Posted on 01/01/2005 7:23:40 AM PST by Prospero
"Words fail," they say, and they do, they do indeed.
Having just finished a first-stage restoration of my father's 45 year-old home movies, which included scenes of Djakarta, where our family briefly lived, I've always felt a sub vocal kinship with Indonesia and her millions.
They say I spoke Bhasha, the Malay tongue spoken there, and would translate for my parents instructions for the house servants, who were probably also spies for the Junta, the Communists, or both. Perhaps I dream in that language, occasionally, but this week I retreated into a walking nightmare, early on after the first indications that the Banda Aceh Christmas Earthquake of 2004 had swamped the parameter of the east Indian Ocean, strongly hinting at what the world would find when the northern end of Sumatra was finally heard from.
In America, for days, we could watch a handful of the same "amateur videos," from Phuket and Sri Lanka, and the horror there was bad enough. The only such video I've seen of the torrent that scraped over Banda Aceh, however, appears to have taken almost a week to make it to the Internet. I have yet to see it's like on television. It makes what happed to the beaches in Thailand and Sri Lanka look like a creek over running its banks after a brief summer storm.
Let's just say, what happened to the sex tourism spots and coasts and more distant islands elsewhere is nothing in comparison to the fate of Banda Aceh and the western shore of Sumatra. Since so many can't find the words, here are a thousand of them:
Now, if you had told me a week ago that an American Marine expeditionary force would be in Banda Aceh on New Years Day, my first reaction would have been that the President had decided upon a bold and unexpected strike in the War on Terror, jumping ahead on the timeline of that effort's multi-generational strategy. I might have thought it was a bold and necessary move, and I would have believed you if you had said they had located and captured Osama Bin Laden there.
As it was, in our shock, probing in from the parameter toward the epicenter of the Banda Aceh Earthquake, only a few have considered whether the hand of the Almighty reached out and sliced off a decade from what still promises to be a protracted conflict with Islamo-Fascism.
Consider that Indonesia is largely a Muslim country with a population similar to that of the United States, and developments there have been "the elephant in the living room" few wanted to consider as we cleaned out Islamo-Fascist terror nests in Iraq, Afghanistan and the southern Philippines.
Banda Aceh was, until a week ago, home of a Taliban-like, semi-autonomous government that had succeeded in establishing the Sharhia Islamic law, though the central government on Java nominally "allowed" this legal code on a "separate but equal" basis, for Muslims only. That was in 2002, and it was hoped the restive Islamo-Fascist insurgents who have fought for independence from Djakarta for more than twenty years would be satisfied. The locals had even just recently succeeded in putting into place, shall we say, "heavy legal penalties" for anyone who tried to prosthletize a citizen of Greater Islam... meaning Christians, of course.
Not a week passes without stories emerging from Indonesia of an on-going persecution of its Christian minorities, and the central governments failure to put a stop to it, especially the further one travels further from Djakarta to the myriad islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Remember the bombing of the nightclub in Denpasar on Bali, the only refuge for Hindus in Indonesia? The Australians haven't.
When he was forced to leave Sudan, Osama Bin Laden considered moving to Yemen, Afghanistan and Banda Aceh. He decided upon Afghanistan, of course, and may still be holed up there, or on the border with Pakistan, or under the nervous refuge of the Mullah regime of Iran. In fact, the Grand Mosque in Banda Aceh is right up there with Karbala, Qom, Medina and Mecca in everyone's top ten list of Muslim "holy places."
Today, it's an open air morgue, and if they find Osama among the dead there, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Sooner or later, we were going to have to deal with Indonesia, in general, and Aceh in particular. And things weren't looking too good.
Things are looking up.
Consider that the Christian Reformation, perhaps even the American Republic, has roots in the Black Death of 1349. People faced with such tragedy question their Worldview, abandon or are, at least, forced to examine their beliefs and habits, and the rebirth of Philosophy and the scientific method in the West began again in the centuries immediately after the plagues of the 14th Christian Century. They certainly questioned the magic of their priests and closely examined the "mysteries," resulting in a rebirth of Bible study that continues to this day. Unquestioned obedience to Rome ended with the Black Plague, and the True Belief of many a young muslim, of their Imams, may come to an end in the aftermath of the Christmas Earthquake.
Now, some might think I'm suggesting the God of Abraham did an angry thing of "biblical proportions" when He decided to shake Sumatra, and that he's on our side, loves George W. Bush, answered the humble prayers of the persecuted, etc., etc. But, this natural tragedy doesn't strike me that way at all. You won't find me cheering the deaths of a million people on Sumatra, and particularly in Aceh.
"Rather fear," I would think, betting on the "beginning of wisdom" might be the best response to this Catastrophe.
But... after you've digested the indigestible scope of the Christmas Earthquake, consider what you might have thought if Kabul under the Taliban had been wiped off the face of the Earth a week or so before our first boots hit the ground there after the destruction of the World Trade Center.
