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.”