Acehnese Dreams

In front of the Baiturrahman Royal Mosque, Aceh’s most famous landmark.

At Sultan Iskandar Muda Airport in Banda Aceh, a swirling mist still clings to shrouded green hills as steam begins to burn off of wet runways and tiled roofs. Stepping off the plane and onto the gleaming tarmac, the air is heavy for me. Not due to relief from surviving yet another flight with Adam Air, the company responsible for the plane lost off of Sulawesi two weeks ago, garnering massive international media attention because of the three Americans onboard. Not due to the stifling humidity that rises from the slick ground and presses from overhead. Not due to the prospect of entering Indonesia’s most pious and strict Islamic province. And not due to the lingering destruction and pain that I know are still omnipresent outside the airport gates. The atmosphere of re-entering Aceh is heavy because in this place lie the memories and hopes of a people that I have come to love.
The staff at the Lonely Planet write, “Few travelers discover the delights of Indonesia’s northernmost province. Internal conflict and its image as homeland to a band of Islamic zealots have kept most people away for years.” Subjected to military occupation for the majority of the past century and a half, and at bloody civil war from 1976 onwards, much of the province had been reduced to little more than a widespread state of emergency. However, in late 2004, a bout of unimaginable violence and destruction would render the disputes between guerrillas and the central government moot. The Acehnese were crushed by the world’s most devastating tsunami and the massive 9.2 Richter earthquake that preceded it. More than 150,000 people (or close to five percent of Aceh’s population) were ultimately included in the death toll, and tens of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure and private holdings were washed away or pounded to smithereens. Imagine nearly forty times the number of deaths from September 11th, the ninety foot waves that traumatized millions of other survivors, and you can just begin to understand. As the preeminent scholar of Aceh, Anthony Reid, writes, “Acehnese have learned to be stoic in the face of suffering.”
I made my first trip to Aceh during the winter of my Junior year at Dartmouth. At that point, I was working around New England on a photo project dealing with the homeless and displaced. I had applied for several grants through Dartmouth, and had won funding to pursue my photographic work on displacement in China. Instead, I took the term off to visit the Southeast Asian tsunami zone and photograph the more pressing situation that I found there. After being turned around at gunpoint in Myanmar and then making my way overland from Bangkok to the peninsular west coast Malaysian port of Penang, I boarded a ferry crossing the Malacca Strait bound for Medan, Indonesia.
When I arrived in Medan, I was informed that I would need a specially authorized “blue book” from the Acehnese provincial government in order to enter the still fractious province. Not keen on the idea of kicking around Medan, Indonesia’s third largest (and arguably dirtiest) city waiting indefinitely for uncertain admission to Aceh, I instead bought a bus ticket and stowed away in the luggage compartment for the twelve hour ride. Passing through numerous check points, where soldiers in full battle gear took unceremonious turns observing the contents of the passenger compartment of the bus, I met an Acehnese man named David who was returning to Banda from his family palm oil plantation in North Sumatra. I would spend the next two weeks living with David’s family, touring the death and destruction. Dozens of body bags were still stacked on street corners, stagnant pools of oily black water leered menacingly around the city, and the vast majority of the people in the city, a mere five weeks after the waves had receded, were still too shocked to do anything but repeat their stories and look to Allah for answers.
After a stimulating and eye opening set of experiences, I returned to Dartmouth for the spring term, where I applied and won more funding to expand my study and return to Thailand and Aceh the following summer. I was given my senior year free of classes and a substantial budget to pursue my photographic work on displacement and development in the twenty-first century. This was, before the Fulbright, the biggest break of my academic life.
I spent June in Khao Lak, Thailand, and then returned to Indonesia for July and August, where I lived with David and his family. It turns out that David may be a drug addict, but I nevertheless spent an incredible month digging deeper into the issues of Aceh, interviewing dozens of people and shooting hundreds of rolls of black and white film. When I returned to the U.S. in late August, I was riding a wave of intellectual anticipation. I sought out the Fulbright as a means of returning to Indonesia, and in an ideal world, living in Aceh. The gods of bureaucracy favored East Java instead. A few weeks after the two year anniversary (if you can call it that) of the tsunami, I decided it was time to return.

As many scholars and journalists have lamented, Aceh is an understudied and underappreciated region of both Indonesia and the world. The intrepid Dutch colonialist Snouck Hurgronje wrote a comprehensive, albeit politically skewed, survey of Aceh that was published in 1895. At the time, the Dutch were more than twenty years deep in their battle to suppress the rebellious and unrelenting Aceh, the last hold out of non-colonized Indonesia. Unstable conditions since then have limited field work to a handful of committed academics and journalists. Among them, Billy Nessen spent several years living with GAM (Free Aceh Movement) rebels photographing and filming the atrocities that he saw. For the eighteen months leading up to the tsunami, when all foreign aid and development workers and journalists were expelled from Aceh, Nessen was the only non-Indonesian in the province. A few linguists and anthropologists have also done work in the region, but as Reid points out, “None of the potentially rich archaeological sites in Aceh has yet been systematically excavated.” Much of the English language early history of Aceh is still murky, at best.
This lack of an historical record partially accounts for the number of deaths sustained in Aceh, and ironically the peace that followed. Aceh lies on top of the Sumatran subduction zone, where the heavy crust of the Indian Ocean floor is absorbed beneath the lighter Sumatran Plate, which forms the basis of the Ring of Fire and makes Indonesia the world’s most volcanically and seismically active nation state. Over decades and centuries, the pressure built up through that subduction process must be released. Similar earthquakes and tsunamis must have, even in the past few thousand years, bombarded the Acehnese coast. With more than four centimeters of the Indo-Australian plate being consumed under the west coast of Aceh per year, it is surprising that there is no recorded sign of a large scale earthquake in British, Dutch, Japanese or independent Indonesian records of the province.
The lack of research being conducted in Aceh and the inability to maintain a historical database therefore account for the lack of foresight that Aceh was due for a massive show of seismic might. There is well documented evidence of quakes in more southern parts of Sumatra, where European colonists had successfully made progress. Earthquakes in Padang, Mentawai, and Bengkulen are recorded systematically from the late seventeenth century onwards. In Nias, off the west coast of Aceh, there is a record of an 8.5 Richter quake in 1861. Even in Simeulue, practically a stones’ throw from southern Aceh, a 1907 earthquake reportedly triggered a massive tsunami that claimed nearly 2,000 lives. Tales of the giant waves lived on in popular memory, but due to lack of a European presence, were not until recently recorded by historians or geologists.
Additionally, a moderating factor was the Acehnese style of building simple thatch houses on wooden poles, so that even very large earthquakes caused relatively little loss of life. That is, prior to the twentieth-century urban transition to building in brick and concrete. As modern concrete buildings subsumed the coastal landscape, earthquakes that had previously been “but little formidable to the natives” took on an increased potential threat. As Reid writes, “By contrast the century prior to 2004 does indeed appear to have been a quieter time, which should have given rise to some anxiety.”