What has happened in Banda Aceh is no less miraculous and undreamed of a possibility, and, at this hour, American Marines are handing out water and food to the pitiable handful who escaped the 20 foot high, hundred mile wide river that swept over their island, again, making what happened in Thailand and Sri Lanka look like a simple storm surge in comparison. The Epicenter of fierce hatred, a sanctuary of Islamo-fascism is no more, as though Falluja had been hit with several hydrogen bombs.
Now you see them, now you don't.
Some of those locals, who have waited for almost a week for food and water, helping off-load our nation's charity are wearing T-Shirts with the image of Osama on them.
We certainly didn't cause this tragedy, but we'd be fools not to take advantage of the strategic miracle God has handed to us.
L
Thanks for that link.
Happy New Year to you my friend.
L
Reading further in this thread about the hampering (directly and indirectly) of our and others' rescue efforts........
Is there any more useless organization than the U.N., or any more worthless "religion" than Islam on the face of this planet?
Yeah.......rhetorical question.
Hmm...
http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/
Check out this interview (on the UN's official website) with SecGen Annan and Under SecGen Egeland shows,
Mr. Egeland: Our main problems now are in northern Sumatra and Aceh.
<...> In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. <...> Tomorrow, we will have eight full airplanes arriving. I discussed today with Washington whether we can draw on some assets on their side, after consultations with the Indonesian Government, to set up what we call an “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh.
Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers – 90 of them – which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything, because they have nowhere to stay and we don't want them to be an additional burden on the people there.
I provided this to some USAID colleagues working in Indonesia and their heads nearly exploded. The first paragraph is quite simply a lie. The UN is taking credit for things that hard-working, street savvy USAID folks have done. It was USAID working with their amazing network of local contacts who scrounged up trucks, drivers, and fuel; organized the convoy and sent it off to deliver critical supplies. A UN “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh? Bull! It's the Aussies and the Yanks who are running the air ops into Aceh. We have people working and sleeping on the tarmac in Aceh, surrounded by bugs, mud, stench and death, who every day bring in the US and Aussie C-130s and the US choppers; unload, load, send them off. We have no fancy aid workers' retreat -- notice the priorities of the UN? People are dying and what's the first thing the UN wants to do? Set up "a camp for relief workers" one that would be "fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything."
The UN is a sham.
The United Sates is the "United Nations," and it has clearly become a Cold War NGO with delusions of grandure.
It has, he tells me, "become like all the best intentions, starting as a organization devoted to it's reason for being, and needing to form departments to see to self-continuity, inevitably been supplanted by self-continutity. Self-Continuity has become it's Reason for being. Tear it down and start over, with a Coalition of the Willing, a United Free Nations."
51,000 troops STILL trying to kill 5,300 terrorists? This is why terrorists cannot be shown any consideration. They must be killed, before their relatively smaller numbers annihilate greater numbers of innocents.
I find this article extremely thought provoking...
Additionally, Iran taking that quake at Christmas last year must have some islamos wondering if Allah isn't going down for the count.
AGREED!
Christmas questions, indeed.
That's something I hadn't thought of. One of my older sons asked just a little while ago if Al Queda might try to attack our ships offshore. I hadn't thought of that, either. I figured they couldn't get to them because of the nature of the destruction; they wouldn't be able to get to the seashore from the interior. But if the photographers can get there, so can the terrorists.
Those are amazing pictures of the devastation.
I read on a different thread that the Basilica was spared any major damage and that those attending Mass when the tsunami struck were saved, even though areas around the church were devastated. It has become a hospital and its grounds a morgue since the disaster.
But, the nature of the destruction is nearly complete, with the "civil emergency" in Aceh put in place by the central government a moot point.
Aceh is drowned, the man said... it is finished.
Everyone says how terrible the Tsunami was, but it is only now becoming clear how nearly complete the destruction of Aceh was. There really hasn't been anything in recent times to compare with the size of the destruction there... Even Krakatoa didn't compare... even the wasteland of industrial Germany in the summer of 1945... An area the size of California is simply gone...
You know, the heavy rain could also help them clean the mud and debris from the streets.
That was Sri Lanka, and the mines were left over from the civil war with the Tamils.
People 50 years from now will be trying to landscape their houses they built, and when digging the flower beds will be unearthing all sorts of artifacts: cell phones, bones, who knows what.
http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/
A colleague came back from a meeting held by the local UN representative yesterday and reported that the UN rep had said that while it was a good thing that the Australians and Americans were running the air ops into tsunami-wrecked Aceh, for cultural and political reasons, those Australians and Americans really "should go blue." In other words, they should switch into UN uniforms and give up their national ones.
Now you all know that The Diplomad is not a cynical or suspicious being, but there is something funny going on here . . . what could it be? Could it be a genuine concern for local "cultural and political sensitivities" that would be offended by the presence of Aussies and Yanks in their own military uniforms saving thousands of lives? Maybe . . . or, might it not be an odd coincidence that just after the infamous Mr. Anan (see prior posts) says the UN will be setting up air traffic control in Aceh, the UN wants to show that it has an ATC system operating? What better way than to continue in the UN tradition of taking credit for others' work? And this just before Mr. Anan arrives in Indonesia on January 6.
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