Sunday Times: Tsunami survivors given the lash

Disaster donations help Islamic vigilante force impose punishments on women

Now, that’s alarming. But here are the paragraphs that support this assertion.

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Here’s what the story really says:

International aid workers and Indonesian women’s organisations are now expressing dismay that the flow of foreign cash for reconstruction has allowed the government to spend scarce money on a new bureaucracy and religious police to enforce puritan laws, such as the compulsory wearing of headscarves.

Some say there are more “sharia police” than regular police on the local government payroll and that many of them are aggressive young men.

The irony is that sharia was first introduced into Aceh as part of a package of measures that ultimately succeeded in making peace in the long-running guerrilla war between the conservative, independence-minded Acehnese and the Indonesian state.

The 2004 tsunami, which killed 170,000 Indonesians, devastated the whole northern coast of Sumatra and shocked both sides in the conflict into reaching a deal after 30 years of fighting that had claimed 15,000 lives. It is, so far, a success story. The separatist guerrillas, known as GAM, have decommissioned most of their weapons and the Indonesian army has withdrawn most of its combat troops.

Last Monday the province held the first democratic elections in its history and early returns suggested that voters had elected as governor Irwandi Yusuf, a former rebel spokesman who escaped from jail after the tsunami.

For international donors, who gave generously to end the nightmare of the tsunami, the next few months will pose hard choices. “Nobody intended our aid to subsidise this,” said one United Nations official.

Here are the facts.

1. Local governments in parts of the devestated region have begun supporting sharia.
2. The religious police are paid by the local governments.
3. No donations are being used for this purpose.
4. The region has held its first democratic election.
5. The governor elected is a former rebel.
6. The peace between the rebels and the national government is holding.
7. Only one person is quoted by name, and one is nameless. Two quotes in total.
8. Only one person is named as having been arrested by the religious police.

There are no facts in this article that support the sub-head. There is no evidence that tsunami donations have been used to advance sharia. Indeed, the only news in the article is very good for Aceh, free elections and the participation of former rebels peacefully in the process.

As I have shown in past posts, the vast majority of complaints about tsunami aid come from the fly-in, fly-out NGO’s and the UN and government functionaries that are forced to live in hotels in Indonesia where the people are “different”. Rather than accept that the locals want a say over the relief efforts, these whiners will say anything to puff their efforts up and dinigrate the locals.

I do not doubt that there is graft and intolerence in the region. Kinda like Louisiana, say. I’d expect far more facts and fewer speculations from the Sunday Times, but it seems intent on earning the prefix “the once, great”.