Word: indonesianness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...before retreating to the hills where she can keep an eye on the ocean, keep it in its place, from her tent made of blue plastic sheets and Styrofoam fished out of the swamps. Neither she nor the 150 others camping with her near Banda Aceh, capital of the Indonesian province that suffered the worst destruction, are ready to come down. The relief workers haven't yet discovered them, like untold numbers of others. "The water took away everything," she says. "We're afraid the waves may come back and try to take the rest...
...cause of the carnage was a massive earthquake that trembled the earth's crust off the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, setting off through the oceans shock waves that were felt more than 3,000 miles away on the coast of East Africa, where at least 200 people died. Bustami, a fisherman from the Sumatran village of Bosun, is one who experienced the quake and tsunami and lived to tell about them. Sometime after 7:30 on the morning of Dec. 26, he says, he was on his boat just off the coast when he felt...
...combined effects of the earthquake and tsunami that Bustami survived has killed tens of thousands. The precise number is so far unknown and ultimately unknowable. On Dec. 30, the Indonesian government doubled the number of likely dead in that country alone to 80,000, though that was no more than a guess. The area most affected by the quake and tsunami is Aceh, at Sumatra's northern tip--difficult to get to in the best of times and a place where a long and bloody insurgency has made travel and the provision of emergency services desperately hard. Whole fishing villages...
...ubiquity of personal technology distorted the early news of the disaster. Because the first indications of its scale came from Sri Lanka and Thailand, it was easy to forget that the real devastation was not in well-heeled tourist enclaves but in dirt-poor Indonesian fishing villages. In any event, the earthquake reminded us--had we been foolish enough to forget it--that there are primal forces of nature that no amount of our wizard technology is able to confine. Yet technology can help. For decades, a sophisticated early-warning system has helped limit catastrophic damage from tsunamis...
...social upheavals that followed massive earthquakes in Nicaragua in 1973, in which natural disasters have sharpened conflict, particularly when aggrieved parties believe there is a bias in the distribution of relief aid. Already there are signs of such a dynamic emerging in Aceh, with some villagers accusing the Indonesian military of directing aid to families of soldiers and its allies in the population. But in Sri Lanka, where the two sides have been locked into an often rocky negotiation process for years, disaster relief may provide a boost to the troubled peace effort...