In Aceh, Ambivalent Over Aid

From behind a rickety wooden crate on which he has spread out cans of Coca-Cola and cigarettes, Mohammed Yunus warily eyes the bare legs of a blond woman in khaki shorts as she helps carry a ladder.

A welter of emotions flickers over his face. Until three weeks ago, this sleepy provincial capital was about as far off the beaten track as it got. Then the tsunami waves that swept away half of Banda Aceh washed in unprecedented numbers of foreigners -- aid workers, soldiers, journalists, diplomats, psychiatrists, missionaries, environmentalists and just plain curiosity-seekers.

Until this past month Yunus, 32, had never seen a Western woman. He is upset that some of the foreigners don’t follow the Islamic dress code that prevails in his hometown. On the other hand, he recognizes there is no way to clean up the disaster without their help.

All this is further complicated by the inescapable fact -- which he acknowledges rather sheepishly -- that he is among those cashing in on the foreign presence. Before the tsunami, Yunus earned $2.50 a day as a construction worker; he’s been making twice that much since he set up his crate in front of the new tent city of foreigners known as the United Nations humanitarian information center.

“These foreigners are doing so much to help us. But it would be good if they didn’t stay too long,” Yunus said as two big relief trucks faced off in a dance of gridlock on the narrow road.

Decades of separatist fighting and martial law kept foreign visitors to this northwestern tip of the Indonesian archipelago to a minimum. Journalists and human rights advocates were banned by the Indonesian army, as it waged its war against Acehnese rebels seeking independence. The imposition in 2002 of Islamic Sharia law -- with its accompanying ban on revealing clothing and alcoholic beverages -- ensured that tourists didn’t linger long at its stunning palm-fringed beaches.

Today this city is in danger of being smothered by a surfeit of foreign attention and sympathy. One of the regions most ravaged by the tsunami, it has become the destination of choice for much of the world’s humanitarian aid community. Dignitaries ranging from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have posed for photographs at Banda Aceh’s single-runway airport. A former sultan’s palace has become a temporary encampment for an international media corps numbering in the hundreds.

Foreigners can be seen tramping through the ruins of the beachfront neighborhoods or snapping photos in front of the city’s leading attraction, an imposing 19th century mosque with licorice-tinged domes and a soaring yellow-brick minaret.

The Armageddon-like quality of the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami has touched a nerve with donors who have pledged an estimated $7 billion to help. The vast majority of the approximately 115,000 Indonesians killed in the disaster were in Aceh province -- and Banda Aceh, its capital, has become the hub of the relief effort.

But with all the aid money come aid workers, bringing helicopters, trucks, satellite telephones, rising prices and congestion.

The Acehnese have a long history of fighting invaders, from the Dutch to the Japanese and the present uneasy relationship with Indonesians. There is a natural suspicion of outsiders, whether they come from Europe or Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.

“It is very important to the Acehnese people that they don’t feel their tragedy is being exploited by the outside world,” said Darmansyah, an editor of Serambi, Banda Aceh’s daily newspaper, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

Since the tsunami, an estimated 50,000 Indonesian troops have descended on Aceh -- more than were present at the height of the army’s campaign in the late 1990s against the separatist Free Aceh Movement.

Then there are the foreign troops: 4,478 from 11 countries, according to an Indonesian military spokesman, not counting thousands more who are staying offshore on aircraft carriers such as the United States’ Abraham Lincoln. As for aid workers, 3,645 were registered at the U.N. compound as of Sunday, but authorities only started registering them last week, and the list is believed to be incomplete.

Add to that dozens of businesspeople, many of them Indonesians, and religious groups including Islamists and the Church of Scientology.

“A lot of these people who come to Aceh are just voyeurs. They are taking photos and coming to look, using up food and gasoline, but they’re not really helping,” complained Andi Basrul, 45, who lost his wife and 11-year-old daughter in the tsunami.

The ambivalence of the populace mirrors that of the Indonesian government. Welfare minister Alwi Shihab complained in an interview last week at the airport that foreigners were driving up prices for everything, whether it be taxis or sugar.

