Two weeks after it was hit by Asia's tsunami, parts of Banda Aceh are showing signs of life: customers haggle at markets overflowing with chilies, squawking chickens and tropical fruits. Barber shops are open, and old men while away the morning sipping coffee and puffing on pungent clove cigarettes in street-side cafes.
But a short drive across this provincial capital and it is a different scene: back hoes drag up bloated corpses from the debris of a residential area and dump them on the sidewalk. Survivors who have lost everything scavenge in the ruins of a shoe shop for something to sell, and plead for money.
PHOTO: AFP
The most powerful earthquake in 40 years sent giant waves tearing through this city on Indonesia's Sumatra island on Dec. 26, killing up to 40,000 people and leaving many more homeless and traumatized.
In districts that were spared the wrath of the sea, a semblance of normality has returned. But in the hardest hit areas, the horror remains acute.
"My wife and my son are dead," said one survivor, Hariyanto, as he picked through the debris near where his house once stood. "Even if I find them I will not be able to recognize them."
Teams of volunteers wearing face masks and plastic gloves comb the city collecting bodies and bury them in mass graves, but thousands still remain rotting under the debris of collapsed houses or the tons of wood and trees that lie piled up on the streets. The stench of death is unbearable in many neighborhoods.
Hundreds of makeshift refugee camps dot the city, with survivors subsisting on rice and instant noodles. Naked children play in dirty rivers that run through some of the settlements. There are fears that deadly waterborne diseases like cholera and dysentery could soon spread among the survivors.
Banda Aceh was one of the first places to experience the tsunami before it traveled across kilometers of ocean laying waste to coastal regions in 10 other countries in Asia and Africa. More than 150,000 have been killed, 100,000 of them on Sumatra, which took the full force of the waves.
Many of those killed were taking Sunday morning walks or playing on the beaches on either side of the city when the tsunami hit.
"Look at this, it will take us at least 10 years to recover," said Muktadin, a motorcycle rickshaw driver whose vehicle had got stuck in the thick mud that coats much of the city.
In the first two days after the tsunami, witnesses reported seeing thousands of shocked residents wandering the streets in a daze, and authorities were unable to cope with the scale of the disaster.
All but one of its five hospitals were knocked out, electricity and phone links were cut and looting was widespread.
Aid operations were slow to start amid the chaos, but the relief effort is now in full swing.
Scores of foreign and local aid organizations and military troops are involved in what the UN is calling the largest and most complex emergency relief operation ever.
They say they will be here for at least two years.
"Things are improving, but people will be traumatized for years to come," said Suprizal, who used to work in the city's most upmarket hotel, which collapsed when the quake struck.
"The city is still dead," he added.
Banda Aceh's 17th century Baiturahman Mosque hosted Friday prayers for the first time since the disaster last week.
Many in the staunchly Islamic region believe that Allah ordered the disaster as punishment to its 4.3 million people for failing to live up to His teachings.
"We have forgotten about Allah and this is what we get," said Ingli, who lost two nephews to the waves.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the