“It was Sunday morning, early, you know, so my family and I just at home, wake up, watch TV, eating. It was beautiful day, too. The sun was shining, I now remember the birds sing too, but maybe I invent that part. Anyway, it was very normal, like any other Sunday in Banda Aceh. I was eighteen at the time, still live with my parents and my two brothers. My dad in Sabang, my mom in Banda. They don’t even live in the same house anymore. Whenever she in Banda, my father in Sabang, and whenever my father in Banda, she in Sabang. Is like they can’t stand each other. My mom wants to get divorce, she has for long time, but my brothers tell her she is a bitch. Can you imagine calling your mother bitch?”
I’m talking with Siti Balqis Natyasrah, who introduced herself to me as “Kiss, it’s easier for foreigners.” We are in front of a beachside warung in Sabang, Pulau Weh, a tropical paradise located an hour by ferry from Banda Aceh. Kiss was born in Sabang – home to Kilometer Zero, Indonesia’s westernmost point – and has lived in Aceh all her life. She is now twenty, flawlessly beautiful, and married to a thirty year-old Swiss engineer who works for the International Committee of the Red Cross. I met her on the ferry ride from Banda, and she volunteered to show me around “her island” for a few days.
Using money put-up by her Swiss father-in-law, she is developing a beachside bungalow resort on a quarter mile stretch of flawless sand that overlooks the setting sun. At the time of the tsunami, she had finished half her coursework for a degree in accounting at a local university in Banda Aceh. Her English is nearly perfect, minus the occasional split infinitive or forgotten pronoun. After the tsunami, her university closed temporarily, at which point she began working as a translator for the Australian army corps of engineers, a job that quickly catapulted her into the world of development work. Since then, she has worked for half a dozen humanitarian organizations, including UNICEF and the British Red Cross. When she can get away, she spends her weekends checking-up on the construction of her bungalows, recuperating from the stress of twelve hour work days.
“Anyway, at about eight in the morning, we feel the earthquake. I mean, the walls of the house move like rubber, cracks coming in the floors, lamps and photos and TVs and things falling from shelves. I was so scared, minqia” – her sentences are interjected with quips of Italian, the native language of her Swiss-born hubby – “My mother and me, we run out of the house to the street, and there are people everywhere. We very lucky, we were not hurt. Some people bleeding, other people just scream and cry. Many peoples’ houses were destroyed, just nothing left. It was like that for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then thousands and thousands of people just start run and drive cars and motorbikes, no one knows what was going on, just people everywhere. I didn’t know what was happening, so I put my mother on the motorbike with me and we start driving as fast as we can with the other people. God forgive me, I hit some man, maybe I break his leg, I don’t know. We were just trying to get away as fast as possible. Some people are screaming about the ocean, but I couldn’t hear.
“When we arrived at the hills, I helped my mother, and we walked for maybe an hour up to the top. You see the hills around Banda, they are very tall. We waited there, maybe six hours, then came back down to the city. Our house was OK, thank god. Only some cracks. It’s really incredible. It is like three miles from the ocean, so no water came, only the earthquake. My father was OK, my mother and me were OK, my brothers were OK. But, Nick, I’m telling you, I lost over one hundred friends and family that day.”

While not as explicitly matriarchal as other Sumatran societies, like the Minangkabau culture that surrounds Padang in West Sumatra, Aceh is still home to an ironic blend of women’s power due to adat (kinship structures and customs) and a simultaneous suppression under strict Islamic commitments and interpretations. Houses are exclusively inherited by daughters, so the wife is the one who owns the house. Parents will give the family home to the eldest daughter at the time of her marriage, and build a new house nearby. With this deal come the ubiquitous rice fields, which formed the backbone of the Acehnese economy until the advent of trade six centuries ago. Thus, it is the mothers, and most often not the fathers, who bring home the proverbial bacon through the revenue of their rice-fields and other household activities. To this day, in rural Acehnese societies, once boys reach a certain age, they no longer sleep in their mother’s house, but in the communal hall of the village, biding their time until marriage. As Snouck Hurgronje, the famous Dutch scholar wrote, men feel like “guests in the houses of their wives.”
Reid writes, “The Islamic commitment, that all Acehnese feel is part of their identity, has never reduced the economic independence of women, and in turn their relative autonomy.” Based on my interviews and experiences with Kiss and other women in Aceh, while I observed the matrilineal system to be alive and well, it would take a stretch of the imagination to say that women are autonomous in Aceh, particularly post-tsunami. Aceh is by far and away Indonesia’s most pious Islamic province. The independently Muslim thread that runs throughout Acehnese history has contributed to the distinct and separate sense of identity and character that many Acehnese feel. Aceh’s resistance to incorporation into both the Netherlands Indies and the Indonesian nation state was promulgated in large part by an overriding sense of a distinct Islam-driven nationalism – one that many Acehnese insist has been in existence for nearly two centuries, if not more.
Nobody who has studied the region believes that the issue of contemporary Aceh is a recent development. The history here, as in so much of Indonesia, plays an integral part in shaping every facet of modern life. As Winston Churchill said, “The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward.” Most sane thinkers have come to realize that the multilayered obstacles at the heart of the “Aceh problem” will not be resolved through either military might or simple legislation. Understanding some of the underlying history helps to shed light on, what to me, is one of the most fascinating parts of Indonesia.
Following the tsunami, there was a province-wide backlash against the perceived graft and disregard for Islamic strictures that had been strongly in place since the sixteenth century. Many Acehnese saw the tsunami as a direct sign from Allah that their ways were wicked, and that drastic changes were needed in order to pacify the wrath of God. Many Acehnese in the first few years of the twenty-first century feared the province’s slide from “the gate of the Holy Land” (Serambi Mecca, a term that many Acehnese use to refer to the province) to nothing more than a second rate developing world bastion of corruption and low morals.
In the early period of Indonesian Islamic history, Aceh had played the crucial role in defining a new identity of faith throughout the archipelago. As Snouck Hurgronje recorded:

Before sailing ships were replaced by steamers as a means of conveyance for visitants to Mekka, Acheh formed a great halting-place for almost all the pilgrims from the Eastern Archipelago…. Many remained there a considerable time on their way to and fro, while some even settled in the country as traders or teachers for the remainder of their lives.

Nur al-Din al-Raniri, chief Acehnese religious authority and a native of Gujarat in modern day India, authored what would become the famous Bustan al-Salatin. He found the sultanate to be impressive in both its sumptuousness and religious grandeur. In 1641, in describing the funeral arrangements for the man who appointed him to his high position, the Acehnese Sultan Iskandar Thani, al-Raniri recorded:

In all the states we see both above and below the wind, in the palaces of all the great kings, there is no-one who is equal in righteous authority to our noble Lord the King, Duli Hadharat. Truly this state of Aceh Daru’s-Salam is the very verandah of God’s most honoured city of Mecca.

