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INSIGHTS is a new forum that allows East-West Center (EWC) staff, seminar participants, visiting fellows, speakers, and degree fellows the opportunity to make thoughtful and reflective observations on issues beyond the headlines. As with all material distributed on the East-West Wire, INSIGHTS commentaries may be used by journalists, policymakers, and academics interested in the subject. This first INSIGHTS was written by Terance W. Bigalke, director of the EWC’s education program, reflecting on a recent return trip to Indonesia’s tsunami-ravaged Aceh province.
HONOLULU (Dec. 14) -- Few tragic events in history have so immediately captured the world’s attention and generated so deep an empathetic response as the massive earthquake and resulting tsunami of December 2004.
Striking with terrifying swiftness and force on the morning of December 26 in the Indian Ocean off the northwest coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the losses were enormous. Some 200,000 lives were extinguished, over one million people lost their homes and livelihoods, and provincial economies from the western tip of Indonesia, to southern Thailand, coastal Sri Lanka, the Maldives Islands and southeastern India suffered heavy damage.
Many of the world’s 6.5 billion people witnessed this devastation on television through video and still images captured on digital cameras and cell phones by those fleeing the tsunami, transmitted by reporters quick to the scene. A large portion of this attention was focused on the area that suffered 65 percent of the casualties and the most widespread destruction, the special autonomous region of Aceh. The region has long been deeply divided by the fighting between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the central government in Jakarta and its armed forces.
First Impressions
In my first visit to the capital city, Banda Aceh, three weeks after the tsunami, I entered a landscape of eerie anomalies. Huge ships lay stranded miles inland from the coast. Lone two- or three-story houses stood watch over vast stretches of flattened, coastal housing complexes, where a single Caterpillar and dump truck began the excruciating process to sift and move the rubble. In the retail center of the city, an elephant with its mahout labored to clear pieces of collapsed walls, and men scavenged with small carts to collect scrap metal.
Through areas of destruction, people staked small Indonesian flags over indistinguishable piles to mark claims to their property, and erected signs threatening death to looters. Families forlornly returned to the rubble of their houses seeking any sign of the remains of lost loved ones, while small teams of volunteers carried black body bags of newly discovered remains. Bright yellow tents filled open spaces surrounding public buildings, most notably the Grand Mosque, which now sheltered hundreds of families and relief volunteers.
Within this seemingly hopeless city, within a devastated province, people had begun to put their lives back together.
I was invited to stay in the home of a lecturer at the Islamic university whose institution I was visiting. Each day family and friends visited to retell their harrowing stories of escape from the tsunami, or to provide information about others who had not. Everyone I met at this home and the university had experienced a loss, some of their spouses and children. Despite their obvious expressions of grief, I was struck by the resiliency of those I came to know. People commonly described themselves as submitting to destiny, to spiritual forces beyond their control and to the will of God. This submission to a religious explanation appeared to provide a necessary rationale, a degree of reassurance, and individual as well as collective comfort that enabled them to cope with their loss.
Some of the old rituals of life returned as well. In the morning men gathered again at coffee shops, friends sitting together around tables sipping glasses of coffee, eating snacks, telling stories and exchanging gossip, word-play and joking amongst themselves.
One is immediately struck by the diversity of faces in Banda Aceh’s best-known coffee shop, reflecting centuries of interaction with populations from India, Turkey and the Arab world. Despite its strong sense of political, cultural and religious identity, or perhaps because of it, Aceh has welcomed commercial exchange and generally been receptive to outsiders who have settled there. Even the ethnic Chinese population, often a target of recrimination during times of upheaval in many parts of Indonesia, in Banda Aceh was more secure. They in turn demonstrated their loyalty to Aceh by investing in the rebuilding of Banda Aceh following the tsunami.
This is not to overly idealize inter-ethnic relations. Rightly or wrongly, Acehnese merchants suspected their Chinese counterparts of setting fire to their
own stores following the tsunami to collect insurance money, suggesting they would not engage in such unethical practices themselves.
Defining Shariah
Concerns over proper social behavior seem close to the surface in Aceh, and they are tied to the ongoing process of defining Muslim values in response to change.
The local press carried stories of officials in urban areas of Aceh denouncing Valentine’s Day. Their stated target of concern was excessive, inappropriate celebration by boys and girls who viewed this Western holiday as an opportunity to violate the accepted boundaries of interaction. My Acehnese friends seemed surprised to learn that it had a far more innocent reputation in the United States.
Of far greater consequence to most Acehnese is the expanding space of Islamic law or Shariah. A pre-tsunami offering from Jakarta to enhance the substance of Acehnese autonomy in lieu of a more favorable sharing of revenues with the region, Shariah was a concept in search of codification.
Legislative committees, Islamic scholars, and local officials have since been weighing in to broaden or narrow the reach of Shariah. Lecturers at the two leading tertiary educational institutions, including Ar-Raniry State Institute of Islamic Studies, view their role as helping legislators to achieve a legal code that blends Shariah with Acehnese values and modern sensibilities. Just how far this goes beyond family law, and how fast, remains to be seen, but already one sees signs of enforcement.
What is Shariah in Aceh? Though it may become a codified, comprehensive set of laws, currently its most visible characteristic is concern with defining and regulating morality.
