Aceh: A New Dawn

4. The Women of Aceh

53 4 The Women of Aceh Braema Mathiaparanam As described in Chapter II, the province of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (NAD) had a larger female than male population even after the tsunami.This is partly because many men among the Acehnese had either migrated or died in the ongoing conflict of the Free Aceh Movement insurgency and partly because naturally women have longer expectancy of life.Women were left to carry on as breadwinners and caregivers. During the earthquake and tsunami that struck along the 800 kilometre coastline of the province on 26 December 2004, more women perished because there were more of them there at that time and also because, as will be elaborated later, they were simply unable to escape the disaster. This has contributed to a gender imbalance in Aceh. But it is the figures at the village level that localize the impact of the devastation and shift us beyond the usual big death toll figures. For example, in the village of Deyah Mapplam, only 270 survived among the 4,500 villagers. Of those survivors, only a third, or 90, were women.1 Flower Aceh2 was among the earliest non-governmental organizations in Aceh which compiled Fewer women than men survived the tsunami in Aceh. Of those who survived, many are now single parents, having lost their husbands to the tsunami or even earlier, to the military conflict. Photo courtesy of Mercy Relief. 54 Soldiers in a mountainous area. Photo courtesy of Mercy Relief Women taking on responsibilities in the rehabilitation and resettlement programmes. Photo courtesy of Mercy Relief 55 reports on five villages in Aceh’s Lampu’uk sub-district.They showed that only 40 out of 750 survivors were women in an area where the population was once 5,500.3 Another report, Oxfam International’s, on North Aceh showed that the death toll among the women from four villages was 70 per cent of all fatalities. Out of the 676 persons that was recorded, there were only 189 women survivors; male outnumbered female survivors by a ratio of 3:1.4 Many reasons have been offered as possibilities to understand this gender imbalance among the survivors.The women might have been more vulnerable as most were not good swimmers; they might have lost time and energy in struggling against the waves with children and the elderly in tow, and were hindered from climbing trees or from running fast because of their traditional outfits.The second possibility is that, even before the tsunami, women already outnumbered men as many men had either fled Aceh or had been killed in the conflict between the Indonesian military and the GAM (Free Aceh Movement). In fact, reports show there were already about 148,000 women who were single parents who lost their husbands in the armed conflict or whose husbands had become either internal or external migrants.5 Under such circumstances these women were both the primary caregivers and breadwinners. The third possibility is that the men were more likely to be outside the houses during the disaster and hence they had more chances to save themselves. Even now there is no clear evidence to show which factor or factors contributed to this gender imbalance at the district level. Impact on Women The tsunami also robbed women of their home industry livelihoods as equipment and tools used in tilling the land for rice, coconut, vegetables and fruit, were lost. Many also lost their micro-enterprises that included selling food and handicrafts at bazaars. On the domestic front young women survivors bear the burden of looking after children left motherless, cooking, keeping house for a few households and in some cases entering marriages, regardless of whether they consented. In some instances there have been reports of younger women being harrassed into marrying widowers and asked to bear children with shorter intervals to make up for the losses of children due to the tsunami.There are also instances of domestic violence and incidents of forcing widows into prostitution.6 A coordinator of Aceh’s Trauma Recovery and Psychosocial Intervention Foundation cited the example of a village of 15 women survivors who were doing the work for the other 185 who died, to explain why women’s workload had increased substantively, since the tsunami. She said women survivors were very busy — washing, cooking, serving the children and the men and the women had little time to think of their own...