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women blamed for tsunami in Indonesia

Posted by Tanja on December 24, 2005, 10:46 am
Message modified by board administrator May 20, 2006, 7:13 pm

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1952823,00.html#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=World
The Times
December 22, 2005

Tsunami was God's revenge for your wicked ways, women told
From Nick Meo in Aceh
Religious extremists are using last year's storm to oppress the survivors
MARLUDDIN JALIL, a Sharia judge who has ordered the punishment of women
for not wearing headscarves, was uncompromising: "The tsunami was
because of the sins of the people of Aceh."
Thundering into a microphone at a gathering of wives, he made clear
where he felt the fault lay: "The Holy Koran says that if women are
good, then a country is good."
A year after the disaster which many see as a divine punishment,
emboldened Islamic hardliners are doing their best to eradicate sin --
and women are their prime targets.
With reconstruction slow, irrational fears of a second tsunami high, and
nearly 500,000 still homeless along 500 miles of coastline, the stern
message falls on fertile ground. A Sharia police force modelled on Saudi
moral enforcers enthusiastically seeks out female wrong doers for public
humiliation.
The Wilayatul Hisbah, which loosely translates as "Control Team", has
arrested women, lopped off their hair, and paraded them in tears through
the streets while broadcasting their sins over a megaphone.
More than 100 gamblers and drinkers -- men and women -- have been caned
in public and some clerics are calling for thieves' hands to be amputated.
The Islamic law introduced without popular enthusiasm in 2002 has been
implemented rigorously since the tsunami, especially in towns such as
Lhokseumawe, where Fatimah Syam, of Indonesian Women for Legal Justice,
knows of 20 women who have fallen foul of it.
She said: "They seek out women without headscarves or unmarried girls
meeting boys in private and parade them through the streets in an open
car. I've seen the police laughing and boasting, and the girls in tears.
The Sharia police say the tsunami happened because women ignored
religion. We never heard of this parading before the tsunami."
The poor, powerless and female have borne the brunt of the moral
enforcers' righteousness. Mrs Syam claimed the wife of an official
caught without a headscarf on a scooter was let off last month and a
prostitute who was paraded through the town won the sympathy of
passers-by because of the hypocrisy of her persecutors: the woman's
client was allowed quietly to disappear.
The religious police have not always had it their own way. In one
incident on the island of Sabang, attempts to humiliate a bareheaded
girl backfired when angry villagers turned on them. By the time the
civil police arrived to rescue the enforcers they were surrounded by an
angry mob flicking lighted cigarettes at them.
But such setbacks and public unease have not dampened the zeal of Dr
Jalil, a small, neat man with a trimmed moustache whose particular
concerns are headscarves, gambling, alcohol, and girls meeting boys.
"Sin starts small and gets bigger," he said. His next target is a
displaced persons' camp outside Lhokseumawe where he has heard of young
men and women freely mixing.
"Another tsunami is possible," he said. "The Holy Koran says that if
humans don't listen to Allah they will be punished."
He was not sure whether there was more or less sin since the disaster
although he believes that the Acehnese are more God-fearing now. In the
tent camps and temporary wooden barracks where desperate survivors
endure grim conditions, Dr Jalil's views are often well received. There
are 67,000 survivors still living in tents and a further 75,000 are in
the slum barracks, which are taking on a semipermanent air. Only half of
those who lost their jobs in the disaster are back at work and drug
abuse among the young is growing.
Although Aceh province is now a giant building site, the sheer scale of
destruction has slowed work. A third of government servants died and
1,000 miles of roads were wiped out, making the logistics of recovery
extremely difficult.
The Government says it has built 12,000 of the 80,000 permanent homes it
aims for and that housing will be its top priority next year. But some
aid workers think there could still be families under canvas in three
years' time.
Surnyati Alian, five months pregnant, is a typical survivor, squeezed
with her family of four into a 12ft square tent beside a stinking ditch
among the ruins of Meulaboh on the west coast. Like many Acehnese women
she is desperate for a new family. Her four-year-old daughter was torn
from her grasp as the wave crashed down on them. The child's body was
never found. Now she faces the prospect of nursing a new baby in a tent
that is black with mould.
In such conditions wild theories about the tsunami thrive. In a version
of /Pop Idol/ organised by the American and Indonesian Red Cross in
Barak Lampaseh camp in Banda Aceh, the winner was 12-year-old Sheila
Mentari, whose song told how God sent the wave as punishment for sin.
She said her father, who died in the wave, would have approved.
A fellow villager Marzuki Lidan, 46, who lost his wife and children, was
among the enthusiastic audience. He said: "The Sharia police are good
Muslims doing an excellent job. We must listen to them and follow God's
rules. Otherwise the tsunami will happen again."
*INDONESIA: ONE YEAR ON
*
# 18,149 permanent shelters built; 75,576 living in organised barracks;
67,504 in tent camps; 293,740 in host families.
# A quarter of those in need expected to be in permanent housing by end of
year
# Almost 70 per cent of fishing boats destroyed rebuilt or being constructed