The first signs of Islam in Aceh (and by dent of that fact in the Indonesian archipelago) date to roughly the beginning of the twelfth century. The discovery of traces of medieval south Indian red pottery at the Kuta Lubhok archaeological site near Lhok Cut – one of the few in Aceh – point to the direct ties between Aceh and south and east India that were established long before the subsequent Islamization of what are today Malaysia and Indonesia. As McKinnon points out, “The influence of such communities who established themselves on the Aceh coast, with their westward-looking links, was eventually to have a profound influence on the fiercely independent but indigenous way in which the Acehnese saw themselves.”
While the prolific Javanese Majapahit dynasty appears to have fought and won battles as far north as southern Aceh, the cultural influences of the Javanese seems to have lacked the influence of the Indian traders. The Western-oriented commercial, cultural, and religious contacts strongly influenced the development of Acehnese identity, developing a much different perception of themselves from the Javanese, or even south Sumatran peoples. As the Acehnese Sultanate began to rise at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Aceh developed into a major entrepot where all major horizons of foreign interaction remained oriented towards, in the west, Sri Lanka, India, and the Middle East, and to China in the north – but rarely to Java in the southeast.
Under the great Sultan Iskandar Muda (ruled 1607-36), whom the Banda Aceh airport is named after, Aceh experienced nearly thirty years of military expansion. In 1614, the Acehnese even successfully defeated the Portuguese at Baning as part of their push to dominate what is today peninsular Malaysia. Iskandar Muda’s successor, Iskandar Thani, died prematurely after only five years of rule, much of which was characterized by religious turmoil. His death led to a nearly sixty year period of all female rule. To the dismay of the Acehnese and foreign Muslim backers alike, that sixty year period resulted in significant military and land losses that ultimately led to the dethronement of the Sultana Kamalat Shah. In 1699, the Sheriff of Mecca issued a fatwa ruling that it was unIslamic for a woman to serve as Sultan.
When conceptualizing Aceh’s development into a fractious, unsatisfied, and devoutly Muslim province – as it was for most of modern history – it is important to acknowledge that even – and maybe especially today – violence is often an effective means of catalyzing identity formation. From the fifteenth century on, the themes of violence and conflict were very prominent in Acehnese life. Between outward imperial expansion and inward religious struggle, there was more than sufficient fodder to feed the cannons of cultural and political conglomeration.
Prior to the sixteenth century, Aceh had embraced a regional approach to developing political and cultural identity. In envisioning Aceh as the imperial throne for both Sumatra and peninsular Malaysia, the Sultans adopted an “essentially inward-looking” approach, “with a vision for Malay hegemony overriding pan-Islamic notions.” However, as Aceh began to bump heads with the global superpowers of the era, especially the Portuguese, a wider purview became necessary. Reaching out for the support of a like-minded western-based superpower, under Sultan Alau’d-Din Ri’ayat Shah al-Kahar, the Ottoman Turkish were enlisted. From 1563 onwards, Aceh established close ties with Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople, requesting help against the Portuguese using overt pan-Islamic terms:

The Sultan [of Aceh] says that he is left alone to face the unbelievers. They have seized some islands, and have taken Muslims captive. Merchants and pilgrim ships going from these islands towards Mecca were captured one night [by the Portuguese] and the ships that were not captured were fired upon and sunk, causing many Muslims to drown.

The pan-Islamic approach is also obvious in the context of local religion and law issues. While Hukum Adat (customary law) continued to play an important role in everyday life, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, what we in the West think of as the strict dogma of syariah or syariat law began to be integrated into the functioning of the criminal and penal courts.
Acehnese law was often much more severe than the Islamic variety. Where stoning was proscribed for adultery, the Acehnese used strangulation. The penalties for consuming alcohol included amputation of the hands and pouring molten lead down the throats of those judged guilty. It was not until much later that a strict interpretation of syariat law was adopted.
As more Muslims traveled between the east and Mecca making the obligatory hajj – one of the five Islamic life duties – more Islamic scholars paid visits to Aceh, thereby introducing Islamic sciences and law to everyday life. Additionally, many Acehnese began to make the hajj themselves, returning to the province with newfound Islamic scholarship and customs. As Riddell writes, “Aceh was a conduit for the dynamic processes of change taking place throughout the archipelago.” During the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, both in terms of empire building and Islamization, Aceh was pushing the vanguard across the Indonesian archipelago.

