Facing tough times in post-tsunami Aceh

Facing tough times in post-tsunami Aceh

Tess Bacalla, Contributor, Banda Aceh

Rahmi is about 14, but has already lost her world as she knew it.
One can see it in her sad, soulful eyes, and in her inability
to smile. And the reason is evident just by surveying what
surrounds her here in this northwest Sumatra city.

Several months after the powerful Dec. 26 earthquake struck
and triggered a tsunami around the Indian Ocean, this once
bustling coastal city remains desolate.

In many areas, piles of rubble are the only proof that there
were once houses and buildings, while in others muddy boats
scattered willy-nilly far from the shore show just how strong the
waves that swept into Banda Aceh were.

There are also places where the stench of death still hangs in
the air, even as a few men sort through the debris.

Save for a younger brother, Rahmi is all that is left of her
family. She doesn't know it, but Aceh's female population in
particular has been just as decimated. In fact, the tsunami
didn't just flatten this provincial capital and almost erase it
from the map; it also altered the demographics of a place that
was already a man's world to begin with, and may have paved the
way for a hard future for Rahmi, a life that will be more
difficult than what her mother or grandmother experienced.

The total death toll from the tsunami that swamped coastal
communities in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand and India,
along with seven other countries, is more than 220,000, according
to international relief group Oxfam.

Based on the Indonesia National Disaster Coordinating Board,
or NDCB, more than half of those deaths occurred in Aceh. Not
included in these figures, however, are the missing, and these
may outnumber the fatalities.

In many areas, including Aceh, the majority of the missing or
dead are women. In five villages in Aceh's Lampu'uk subdistrict,
the women's group Flower Aceh said only 40 of the 750 total
survivors from a population of 5,500 were women. Other local non-
governmental organizations and international aid groups have
found similar statistics in other tsunami-affected communities in
the province.

Oxfam says in four villages in Aceh Besar district, male
survivors outnumber the females by a ratio of three to one. In
four villages in North Aceh, the female death toll made up 70
percent of all fatalities. In Kuala Cangkoy, 80 percent of the
dead were female.

Not surprisingly, men outnumber women in the camps and
barracks set up for internally displaced people, or IDPs.
International and local NGOs, as well as UN agencies, worry that
if what is happening in these camps and barracks is any
indication, the Acehnese women and girls who survived the deadly
waves should brace themselves for what lies ahead.

Heavier burdens, heightened risks of abuse

As in other Asian societies, women are the traditional
caregivers in Aceh, and perform the household chores. They still
perform such tasks in the camps, but these days their burden has
become heavier because of the sheer number of men and children
they are expected to serve and look after.

Before the tsunami, each Acehnese household could probably
count on more than a pair of female hands to do the chores. Today
not only is that no longer true, women and girls are expected to
help men who are not their relatives, if only because Acehnese
males are "embarrassed to be seen doing housework", says Tesmiati
Emsa, who heads a women's NGO based here.

Another relief worker says some widowers left with children to
look after simply could not cope with the idea of becoming
caregivers even to their own children, so they readily gave them
up to orphanages.

Meanwhile, NGOs and international aid agencies say many of the
women have been subjected to sexual harassment and abuse, while
some have found themselves becoming victims of physical violence
wielded by bored or frustrated men. Erwin Setiawan of Flower Aceh
says men are lashing out partly because of the stressful
conditions in the barracks where there is a lack of privacy and
where they are unable to practice their usual means of
livelihood.

But he offers no explanation why women, who are enduring the
same conditions, are not reacting in the same way and instead are
made to bear the brunt of the men's pent-up emotions.

In fact, life in the camps and barracks is even more stressful
to the women because, say several observers, their needs were not
taken into consideration in designing these places. For instance,
there are no separate toilets for men and women. Many of these
have no roofs or are made just from plastic sheets or sacks,
through which peepholes can easily be cut.

"I heard a lot of cases of men peeping while women were taking
a shower in their temporary shelters," says MB Wijaksana, editor
in chief of Journal Perempuan, a Jakarta-based women's magazine.
He says he tried to check whether the police were aware of these
cases, which he described as a form of sexual harassment, and
found that the authorities had somehow managed not to hear about
them.

Personal supplies such as underwear and sanitary napkins have
also apparently missed the list of basic needs provided in the
shelters. The lack of long-sleeved shirts and headscarves
essential to Acehnese women, who are predominantly Muslim like
the majority of the Indonesians, has also not been remedied.
In a press statement, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) observed
that in the face of such unmet needs, "women and girls become
reluctant to carry out public activities and even access basic
needs and humanitarian assistance".

As if they didn't have enough problems, the women in the
shelters have also had to put up with a lack of clean water,
which means they are usually forced to fetch water elsewhere and
lug it back to their quarters. But according to a UNFPA
information officer in Indonesia, Maria Hulupi, some barracks are
in areas that make it dangerous for women to venture outside.

