their daily allocation of food there stops. Clearly, if food is contingent upon moving to a barracks, any notion of choice is irrevocably tarnished.
This schism over where Aceh's distressed survivors must go is the biggest issue facing planners, aid workers and the government.
It is closely related to the other large post-tsunami controversy over whether survivors will be allowed to rebuild their homes on the sea shore. Government planners speak of a 500-metre or even two-kilometer exclusion zone along the coast, presumably to protect people in the event of another tsunami.
But for families who make a living from the sea and have no other asset but the site of their former homes, the exclusion zone seems another ploy to rob them.
At the provincial city of Meulaboh, 245km down the west coast from Banda Aceh, popular resistance to the barracks plan is starkly obvious. Donated tents are pitched directly on top of the foundations of people's former homes. In many cases, the tents are not even lived in. They are there to stake a claim, to say, "this is my house and I'm coming back."
One woman, too shy to give her name, on a public bus running down the coast road out of Meulaboh, has been to the market to buy a large new blue plastic tub. She gaily waves her arm at a tent village perched between wrecked palm trees and the sea. "That is my home," she says proudly. She rejected the new barracks built inland, right next door to a military camp on the outskirts of Meulaboh.
These long wooden structures with corrugated iron roofs are built directly under the gaze of the regional military command. They are also a long trek from the market and any form of employment.
The word that springs to mind is hamletting – the classic counter insurgency technique developed with deadly effect by British forces battling a communist insurgency in 1950s Malaya, and later used by the United States army during the Vietnam War.
The system is simple. When guerrillas of any kind draw sustenance from the local population – the people are like water and the revolutionary army like fish, as Mao Zedong said – the military drains that sea to deprive the guerrillas of support. How to do this? Move the local population into controlled structures called hamlets or barracks or temporary housing.
At rare spots in Aceh now, the new housing is not only well-meant but well done. The village of Nusa, near Lok Nga west of Banda Aceh, lost just 15 people to the waves but much of its housing is gone. The men who gather at the coffee shack in Nusa say the new structure next door is better than a tent even though the cubicles inside are small and hot with no windows. But, in this close-knit community, at least the barracks does not move them away from home.
The Indonesian government insists that any move into temporary housing is voluntary and that international standards of hygiene and comfort have been assured.
If located properly and done with local community support, as in Nusa, the idea can work. But this is an area riven by conflict and, until the tsunami, ruled by the military for almost two years.
At the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) referral hospital near Banda Aceh's sports stadium, the 200 or so daily outpatients must sometimes get through military checkpoints in order to get medical care. The hospital is there by permission of the ministry of health, but soon after it was set up a military camp appeared in front, as if to assert who was really in charge. The ICRC has been in negotiations ever since in an effort to keep the aid clean of military influence.
In such an environment, the voluntary nature of a move into temporary housing is dubious, and that's why the international aid community says it will have nothing to do with the process. Some, such as the Norwegian Refugee Council and Catholic Relief Services, are focusing on delivering wood, nails, hammers and other tools directly to refugees so they can rebuild and reoccupy their homes without using intermediary housing.
Everyone agrees that tent cities are messy and untenable but the tension is between the Acehnese, who just want to get back to normal quickly, and the vested interests of officials who speak of a Master Plan, due out on March 26, as the start of a process they plan to control.
The first relocations to a barracks complex in Banda Aceh took place on February 15. Instructions to move were delivered to the refugees only the night before and by local government employees in the company of soldiers.
"In the context of the war in Aceh, a military presence at the camps can be a form of intimidation and abusive control," says Neil Hicks, director of international programmes at Human Rights First, the American advocacy group formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.
In a February 7 statement, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First expressed concern that the new camps would be misused by the military, which has a record of forcibly relocating populations into secure areas where abuses then take place. "The participation of the police paramilitary brigade [Brimob] would raise similar fears due to its history of abuses in Aceh," the rights groups said.
In some locations, barracks are being built on the site of former "transmigration" camps that harken back to the Suharto era, when people were moved from overcrowded Java to outlying provinces in a way that was often criticized for destroying local communities and extending Javanese political control.