“One day, like six days after the tsunami, a big Spanish ship came. It was right over there, around the bend at Iemuele beach, but you could see it from here. It was a big ship, you know, like the USS Abraham Lincoln, the American one that brought the fresh water to Aceh. You see, your government can treat Muslims right… sometimes!”
Kiss and I are standing on her beachfront property, watching half a dozen bare-chested Indonesian men chop down coconut trees and saw planks of wood. Kiss’s bungalow resort is supposed to open in less than four months, but the majority of the land has yet to be cleared, and only one bungalow is under construction. The land slopes up from pristine white sand to a steep hillside of lush vegetation. On the beach, crisscrossed coconut trees lean precariously out over the sand and lapping Indian Ocean. Located on the north side of the island, her property was spared any damage in the tsunami. The sun is just rising over the eastern horizon, but the sweat is already beginning to run down my back. Kiss wears a black bikini top and a pair of pink shorts that read “Von Dutch” across her bum. She has a large pink tropical flower pinioned between oversized Chanel sunglasses and her long black hair.
“It was a big Spanish ship, so they could not come to the land, but they sent a smaller boat, one of those rubber kinds for going to the shore. So twenty Spanish soldiers come in their boat and they don’t go to the harbor, but stop on the beach and come up to the big road here through the forest. And I was in town, in Sabang, help my friend at her store. The tsunami didn’t come to this part of the island so everything okay, but because so many people had no food or things, my friend was very very busy. So I helped her sell things and clean her shop.
“Then, all of a sudden, here come twenty foreigners, twenty Spanish who wear nothing but underwear. They don’t have uniforms or guns, they just come walking through town in their underwear. The Australians, they always wear their uniforms. You know I worked with the Australians, just me and one other girl from here and an Australian girl who could only speak very simple Indonesian. It’s funny, because they didn’t want men, even though men usually get hired for all the translating jobs. They only wanted women. They were very polite and nice the whole time. Just me and two other girls translating for five hundred Australians. Sometimes just about shopping, but most of the time for important stuff, like permission to make a building or permission to land an airplane or boat.
“The Aussies were not allowed to drink while they were here, and you know how much Australians like to drink. But they were OK. Sometimes the Chinese in town asked me to ask the Aussies if they wanted beer, but I told the Chinese to ask by themselves. The Australians never drank though, they were very polite.
“The Spanish though, oh my god! So they come walking into town, twenty of them, wearing nothing but their underwear, small little white underwear too, so their cocks and balls are all over the place when they walk down the street. I could see it, Nick, because they were sweaty and their underwear was clear. So I go up to one of them, and I say, ‘You know, sorry, I don’t want to be rude, but this is a very Muslim place, and people will be angry with you for walking like that in public. See that store there, you can buy a sarong to cover yourself for only three dollars.’ But he only said, oh yeah, and kept walking, maybe he didn’t speak English, I don’t know.
“So, at that point, I was being followed by like what you would call the FBI or CIA for several weeks, because I worked for the Australians, and they wanted to know secrets about Australia, you know? It was scary. Like every time I got in a car, these two guys in dark sun glasses and suits would follow me. It was like in the movies. After two weeks or so, they come over to me and start trying to get to know me, you know, like guys do. One of the guys was really aggressive, but the other was nice, so I talked with them and let them buy me dinner.
“And they took me out a few more times, to nice places. One time they even took me to an Indonesian navy boat. They would ask me questions about what the Aussies were doing and what special equipment they were using. But I signed a contract, so I wouldn’t tell. Even in Jakarta, they followed me there and called me and asked me to meet them at a nice restaurant, but I said I was leaving the next day.
“So that morning with the Spanish, I see the two guys watching me from across the street, and one of the guys goes out to the street, and I hear him saying that he will call the head of the navy. That’s when I know for sure that he was a spy. So, like twenty minutes later, I see the Spanish guy that I talked to and all the other Spanish being walked out of town by about twenty police officers. The Spanish guy looked at me, and I know he felt stupid, he should have bought a sarong!
“Then there were the Japanese too. One ship of Japanese, like one thousand of them, stopped here without permission. They just all got off the boat and followed their leader, who had a big white umbrella. It was like a tour group that you see in Europe, you know? They all had their cameras and were just taking photos saying, ‘Oh, there’s an Australian or there’s an Indonesian! I want a photo with you!’ It was very funny. I love the Japanese.”
Kiss, by any account, is not your typical Indonesian woman. Born in Sabang, her father works for the government trade and commerce office on Pulau Weh, and at one point dabbled in importing vehicles from Malaysia. The family, despite living off of the income of one government employee, currently owns both a Toyota Rav4 and a Subaru Outback. While Indonesian government officials are notoriously corrupt, I have no evidence to support any claim that Kiss’s father was skimming cream in order to pay for the family rides. When he dropped us off at the family house, he removed a large ball of twine, swamp waders, and an unsheathed machete from the trunk.
Kiss left the island to attend a pesantren (Islamic boarding school) on the mainland when she was twelve. Located near Sigli, in the Pidie region of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (Aceh province’s formal title), her school was often caught in the midst of gunfire exchanges between GAM (Free Aceh Movement) guerrillas and TNI (Indonesian Armed Forces) soldiers. At one point she told me, “Now that all the violence has stopped, sometimes it is hard to fall asleep. I became so used to hearing the gunfire in the middle of the night, it was like a lullaby.”

Buffered between the competing colonial powers of Britain and the Netherlands, up to the twentieth century – with the exception of Siam, which would eventually become Thailand – Aceh remained the only pre-colonial entity in Southeast Asia to elude European domination. The last Acehnese dynasty came to power in 1727. By 1873, the province had been invaded by the Dutch in a war that would last over three decades, ultimately ending in Aceh’s reluctant subjugation. Disgruntlement with occupation would become a long running theme in modern Acehnese history, one that would only increase in intensity up to the eve of the tsunami.
Following the geopolitical maneuverings of Aceh’s Sultan Alau’d-Din Ri’ayat Shah al-Kahar in the sixteenth century, Aceh grew in terms of both economic and political power. Of all the sultanates throughout the Malay Archipelago, Aceh maintained the most wide-ranging and frequent interactions with foreign, predominantly Western powers. From 1790 to 1860, American ships made an estimated 967 voyages to Sumatra. As a result of those trips, they carried away more than 370 million pounds of pepper worth about 17 million dollars.
However, Aceh was perceived by most Western powers as a “source of marauding pirates and encroaching settlers,” a territory with a flaccid leadership unable to reign-in rebellious uleebalang (Acehnese war bosses or territorial chiefs). While trade flourished and peace remained relatively stable, a fractured Aceh found its future charted predominantly by foreigners. Following the 1824 London Treaty, which formally divided the Malay Archipelago into British and Dutch spheres of influence, Aceh was in effect “traded” to the Dutch in exchange for Stamford Raffles’ newly founded international hub of commerce on a small island called Singapore.
The Dutch occupation of Aceh proved to be the European nation’s single largest colonial blunder. Throughout the rest of the Archipelago, the Dutch had pursued one of two policies: In extant monarchies and sultanates, a combination of economic and political accommodation punctuated by short spurts of war; and in lawless areas, an unprecedented harnessing of the rule of law, previously absent in many of the more isolated regions of Indonesia. Aceh experienced neither of these paths to subjugation. Instead, threatened by Aceh’s entitled sense of independence, unyielding commitment to Islam, and notorious reputation for stoicism and valor in battle, in February 1873, the Dutch attacked.
As Adrian Vickers writes:

For a Dutch soldier watching the lush green shore-line as he sailed towards Aceh it must have seemed as though the pending task was going to be very easy. Standing with him on the ship were troops from all over Europe whom the Dutch had signed up, men down on their luck or getting away from their pasts…. The colonial army had the latest repeating rifles and heavy artillery, while the Acehnese merely had spears and knives.

