Word: tsunami
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When I landed in Banda Aceh a few days after the tsunami struck on Dec. 26 last year, I was surprised that among the jumble of feelings swirling through me, one of the strongest was also one I least expected: anger. Of course, there were other emotions: disbelieving horror at the devastation; pain for the suffering of the living and those who died; fear as the buildings still standing were rattled by repeated aftershocks; even the guilty relief that I wasn't out there searching for my family among the muddy ruins. But beneath all that there was a steady...
...Aceh Movement (known by its Indonesian acronym, G.A.M.) are scheduled to sign a peace treaty in Helsinki, the fruit of months of hard bargaining. Both sides have made concessions on points that had killed previous talks, and there's little debate about what brought about the new flexibility: the tsunami. To be sure, "it was also the democratization in Indonesia," says one of the principal G.A.M. negotiators, Nur Djuli. "But, yes, the tsunami was very, very important. How could we go on fighting when our people were suffering...
...most accounts more than 12,000 have died in the fighting, most of them civilians?they are desperate to avoid seeing full-scale conflict again. Abdullah, a fisherman in the coastal village of Lamno, summed up the feelings of many we talked to in the months following the tsunami. The catastrophe, he told a Time colleague, was "a blessing in disguise." How so? Said Abdullah: "At least we can now sleep peacefully at night." Because of the scale of the disaster?and the presence of so many foreign relief workers?those who survived no longer had to be worried about...
...Even before the tsunami, when the only news from Aceh came from refugees (the military had sealed off the province while it attempted?vainly?to crush the rebels), the longing for peace was obvious. In May 2004, I was told by Mohamad, one of a dozen Acehnese illegal immigrants sharing a small room in Penang, that it didn't really matter who did the killing and torturing. "My friend Saiful was confused with someone else with the same name. Someone took him off a bus and tortured him in the jungle. When we found him, he was so covered...
...Number of men arrested for spreading postdeluge rumors of a tsunami, landslides and a burst dam; the last scare set off a deadly stampede...