“We want to be as open with the foreign aid community as possible. We don’t want to receive their generosity with rejection,” Shihab said. “At the same time, we know that if we cannot handle this by ourselves, the dignity of the country will be compromised. It is only logical that there should be a limited period before we can stand on our own feet.”

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Banda Aceh is a flat, sprawling city built along a coastal plain that is bordered by the ocean to the north and west and blue-tinged mountains lush with rain forests to the south.

Today, the city is severed by a snaking line -- the high-water mark -- that runs up to two miles inland. It delineates the section that was washed over by the waves and the part that was spared. On the ground, though, it can be hard to tell the difference because the monsoon rains that pour down each afternoon have turned much of the city into a sea of mud.

Most outsiders arrive in Banda Aceh at its tiny airport, which is eight miles inland and well outside the high-water mark.

In the past, no more than 15 flights came through here per day, but since Dec. 26 there have been as many as 200. The place is roaring with activity as C-130 cargo planes and CH-53 transport helicopters take off and land with pallets of rice, mineral water and other supplies.

A vast tent city has sprung up around the airport where aid workers and foreign troops are staying. All the hotels in the city and three-quarters of the housing has been destroyed, so the outsiders have to sleep in tents not unlike those of the refugees.

The airport is a noisy place to be camped out, but the refugees are well aware that proximity to the aid is key to survival, especially because the relief workers still have limited ground transportation.

Under a large blue tarpaulin, where he is living on the airport road with his extended family, 25-year-old spice merchant Musliadi Casi shows off some recent donations from the aid community. There is a state-of-the-art camping stove, five cartons of chocolate butter-cream biscuits and bags of rice stacked high enough to support the tent.

“We have plenty of food, no complaints about that. But we are still wearing the same clothes that we escaped in,” Casi said.

He is among those survivors who fear that the Indonesian government may kick out the foreign aid agencies prematurely.

“We need all the help we can get. If you watch the Indonesian army, you see that all they do is order people around or talk on mobile telephones,” Casi said. “They can’t accomplish anything without the foreigners.”

But Ferdinando Severi, the priest at Banda Aceh’s lone Catholic church and one of the few foreigners living in the city, believes that the aid community has come into Aceh with too much personnel.

“They really don’t have enough to do,” he said.

In truth, many of the aid agencies do not seem to be terribly busy. One reason is that the Indonesian army has tried to keep a tight leash on the distribution of foreign aid. As of last week, relief workers were told they could not travel outside Banda Aceh and Meulaboh, the province’s other main city, without a military escort because of the threat of attack by rebels.

Medical personnel who have come into Aceh also find their workloads to be light, because the magnitude of the disaster left few merely wounded. “By and large, you either survived or you died,” Michael Elmquist, the U.N.’s chief humanitarian coordinator for Indonesia, told reporters.

With so many people dead and so much relief money floating around, some survivors stand to profit from the huge demand for labor, especially for interpreters, drivers, mechanics and construction workers.

“I feel so guilty, but I have to feed my family too,” said Yusuf, 40, an English teacher who has temporarily given up his $170-a-month job in the public school system for a position with the World Food Program that pays more than three times as much.

Everywhere around Banda Aceh there are signs of the new relief-money-fueled economy: “For Rent,” read English-language placards on many of the remaining houses, whose owners are moving out of town.

“What else can we do?” asked Ayu Mingsih, 55, the elegantly dressed matriarch of one of Banda Aceh’s wealthier families, whose 6-year-old grandson is among the missing. Last week, she was packing up the family heirlooms in their rambling, nine-room house, just beyond the high-water mark, in preparation to rent the place and move out of town.

The aftershocks from the earthquake rattle the crystal chandeliers and the porcelain in the cabinets, so much that it feels like the house is haunted, her 30-year-old son whispers.

Mingsih scoffed at talk of ghosts, her gold bracelets jangling as she spoke, but she believed just the same that Banda Aceh was no fit place for the living.

“Nobody wants to be here, at least not now,” she said. “We will be back eventually, but for now we will leave this place to the foreigners.”