As it turned out, Sumatran warfare was a nightmare. Like so many examples of guerilla warfare that would follow in the twentieth century – and to this day – the Dutch confronted massive resistance from local warriors who easily blended back into the Acehnese population. Camouflaged pit traps lined with sharpened spears confronted the Dutch and their allies at every turn. Ambushes and surprise attacks made retaliation, let alone victory, nearly impossible. European foot soldiers lived in fear at every waking moment.
As history would repeat itself a full century later with the Acehnese pitted against the central Indonesian government, the Dutch were reduced to razing villages, occasionally slaughtering entire populations of women and children in an effort to turn the tide against an indistinguishable and elusive enemy. Within the first five years of the war, the Dutch suffered more than 7,000 deaths, although most were attributed to cholera and other tropical diseases. Shortly thereafter, Dutch orders were given to hold without retaliating beyond the advanced line reached in 1880.
The Acehenese had developed the world’s first successful guerrilla strategy against modern European warfare. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Acehnese launched weekly raids on the Dutch positions, driving the defenders’ morale to a muddy, bloody low. European soldiers defected to the Acehnese side by the dozen, oftentimes accepting conversion to Islam in exchange for an Acehnese wife. The ulama (Islamic scholar) Teungku Sheikh Saman di Tiro responded to the Dutch governor’s plea for peace by writing, “As soon as you accept Islam by pronouncing the two articles of faith, then we can conclude a treaty.”
After 1893, however, an eventual Dutch conquest of Aceh became possible due in large part to the work of Snouck Hurgronje, the Dutch scholar of Islam mentioned and quoted earlier. Snouck’s investigations showed that Aceh had become an international Mecca for Muslims opposed to European colonialism. In a brilliant move that would change the course of colonial history, instead of recommending increased military muscle, Snouck responded by looking for the social basis of Acehnese resistance. Snouck observed a growing divide between the uleebalang and the ulama – between the traditional Acehnese leaders and the more devout Islamic scholars. He found that it was the ulama who were spearheading the anti-colonial struggles. Snouck recommended that the Dutch initiate a new push to bring around the slighted yet still influential uleebalang to the colonial point of view.
Snouck advised, “When one wishes to rule a country, to have one’s will respected there, then one must establish oneself in that country.” Dutch military commanders adopted some of the Acehnese guerrilla tactics being used against the colonial forces, establishing elite but small units capable of moving quickly and lethally.
As the Dutch government in Europe hid behind bureaucratic banter and a fog of war propaganda, General JB van Heutsz, the commanding Dutch officer in Aceh, adopted Snouck’s novel approach to solving “the problem.” The respect of the uleebalang was garnered through a strengthening of their rule and a simultaneous push to isolate the ulama from their rural political base. Van Heutsz combined effective political segmentation with the use of his new elite units, equipped with state of the art repeating carbine rifles, and a take-no-prisoners campaign that left tens of thousands of Acehnese fleeing the province. By 1903, the local population had been declared “pacified”, and van Heutsz was proclaimed the new governor of Aceh.
However, some would argue that until the peace accords that followed the tsunami, Aceh had never been truly subjugated by any power but Allah. Ulama-led resistance remained very strong in the hinterlands, with annual Dutch death tolls not dropping below 100 until 1913. At least once per week until the 1930s, there were individual suicide attacks conducted by distraught Acehnese against the occupying Dutchmen. Some scholars estimate that all told, twenty percent of Aceh’s population lost their lives in the fight against the Dutch. The resentment and animosity of having nothing but death and defeat to show for such massive sacrifice undeniably led to the manufacture of a socially ingrained hostility that would surface again and again before the Acehnese population could truly be considered at peace.

Inside the Iskandar Muda Airport, while waiting for our checked luggage, my traveling companion Ethan aka The Wire pointed out a “Bintang Zero – 100% Bintang 0% Alkohol” advertisement. Riffing on Indonesia’s most popular beer brand, he mumbled to me, “I guess that detaches the stigma from drinking beer before noon, but then again, what’s the point?”
In late January 2007, it had been nearly eighteen months since I last visited Banda Aceh. While change was taking place, it was at a snail’s pace. After collecting our things from under the perpetual neon glow of the naked overhead bulbs, we hired a taxi to drive us the fifteen minutes to the center of the city. I chatted with the driver, Akbar, as he pointed out newly built houses and schools, or the bulldozed remains of unsalvageable ones. As we approached the city center, I began to recognize familiar landmarks that had benefited from improvements during my absence – a stretch of formerly cracked and broken road that had been repaved, a field formerly littered with trash that was now sprouting grass.
A Swiss BelHotel had recently opened in Banda, but the price tag limited most guests to the international monitoring and UN set. We checked into a dingy and overpriced hotel in the heart of Banda, and then went for a walk to explore. Directly in front of our building lay a now bustling marketplace that, the previous two times I was in Banda, had been crushed beneath a beached sixty foot fishing boat. We were some two miles from the coast, but the wave’s surge had pushed all manner of debris up the Aceh River, depositing detritus, human corpses and mammoth fishing boats as it receded.
After a stop for coffee to avoid a ten minute rain shower, we stumbled across the Aceh Tourism Office, a faded green 1960s era building flying a large Indonesian flag from its roof. Arabic lettering beneath the Indonesian and English meshed romantically, if not awkwardly, with the traditional archway and its peaked corners, representing the horns of the famous Acehnese bulls. This country would be a very different place if the ethnicities of Indonesia permitted themselves to be amalgamated as easily as its architecture.
Inside, after picking our way through a series of labyrinthine and dimly lit corridors, we were guided upstairs by a government employee who was on his way to lunch. Faisal, in his early thirties with the hint of an emerging paunch, found us some literature and a detailed map of the province, and invited us to join him for his meal. Over unfiltered Acehnese coffee and martabak – the Indonesian take on the omelet – Faisal spoke with us about his job, his seven week old first child, and adjusting to life during times of peace. Smoothing out his green government issue uniform, in Bahasa Indonesia he said, “After the Memorandum of Understanding, we just didn’t know. All we could do was hope and pray that peace would stay. Now, the GAM are gone, or in the government, and people are getting used to this new life. Now, it is only the old men who want to fight. The young people like and want this way of life.” We thanked Faisal for his time, and offered to pay, but he said it was already taken care of.
Throughout Banda, people no longer stare with the look of appreciative distress that I became acquainted with during my first two trips. Life, for the most part, has returned to a status of Indonesian-style normalcy. Everything from the way people interact to the style of driving reflects the return from crisis inspired trust and openness to the more reserved and pious traditional approach of the country’s most serious province.
Walking on, The Wire and I made our way to the Baiturrahman Royal Mosque, Aceh’s most famous landmark. Emerging from the low rise sprawl of the city’s grimy surroundings, the Moorish influenced domes and minarets of the massive structure were as awe inspiring as the first time I witnessed them. Entering the mosque grounds, which two years earlier had been scattered with human corpses and debris, I now shivered despite the afternoon sun and sweat trickling down my back. I stood in front of the reflecting pool, between the popularly photographed main minaret and the multi-domed mosque, considering how much change two years can bring. When I first arrived, Aceh was still at war, the military presence an ever tangible reality in a city that had lost one third of its residents to the tsunami. Now, all other sounds blasted out by the magrib – the evening call to prayer – young boys were playing with toy cars as the city hustled and bustled with the pious pulse of a place reborn.
As the call to prayer increased in intensity, fierce looking young men dressed in black from head to toe began to patrol the courtyard of the mosque, ensuring that all individuals were abiding by the dictums of syariat law. I watched as one such man – he couldn’t have been much older than me – stopped two teenage girls dressed in jeans, long sleeved shirts, and matching black jilbabs. Speaking loudly, he gesticulated at the girls with the yard-long wood staff that he carried at his side. After the man walked away and the girls made as if to leave, I approached them and asked what the problem was.
“We are wearing jeans,” they said in Bahasa Indonesia, without making eye contact.
“But so am I, and so are all those men.”
“Yes, but you are men.”
“Huh, well what do you think about that?”
“About what?”
“About not being allowed to enter.”
“Oh, but we are wearing jeans.”
“Right, but the men are also and they are allowed to enter.”
“Yes?”
One of the patrolmen began circulating with a bullhorn in one hand and a yard-long rattan wood cane in the other. While I couldn’t understand the mangled words coming from the horn, as crowds dispersed and men dressed in traditional Islamic prayer robes entered, I knew it was time to leave.
After arriving in Sabang and talking with Kiss, I would ask her about the black-clad men. “Oh yes, they are the WH” – pronounced wey-ha – “the wilayatul hizbah, like the Islamic police. They are all just impotent men who cannot get erections, so they are very angry, and they make their anger on young women, like me. But they have no power. They cannot take me to jail or give me ticket. They can only make threat.”
“But what about that Italian NGO worker and his Acehnese girlfriend?” I asked, referring to a news story about an “improper relationship” that reached the international media shortly after the tsunami. “Didn’t they give her lashings?”
“Yes, but they were stupid. They should have worked out their love in a hotel, or in Sabang, or in Medan, or somewhere else. Instead, they stay in Banda. Life is not normal in Aceh, Nick. You can come to Sabang, and people don’t care, but in mainland Aceh, people are very strict, especially the men. Of course, there is so much korupsi, no one with much power is ever in trouble – they pay lawyers and there is no problem.
“But I tell you, what is nice about marrying foreigner is freedom. I am married woman. They can do nothing. Before, I have to respect everything that my father and brothers say. I say I was going to work with UNICEF in Banda and live there, and they said no, not proper. Now, I am free. They tell me what I can do, and I say, no, you talk to my husband. He is Muslim, but he is European, he does not care. Now I am free.”
The Wire and I spent our days in Banda getting a feel for the progress of change. We walked through markets, alive with the sale of fish, fruits, and mountains of leafy greens and vegetables. The rivers flowed with traditional square-backed Acehnese fishing boats, many advertising the stenciled names of various international humanitarian aid groups. And dozens if not hundreds of government, NGO, and UN SUVs plied the roads, shuttling aid workers to and fro. At night, thousands of people, mostly men, hung out at cafes or in the marketplace, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and living life.
Everywhere we went, construction was underway – the sound of nails being hammered or the smell of wet cement were constant. USAID, UNDP, CARE, and Islamic Relief placards were everywhere, often advertising the donation of a mosque or school or housing development.
Yet everyone in Aceh was not satisfied. In fact, most people were still reeling from their losses, and disgruntlement has reared its head across the tsunami zone. Just three months before my visit, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the chairman of the BRR – the Aceh and Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency – was kidnapped. Responsible for managing over US$2 billion in funds for the province’s redevelopment, he had come under fire from Acehnese internally displaced peoples – international development speak for non-foreign refugees – due to the slow rate of progress. Taken to a temporary housing complex where he was held captive for nearly twenty-four hours, it took the Acehnese governor’s wrangling to have the man released. Pretending to be an aid worker bringing breakfast to the IDPs, the governor revealed himself and struck a deal with the disgruntled crowd. This news never made international headlines.
At Lhoknga village, on the outskirts of Banda proper, The Wire and I stopped to pay our respects to a mass grave only a stone’s throw from the ocean. A group of lean, dark men with surf boards tucked beneath their arms were walking slowly from the surf break, audible when caught by the wind, back towards a hamlet of newly constructed homes. A warm, gentle breeze came blowing through a handful of still standing pines, swaying tranquilly under bright sun and a few low lying clouds enshrouding the surrounding lush hills. A short and muscular man approached us, wearing nothing but a pair of white Capri pants, some knock-off Chanel shades, and a lanyard around his neck from a German NGO. The man, Sabari, talked with us about the site, where more than one thousand unidentified people were buried.
He talked of the twenty-five deaths in his family, and how now only he and his son are left to manage his sundries shop. He took a mobile phone out of his pocket, and told us how Bill Clinton had visited the grave and his home – only twenty yards away – when he had visited last year. Doubtful at first, I was impressed to see digital photos of President Clinton, Sabari, and his boy huddled together in front of the grave. “All we need now is a toilet for the visitors to the grave,” said Sabari in a mix of English and Indonesian. “When the visitors come, they must all use the toilet in my house because there is none here. When you return to America, can you please ask President Clinton for a toilet?”