While I was riding with a friend on the coast road heading south from Banda Aceh, he pointed out a parked car and explained this area was historically a popular lover’s lane. He noted that the Shariah police patrol this area, and will ask a male and female couple seen alone in a parked car to prove they are married or related. Elsewhere Shariah police have been known to enforce socially proper dress for women, including the wearing of headscarves in public.
As intrusive as this seemed to me, it was also not altogether strange. Rising conservative influence across all major religions worldwide has pushed secular law to narrow the domain of privacy, blurring the divide between religious and secular spheres.
What is my dominant image in Aceh?
It is of Acehnese celebrating the return of life toward normality: streams of students walking on the streets near campus; tents being replaced by more permanent housing; shops, open-air markets and cafes flourishing again. It is of traffic jams returning to the main thoroughfares of Banda Aceh, and of people traveling freely again on roads throughout the region. It is of the first harvest of rice in fields destroyed in December 2004, and people remarrying and starting new families.
While frustration with the slow pace of reconstruction continues, and the euphoria of outside assistance has been tempered by the realities of well-meaning but haphazard responses reflected in some shoddy housing projects, life is improving.
After 30 years, peace returns
The greatest improvement to life in Aceh is the return of peace after 30 years of fighting between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the central government. The former vice-rector at Ar-Raniry State Institute for Islamic Studies drove me from Banda Aceh to Malahayati Harbor northeast of the city, describing his personal brushes with disaster along this main thoroughfare. Close as it was to the capital city, this stretch of road was a GAM stronghold, and anyone traveling by car risked being stopped at gunpoint and interrogated about his stance in the conflict. Even well-equipped Indonesian Army troops suffered casualties when their passing troop transport trucks brushed low-hanging tree branches booby-trapped to detonate on contact. Now we could make this drive at a leisurely pace without concern that sunset was fast approaching.
Horrendous as it was, the tsunami may have been the price of peace for Aceh. The losses GAM suffered in the tsunami weakened its position militarily and almost immediately led it to declare a unilateral ceasefire.
Though the Indonesian Army continued to pursue GAM, its focus was forced to shift to tsunami relief as the eyes of the world were fixed on the region.
The new administration in Jakarta, led by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Vice-President Jusuf Kalla, pursued peace talks with GAM political leadership in Helsinki, Finland, that resulted in an agreement in August 2005 to end hostilities, substantially improve Aceh’s share of oil and natural gas revenues from the region, and create a process that could enable GAM to achieve representation in provincial elections.
All of this needed to be ratified by the People’s Legislative Assembly (DPR) in Jakarta to take effect, and required this body to amend the Indonesian Constitution to allow creating a political party that operated only in Aceh, not nationally. Though the DPR had failed to deliver a definitive solution to this electoral problem, GAM responded pragmatically by allowing its members to run for office in any political party in Aceh for upcoming elections.
Challenges for the future
Looking ahead, Aceh faces three major hurdles.
The physical recovery led by the Agency for Reconstruction and Reconciliation will take a decade or more. Given the scale of the effort, the number of international and national agencies and organizations involved, and the large amount of money, the chorus of criticism from Acehnese and watchdog groups will mount.
Expectations inevitably exceed capacity to deliver, failures get magnified, and quality falls short in the complex environment of humanitarian assistance. The July 2006 report issued by the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition concludes as much. Still, in an environment that emphasizes transparency, the agency is learning and improving its oversight.
Second, Aceh’s newly reaffirmed special autonomous relationship with the Indonesian central government needs to achieve a level of trust that has existed only for fleeting periods from 1945 to the present. Continued harmonious relations will require an equitable distribution of oil and natural gas revenues. It also will require attaining a sense in Aceh that true autonomy has been achieved, and in Jakarta that Aceh is not undermining national unity.
Finally, the creation of Shariah is uncharted territory, and even within Aceh — the front porch to Mecca — a wide spectrum of fundamentalist to modernist forces will vie for influence.
Several faculty from Ar-Raniry State Institute of Islamic Studies are conducting research at the East-West Center on issues related to Islamic banking, Islamic business contract law and marital law that they hope will enable them to bring reason, moderation and humanitarian concerns to the process. They are convinced that in Aceh it is possible to create a society firmly rooted in Islamic law, but reflecting Acehnese values and modernity.
Historically Islam in Aceh has evidenced strong self-confidence, and does not appear to have been affected by the wave of fundamentalist, Wahabist influence that has left its mark worldwide in the past two decades. Now Aceh is open to outside influence as never before, including Wahabist groups from Jakarta. How the shaping of Shariah proceeds in Aceh will be an indicator of Aceh’s ability to resist these influences.
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Terance W. Bigalke is director of the East-West Center Education Program. During a five-year period, he lived, worked and conducted research in Indonesia. He was a program officer for education and culture with the Ford Foundation in Jakarta. He also coordinated faculty collaboration between a consortium of American universities and five major Indonesian universities to develop internationally funded higher education programs. Bigalke first visited Aceh in 1983 in an effort to extend legal aid support to university-based providers outside the national capital. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative world history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, with a focus on 19th and 20th century Indonesia.
Dr. Bigalke can be reached at +(808) 944-7323 or via email at BigalkeT@EastWestCenter.org
A PDF version of this INSIGHTS commentary is available at:
http://www.eastwestcenter.org/stored/pdfs/Insights00101.pdf
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