The Light That Came from Darkness

When I landed in Banda Aceh a few days after the tsunami struck on Dec. 26 last year, I was surprised that among the jumble of feelings swirling through me, one of the strongest was also one I least expected: anger. Of course, there were other emotions: disbelieving horror at the devastation; pain for the suffering of the living and those who died; fear as the buildings still standing were rattled by repeated aftershocks; even the guilty relief that I wasn't out there searching for my family among the muddy ruins. But beneath all that there was a steady thrum of outrage: Why, of all people on the planet, was it the Acehnese who had been hit by this calamity? It seemed so unfair. For 30 years and more, they had been caught between the Indonesian armed forces and secessionist rebels, and had suffered a living hell of rape, torture and violent death.

The absurd thought that someone must be responsible for such an enormous injustice wouldn't go away. As I went about the city talking to survivors, I found myself repeatedly asking who they thought was to blame. Was there a reason to it all? Could God do such a thing to a people so proudly religious, who had already suffered so much? Most looked at me blankly; they were far too preoccupied with feeding their surviving family members and burying the dead to consider such existential musings. One or two even grew angry. Was I saying God had punished Aceh? Wasn't Aceh famous as the cradle of Islam in Southeast Asia? Wasn't it known worldwide for the deep religious belief of its inhabitants? "If anything," an elderly man named Marzuki told me, gesturing to the vista of flattened buildings that stretched away for miles around us, "all this is because we weren't religious enough. We must always have faith. Without faith we are nothing."

For much of the past three decades, the Acehnese have survived on faith and little else. Now, finally, they may have something more tangible to hope for. On Aug. 15, representatives of the Indonesian government and the rebels of the Free Aceh Movement (known by its Indonesian acronym, G.A.M.) are scheduled to sign a peace treaty in Helsinki, the fruit of months of hard bargaining. Both sides have made concessions on points that had killed previous talks, and there's little debate about what brought about the new flexibility: the tsunami. To be sure, "it was also the democratization in Indonesia," says one of the principal G.A.M. negotiators, Nur Djuli. "But, yes, the tsunami was very, very important. How could we go on fighting when our people were suffering?"

I haven't been back to Aceh since the peace deal was announced, but I have no doubt that the Acehnese will have one overwhelming reaction to the news: relief. While many in Aceh support the idea of independence from Indonesia or some form of autonomy, after so many years of being caught between two implacable foes—by most accounts more than 12,000 have died in the fighting, most of them civilians—they are desperate to avoid seeing full-scale conflict again. Abdullah, a fisherman in the coastal village of Lamno, summed up the feelings of many we talked to in the months following the tsunami. The catastrophe, he told a Time colleague, was "a blessing in disguise." How so? Said Abdullah: "At least we can now sleep peacefully at night." Because of the scale of the disaster—and the presence of so many foreign relief workers—those who survived no longer had to be worried about being roused for a beating, or worse, by soldiers or rebels.

Even before the tsunami, when the only news from Aceh came from refugees (the military had sealed off the province while it attempted—vainly—to crush the rebels), the longing for peace was obvious. In May 2004, I was told by Mohamad, one of a dozen Acehnese illegal immigrants sharing a small room in Penang, that it didn't really matter who did the killing and torturing. "My friend Saiful was confused with someone else with the same name. Someone took him off a bus and tortured him in the jungle. When we found him, he was so covered in blood and cigarette burns that we could hardly recognize him. That's when I decided to run away." Mohamad's voice cracked. "We just want the killing to stop," he said, as a low murmur of assent rose from the other men in the room. "We want to go home."

Now he and thousands like him can. If only it hadn't taken 175,000 deaths to give them that opportunity.

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