Following their Acehnese “victory,” Dutch politicians and military commanders felt a renewed sense of justification in claiming that they had a “moral duty to free common people from oppression or backwardness…. [To] punish or modernize independent indigenous rulers who practiced slavery, ruled unjustly, and did not respect international law.” The 250 Dutch civil servants working for Queen Wilhelmina took their jobs seriously, and implemented a new archipelago-wide bureaucracy that strove for “peace and order,” protecting the peoples of the Dutch Indies from “the worst effects of modern life.”
The Dutch, to their credit, did work incredibly hard to fulfill the Queen’s “Ethical Policy” and its promises of trickle down prosperity and improved opportunities for the Acehnese. At its international trade apex before the onslaught of the Great Depression, the Dutch Indies was producing 37 percent of the world’s rubber, and an astonishing 86 percent of the world’s pepper. And while the reality of colonial life for the Acehnese was not ideal, it did come with certain improvements and benefits, education being one of the most significant.
Historically far behind in terms of widely available education, by 1935 Aceh had reached and exceeded the national average for school attendance. With the increased knowledge and progress of a formal education came the modernization of thought, desire, politics, and organizations – including Islam. In 1939, the first modern Achenese social movement, the all-Aceh Association of Ulama (PUSA), was founded by many of the activists who had championed the cause of Acehnese education. As would be expected, to the horror of the Dutch, the new ulama-led group quickly became an anti-uleebalang as well as an anti-colonial soapbox. Shortly thereafter, PUSA elected the charismatic forty year-old Daud Beureu’eh its first President.
When the Japanese invaded Sumatra in March 1942, it was PUSA that they turned to for support in kicking out the Dutch. The uleebalang maintained a measure of authority for some time, but when the Japanese suddenly surrendered in August 1945 following the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was to PUSA whom went all the spoils. All but two of the twenty-five ruling uleebalang were murdered, along with most of their families.
On August 17, 1945, in the lull between colonial storms, Sukarno proclaimed Indonesian independence while “kidnapped” at his house in Jakarta. Now forced to choose between an Indonesian – albeit mostly Javanese – nation state and the reemergence of the Dutch colonial authority, the relatively modern-style PUSA sided with the baby-faced Republic. PUSA established itself as the ruling body of Aceh, ensuring that its leaders and supporters were “elected” throughout the province. Latter century historians would call the Acehnese political rearrangement “the most profound social revolution anywhere in the Archipelago.” As Reid writes:

The Acehnese revolution followed its own logic, and its own leadership, albeit in the name of Indonesia. Since Aceh was the only area the returning Dutch troops never sought to enter (save for the island and port of Sabang), it became the exemplary bastion of the struggle. The Republic needed Aceh far more than Aceh needed the Republic.

