Few survivors feared among messengers

Few survivors feared among messengers

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A lot of people count on them to bring the news, especially
now as traumatized survivors search frantically for lost family
members, but almost all of 80 journalists from the only daily
newspaper based in Aceh -- Serambi Indonesia -- are missing and
feared dead.

The latest stories published on the Serambi website are from
Saturday's edition.

As the main paper covering Aceh, the journalists have become
accustomed to threats, intimidation and violence amid the
conflict in the province that began in earnest in 1989 when the
military started operations to root out the Free Aceh Movement
(GAM). Despite those risks, nothing could have prepared them for
what is becoming known as the Boxing Day debacle.

Along with the newspaper's other staff members, the missing
journalists are among 230 employees based in Banda Aceh and other
areas, who work for the Jakarta-based publishing group Gramedia.
Gramedia also publishes the country's largest newspaper, Kompas.

"We fear for the worse," said Gramedia public relations chief
Agus Parengkuan, also refering to employees of the group's
bookstore. The Kompas bureau chief in Aceh checked the homes of
many of the missing employees, including that of Najmuddin Umar,
who also reports for Kompas. Like the others, "His house was no
longer there" an executive at Kompas said.

The Serambi office and printing house were among the buildings
in downtown Banda Aceh that were totally destroyed, either by the
massive 9.0-earthquake or the resulting tidal waves on Sunday.

Serambi was established in the early 1990s by several senior
Kompas journalists, including its editor-in-chief Syamsul Kahar,
who survived the tragedy.

Since Sunday, media companies outside Aceh were also trying
frantically to locate their reporters and staff based in the
province. As of Tuesday, some were found to be safe including The
Jakarta Post's Nani Afrida and Nur Raihan of detik.com. Nani
sounded traumatized, while Raihan cited "God's miracle" that she
and her family escaped "a four-meter wave just behind our car."
Behind them other cars vanished into the wall of water, which
swallowed up most of Banda Aceh, she said.

Raihan's colleague explained that reporting was still quite
difficult in Banda Aceh. "With a lack of gasoline, everyone's
just walking from place to place," he said.