As it is, the crowded, male-dominated environment has meant
that women and girls have had to put up with being constantly
teased and stared at.

Forced marriages

The setup of many of the shelters -- with nonrelated men and
women staying in the same tents or rooms together -- has even
lent itself to a trend many of the female IPDs do not welcome at
all: forced marriages.

Samsidar, who heads a subcommittee of the National Commission
on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), says young women
are being pressured to marry males staying in the same tents or
barracks. Such marriages have become an "informal rule", she
says.

Journalist Wijaksana, for his part, says that the pressure to
marry is greater on young single women because he says that in
Aceh, virgins are preferred to widows, who tend to be looked down
upon.

"For men, the loss of a wife seems a simple thing," he adds.
Besides, says Wijaksana, shariah law forbids women from
remarrying within three months of the deaths of their spouses.

Men can remarry any time. Nana of the Humanist Institute for
Cooperation with Developing Countries (Hivos) cites the case of a
man in Meulaboh, located on the coast of Sumatra, who married his
sister-in-law only a week after his wife disappeared in the
tsunami. He thought she was dead, says Nana. A month later, the
wife resurfaced.

Oxfam says that especially for young women, forced marriage
has serious implications on their education, livelihoods and
reproductive health. "Surviving women may also be encouraged to
have more children, with shorter intervals between them, to
replace those lost by the community," it also says. "Again, this
has consequences for their reproductive health and their ability
to earn an independent income."

Compared with the men, fewer Acehnese women have had some
education, since families give priority to sending the male
children to school. This practice is rooted in the belief that
the women's best place is the home -- even though they are not
recognized as household heads.

Hivos's Nana says some of the women in the shelters who
participate in cash-for-work activities have admitted to her that
all they could do was cry when their husbands would not let them
leave for work without first making sure that their homes were in
order. Such was their fate, the women said.

The harsh truth is that the social position of women in Aceh
accounts for their disproportionate number of deaths, say local
and international NGO workers. Because the tsunami smothered the
province on a Sunday, most of the women and children were at home
while many of the men were out -- socializing, running errands or
fishing.

Other men had also not returned home for quite some time
because their jobs were elsewhere. Ironically, 70 percent of
Aceh's pre-tsunami population consisted of women, because men
were either being killed or were fleeing from the conflict
between the Indonesian Military and separatist Free Aceh Movement
(GAM).

But most Acehnese women, unlike the men, do not know how to
climb trees or swim, say some observers. This made it difficult
for them to escape the raging waters of Dec. 26. Yet even those
who did know how to climb trees or swim perished in the end
because they were either dragged down by the sheer weight of the
children and other family members that they tried so hard to save
-- in keeping with their traditional role as caregivers -- or
succumbed eventually to fatigue.

Observers theorize that the long, flowing clothing that cover
their arms and legs restricted the movement of the Acehnese
women, frustrating their escape from the tsunami.

Finding their voice

Aid worker Nana of Hivos fears that Aceh's women survivors
could only become a weaker force now that their numbers have been
diminished greatly, while men could emerge more dominant. Before
the tsunami women were already reluctant to speak, especially in
public gatherings.

Even now, despite all the hardships they have had to endure in
post-disaster Aceh, many women are hesitant to voice their
concerns.

But gender and poverty expert Yulfita Rahardjo says Acehnese
women can strengthen their position only if they could be made
aware of their rights. She concedes, though, that men will have
to be educated as well on gender issues.

In a gender training program she conducted a few months ago in
Jakarta for subdistrict heads and planners in Aceh, she says it
was evident that the participants -- mostly male -- did not
understand the concept of gender and even blamed the women if
they were not being heard, saying the women refused to talk.

Yet women in Aceh have not entirely kept mum about their needs
and aspirations. Some have expressed their desire to go back to
their homes and start small-scale businesses so they can rebuild
their lives.

Nani Zulminarni, head of the women's rights group Pekka
(Program Pemberdayaan Perempuan Kepala Keluarga, or Women-Headed
Household Empowerment Program), says the women in the districts
where her organization operates are unanimous in saying that they
do not want to be dependent on others. Alongside their yearning
to work is their dream to have a house again, a symbol of
dignity, especially for Acehnese women.

"No one expressed desperation and hopelessness," says
Zulminarni, who notes that providing a livelihood is a very good
starting point for empowering women. She says the grassroots
women's groups Pekka has helped have gained so much respect that
their members are now being invited to important community
gatherings. Says Zulminarni: "It's a good sign."

Sylvia Agustina, program officer of the UN Development Fund
for Women (Unifem), says her vision for her fellow Acehnese women
is not just for them to return to their "normal" lives. Agustina,
who also lost a number of her loved ones to the tsunami, says, "I
want them to have an option."