One afternoon, Kiss and I drove out to Kilometer Zero, Indonesia’s official westernmost land terminus – and beyond the SCUBA diving, Sabang’s main tourist attraction. Following sun drenched asphalt roads lined with bromeliad covered colonial era Dutch elm trees, we made our way from Sabang, a sleepy city of some 15,000 inhabitants, north through increasingly dense jungle. Every now and then, we would pass small dirt roads leading into the growth. The paths were usually framed between identical sets of upright bamboo poles sheared-off at the top. The poles’ red and white paint – the standard flag colors of Indonesia – gave the distinct impression of blood dripping from massive, gnarly spears. As I would learn later, the painted bamboo was meant not only to resemble the Indonesian flag, but also to commemorate the Acehnese resistance to the Dutch, when bamboo spears were used to fight machine guns.
We arrived at the one hundred foot tall shower tower that marks KM Zero just in time for sunset. Dog-sized monkeys prowled around, showcasing their manly accoutrements while screeching at the giant red orb dipping below the Indian Ocean to the west. We snapped some photos and got back into the Rav4 before the dozens of monkeys’ playful antics took a turn for the evolutionary worst.
On the drive back, we followed the same rutted track we had followed on the way out. More often than not, the cracked or non-existent asphalt was fighting an uphill battle against the encroaching vines and rainforest scrub. At one point, we passed a chain link fence with a large sign that read ARE YOU READY in red, bold faced English. “You are stupid,” chided Kiss while slapping me playfully, “following me out here in the middle of the jungle. I could take you to a GAM headquarters and have you killed!” I just laughed nervously.

Once the Dutch had established some measure of authority over Aceh, starting in 1908, palm and rubber plantations became lucrative sources of revenue in the province. However, rarely, if ever, was it the Acehnese who benefited. The East Sumatra-based Belgian company Socfin had contributed to the development and expansion of industrial agriculture in the province, and by the end of the colonial period, there were approximately 150 commercially owned estates. Before independence, about twelve percent of the province’s population was composed of migrants, most seeking opportunities on plantations or in mines.
Yet, it was not until the 1930s and 40s that the true wealth of Aceh was revealed with the discovery of vast oil reserves. After independence, oilfields and refineries previously owned by the Japanese were transferred to TMSU (the North Sumatra State Oilfield Enterprise) without compensating the local or provincial governments. Again, the Acehnese lost out in 1957 when TMSU became Permina (the State Oilfield Enterprise), and again in 1968 when Permina became the nationalized energy conglomerate Pertamina, active to this day. While foreign industrialists and a small percentage of Indonesians – mostly Javanese – reaped rewards, thousands of rural Acehnese farmers were forced off their land, driving already poor villages into a state of previously unknown destitution and misery. With the discovery of natural gas in North Aceh in the early 1970s, and Pertamina’s cooperation with Mobil Oil that followed, by the 1990s, the gas export alone from Aceh had reached in excess of US$2 billion per year.
Misguided central, top down economic policies resulted in Aceh becoming a large scale producer and exporter of raw materials for national and global markets, while it was only the entrepreneurs, industrialists, and corrupt government officials from outside the province who benefited. Local customs, economics, and politics were shunted aside in search of the holy grail of nationwide economic growth. One comparative analysis found that in the late 1980s, consumption per person per year in Aceh was US$168, while the provincial GDP per person was US$1,021. The Acehnese were being robbed blind, and they were pissed off.
Thus enters Hasan di Tiro. Great-grandson of Teungku Sheikh Saman di Tiro, the rebellious ulama who led the Acehnese crusade against the Dutch in the late nineteenth century, he would lead his own generation and the next’s charge for Acehnese autonomy. At age twenty-seven, he negotiated with the national leadership in Jakarta, and was given permission to decree the Province of Aceh as separate from the Province of North Sumatra. Shortly thereafter, he left Indonesia to study at Columbia University in New York, where he would work at the United Nations and spearhead the international effort to galvanize attention for the Acehnese cause.
While in New York, Tiro reflected on the future of Indonesia and how to incorporate its disparate peoples, places, and histories. Among other problems, he thought that the “one man one vote” policy did not satisfy the political and judicial needs of minorities, including the Acehnese. Additionally, the only answer he saw to the question of how to build an effective Indonesian nationalism out of the archipelago’s thousands of different ethnic and linguistic groups was by following the road to a nation state founded on Islam.
Indonesian President Sukarno and his New Order government were also obsessed with national integration. The Pancasila, or Five Principles, emphasized the homogenization and centralization of planning and administration, oftentimes in favor of Javanese culture. Particularly for Aceh, where regional cultural traditions constituted the fundamental basis of life, the new policies redoubled many people’s anger and subordination.
Tiro retooled his objectives, and began portraying the Acehnese cause as one that had existed since before the Dutch had arrived. He argued that because the Dutch never had a claim to Aceh, it was not theirs to give to “neo-colonialist” independent Indonesia when they transferred power in 1949. When he founded GAM (the Free Aceh Movement) in 1976, he did not publicly announce Islam as the core of his sought after nation state – he feared the animosity of an already anti-Islamic West. Yet, within GAM and Aceh, he did promote Islam as one of pillars of Acehnese pride.
Much of Tiro’s platform rested on a concept of Acehnese nationalism and honor that many observers have found intimidating and undemocratic. However, as Isa Sulaiman explains, because national politics were dominated by the Javanese and because Javanese militias were employed by the Indonesian military, “the ‘anti-Java attitude’ which surrounded the movement was caused more by political-economic factors than racial/ethnic ones… In general, the ambition of the Aceh nationalists was shared by elites whose needs were not met by the government or who lost their jobs or agricultural lands as a result of development.” Tiro’s ethno-regional approach was a means of galvanizing support for a movement that far fewer Acehnese would have rallied behind if it were construed according to non-ideological lines.
Tiro spread his ideology through several secret visits to Aceh in the 1970s. As the Acehnese, particularly young men, became more frustrated with Javanese rule, they began to act as Tiro’s mouthpiece, spreading the word of rebellion through personal connections and underground networks. By combining guerrilla warfare with international negotiations orchestrated from his sanctuary in Sweden, Tiro engineered his quest for a free Aceh. By the mid-1980s, he had recruited 300 rebel youths, and had sent them to be trained in Libya. From 1989 to 1998, the Suharto regime imposed DOM (Military Operations Zone) in Aceh, leading to hundreds of casualties and thousands of reports of human rights abuses. As Geoffrey Robinson posits, “Far from being the last bastion against national disunity and instability all these years, the New Order regime itself was largely responsible for the serious and protracted violence in Aceh.”
Following the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998, increased civil freedoms were embraced across the Indonesian archipelago. GAM was able to bolster its propaganda campaign, attracting over five thousand armed men. Additionally, the notion of Acehnese nationalism attracted support from both the newly revived NGO and student activist realms. For a few years, GAM garnered increasing visibility and growth, to the point that Acehnese independence became a tangible reality supported by such popular groups as the Islamic Students Association.
However, by 2000, the tides had turned. With Timor Leste battling for a hard fought independence in 1999, Indonesian nationalists of all stripes began to fear that Aceh could promulgate a national disintegration, with parts of Sulawesi, the Moluccas, and Papua waiting in the wings. Once GAM was seen as posing a threat to the Indonesian nation state, public debate shifted from demonstrations of approval to demands for anti-separatist action.
By 2003, there was popular apathy towards human rights abuses in Aceh, extensive support for the resumption of military operations, and a marked downturn in international support for GAM. In April 2003, roughly seventy percent of Acehnese society was using GAM civil government offices as opposed to Indonesian ones, and 4,750 out of 5,947 Acehnese villages did not have a functional local government. The next month, martial law was re-imposed, Indonesian special forces were air dropped into the province, and another 40,000 TNI soldiers were on the way. This was the state of affairs eighteen months later, on December 26, 2004, when the wrath of God was wrought on a province that had already been drowning for a century and a half.