The only cheering aspect of the relief process in provincial areas such as Meulaboh is that alongside the government and the TNI's big plans exists their ever-present incompetence. One foreign consultant noted that the government had only 30 percent of the building materials and 15 percent of the land needed to build the barracks they plan.
In the meantime, the Acehnese are doing things for themselves. Along the main road of Meulaboh, men are working, banging in wooden supports, attaching them to felled trees, and rebuilding shacks, often right next to the tents given them by the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR.
In Banda Aceh, entrepreneurs are selling tsunami T-shirts for US$7 each to foreign military personnel at the public hospital. Streets empty of people a month ago now boast open shops and a bus station heaving with custom. Schools have reopened, even though playgrounds are dustbowls scoured by the tsunami.
In the worst-hit areas of northern Banda Aceh, where boats still rest in the front rooms of shattered houses, deliveries of bricks and building sand can be seen. In the shell of a large house, one man is using a sledge hammer to bash in a wall in order to retrieve the valuable wood of a window frame.
The hope of many in the aid community is that ongoing competition for influence between civilian and military forces may cancel each other out, producing a balance of power under which ordinary people can still do ordinary things.
In the western district of Banda Aceh called Ulee Lhe, perhaps one structure remains standing per half-kilometer. The rest is flattened rubble now cleared of corpses, offering nothing but far-reaching sea views. The foundations of stable middle-class homes remain, along with bathroom fittings and sometimes the debris of comfortable lives – a blender, a ripped mattress, even a typewriter in the sand.
Here and there, small stakes have been driven into the sand and joined by lines of string to demarcate where homes once stood.
For Ibu Rafei Ibrahim, the floor tiles are all she has. On her first visit back, after seven shocked weeks in a refugee camp, she still bursts into tears at the horror of it all. A small scar on her little finger attests to her amazing story: swept upstairs by the tsunami, she was washed a kilometer inland, taking in water three times she says, each time believing she would drown. Instead, her five children drowned and she's left with less than the skeleton of a home.
Her neighbors, Maryam and Suadi, still have their four-year-old girl, Putri Irywan, but their home is gone.
Another neighbor, Bakhtiar, lost his wife and children, but he knows where his house once stood. "Yes I want to live here again," he says. "All my documents are gone and no one from the government has come to make a report on my land or my house. But this is my home."
Planners might mean well, simply hoping that a solid barracks roof is better than a tent. But the issue of housing comes down to deep-seated distrust. Without exception, every Acehnese interviewed in the course of a week, spoke directly, without prompting, about corruption. Even a relatively well-off local such as Saiful Idris Ali, his house in Banda Aceh now cleaned of refuse after three days of labor, says he's had no help from the government. With his family and house intact, he can handle his problems alone, though he wishes the road cleanup would go faster.
"Yes we've had help from governments – the Australian government, the Malaysian government, the Japanese government. But from our own government? Oh no, not yet," he says.
Just down the road is an improvised dump site where scavengers greet a stream of trucks delivering, in effect, the topsoil of a city. Here, Muhamazen and his wife Norumiati have decided not to wait any longer. With their three children gone and their house destroyed, they've opened the Tsunami Coffeeshop, now a busy hub for resting soldiers, scavengers and the unemployed, in the shell of a once-prosperous home whose owner has fled. Walls have been punched out by the wave, the drains are clogged with viscous mud, there's no electricity or water supply. But fried bananas and strong coffee are available and running the business keeps their minds off their loss.
The coffee drinkers there echo the passengers on the public bus down the coast at Meulaboh: any money channelled through the bureaucracy or TNI shrinks to near nothing by the time it reaches refugees. "We've had a tragedy, but we still have corruption, collusion and nepotism."
Back at the lonely mosque, Nasir is still shouting into the wind, echoing the cries of those who fear not another wave but the imposition of control through barracks, master plans and exclusion zones. "If there is another tsunami, who cares, let it come. All we want is a house, right here," Nasir says.