The Wire and I were back on the road, winding our way from Banda Aceh to Medan via East, Central and South Aceh. We decided to forego the return flight in favor of what is touted as one of Asia’s most scenic drives. The road had been virtually closed to foreigners until after the tsunami. Kiss had told us to watch out for GAM.
After being nearly deafened by the pulse of cheap Bon Jovi knock-off techno inside the microbus, we took the driver up on his offer to ride on top. He told us that not many foreigners passed through these parts, but those that did always liked to sit on top. Clinging to the metal bars beneath us as we careened around hairpin turns, I still had the wherewithal to notice that this ten hour leg from the coast to the center of the province was taking us through by far the poorest villages I had seen in Indonesia. The scenery was beautiful – rolling hills, precipitous cliffs, raging rivers – but where we saw people, they were desperately poor. At one point, we stopped at a shack by the side of the rutted and overgrown road – Aceh’s main transit route from coast to coast – where three bare-chested elementary age boys sold the driver an enormous red fish that was almost as big as them.


The Wire and I didn't ride with the sheep, but we did cling to the roof through some of Indonesia's poorest and most beautiful countryside.

Driving through small hamlets, some that might not have even had electricity, we were often stopped at makeshift gates and made to pay a “mosque tax.” I was amazed at the pristine condition of most of the mosques, many with unblemished aluminum domes that reflected the surrounding mountains and hills like a mirror towards God. Hobbled old women collected coins from the driver in fishing nets, and then screamed commands to open the gate. Too poor to afford shoes or electricity, but still committed to keeping the community mosque looking flawless.
In Blangkejeren, the halfway point on our journey, the microbus let us off at the station, where the driver informed us that he would pick us up in an hour after he went home for lunch. It was a fantastic day, and due to the higher elevation, much cooler despite the cloudless sky. I took a walk out to a local soccer field, and imagined this place two and a half years ago, maybe soldiers exchanging machine gun fire with insurgents right in front of these goal posts. I ran a few laps to loosen up after the six hour haul, and waved to an amused group of boys who had stopped whipping their goat to stare and laugh.
“Hey! Where are you from? Come here, sit down here and wait.” A middle-aged man sitting at the station ticket booth flagged me over as I walked back.
“Thank you, good afternoon. How are you gentlemen doing? Where are you gentlemen from?” I asked in Bahasa Indonesia.
“Fine, fine. Good afternoon. From here of course! I have been here since the day I was born,” replied the man. A handful of the other middle-aged men gathered around the ticket table nodded vigorously and mumbled their support.
“Wow, good. So you all must be GAM then, right?” I half-joked.
“Haha! Ya, almost, but not anymore. You know our new governor is GAM.”
“Ya, I read that in the newspaper. So is this the man who won?” I pointed to the dozens of political photos pasted to the walls, tables, and any free space available. All of the posters featured the same dour looking man in a conservative blue suit and peci, the Muslim prayer hat.
“No, that is the loser. The winner is GAM.”
“Ya, the winner is GAM,” mumbled a few of the other men
“You know, there used to be a lot of violence in Aceh,” continued the ring leader.
“I know, but now there is peace.”
“That is true, allah-ul-akbar.” The others repeated his supplication. He paused to light an unfiltered cigarette. “So then, where are you coming from?”
“Banda.”
“Oh! Banda. Your first time there?”
“No, I was there one month after the tsunami. This is my first time returning to Aceh in over one year.”
“OK, that is very good. You came to help, ya, the first time?”
“Ya, it was crazy, very bad.”
“Ya, many many people died. You know, before, we were at war here too. Many people died. No peace for a long time.”
“Was there much violence here, in Blangkejeren?”
“Here, only fifty dead from the fighting. But in the North, Sigli, Bireun – adu! – a lot.” Another pause, staring off into space. “So where are you from, Germany, right?”
“No, America.”
“AH! AMERICA! He is from America,” he leaned and shouted to the others, they all nodded, I hoped approvingly. “George Bush was here some time ago.”
“Ya, he was, in Bogor, near Jakarta,” I responded. You would have had to have had your head in the sand to have missed his visit.
“Ya, that’s correct. So now we have peace in Aceh,” the man gesticulated with his cigarette, swooping over the surrounding hills in a nicotine laced arc, “and Bush makes a war on the world. Do you like to fight? Do you like shooting guns?”
“I like shooting guns, but war is very bad. I do not like Bush’s war. It is not good for anybody.”
“That is true.” They all nodded, smoked their cigarettes and stared into space, or at me. The coffee they ordered me arrived, brought on a plastic tray by a teenage girl in a jilbab and jeans.
“That is my daughter,” said one of the other men. “I have six children, two wives.”
“That’s good, like Aa Gym,” I said, referencing the popular Muslim cleric who was recently shunned by the female Muslim community for taking a second wife. They all laughed. I asked if I could take their photo, and started shooting.
“You see this man,” the man with two wives was pointing to the man sitting at the ticket table who, up until the wives comment, had been responsible for all of the conversation. “He is a terrorist. Like Taliban. Like Osama Bin Laden.” All the men laughed and slapped each other on the back.
“That’s funny!” I replied, and shot some portraits of the would-be Bin Laden. He cracked a goofy grin and gave me a big thumbs up.
“So what do you study? You are still in college, ya?”
I explained my situation, and began telling them about my life, when our minibus roared back into the station with the Bon Jovi techno still on full blast. “OK, gentlemen, see you next time. Thank you for the coffee. May the peace here last, I hope and pray for you.”
“Oh, do not worry about us,” said the man with two wives, “you should worry more about Bush’s war.”
I didn’t know how to respond. I could only smile. He was probably right.