Afraid of life, scared to give up on the dead

A CARTOON in an Indonesian newspaper summed up what words and pictures struggled to convey.

Death is eating through a book of lives when he selects his next victim with a tick of his pen and a funeral swiftly ensues.

In the next frame, Death is crazed, flicking through page after page in a frenzy. The final frame shows a horrific heap of human carcasses piled high on top of one another.

Death gone mad.

In the Aceh province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the deadly madness unleashed by the St Stephen's Day tsunami continues to horrify and each day turns up more bodies from the rivers, rubble and ruined homes.

The tally for yesterday alone was 3,293 2,661 of them in the provincial capital Banda Aceh and its suburbs. The day before, there were 3,809, bringing the total number of bodies recovered and buried to 78,793. There are another 25,000 or so to go.

The survivors refuse to give up looking for them, believing many lie along the banks or the town's main river where the remains of broken boats and smashed buildings were deposited by the wave in piles 20 feet high.

Townspeople clamber over the mangled mountains, pathetically tugging by hand at shards of metal and splinters of timber in the hope of uncovering a loved one, but knowing they can do nothing with the material they remove except build a neighbouring pile higher and risk burying a loved one deeper.

It is a similar tale down at the beach, or what was the beach before the famous white sands disappeared beneath a brown blanket of debris and mud.

A digger scoops up a mountain a rubble and exposes a body lying beneath. It is a young man, curled up tightly with his knees to his chest as if helplessly trying to shield himself from the hurtling sea.

Close by, an elderly woman stoops to inspect another corpse but she is too late. The remains are already wrapped in black plastic, ready to be taken to one of almost a dozen mass graves around the city.

Supplies of body bags ran out days ago and black sacks and plastic wrap are now all that are used to shroud the dead.

At the beach there are tall palms at the water's edge that stretch out to a blue sky in front, rolling hills cloaked in lush green behind and hell in between.

Several square miles of what was once the envied home of the wealthy now lies an incoherent tangle of flattened buildings, crushed vehicles and battered personal affect.

A child's toy Santa Claus sits on top of a crumbling foundation wall, items of cheap jewellery sparkle in the sun and the neat, trimmed headscarf worn by many women in the mainly Muslim province flutter in the breeze where they hang on branches and broken railings.

The heavy stone Baabunnajah Mosque withstood the worst of the torrent but its distinctive dome was knocked, like a golf ball off a tee, and has yet to be found.

The soft patter of a fishing trawler gives momentary encouragement that at least one boat has survived and that its owner is prepared to take up again his family's centuries-old livelihood, but it turns out that he has been searching for a sunken vessel and is towing the remains ashore.

By late afternoon there is a steady stream of new arrivals to the shore.

They come two to a moped, face masks tied tightly around their mouths, to join in the search.

As if to add insult to their injury the diggers, which so efficiently cleared the main roads further back in the town centre, dumped their loads on the beach, literally heaping misery upon disaster.

Some people believe the plan is to build up a barrier against a much feared second tsunami.

Others say the authorities simply don't know what else to do with the ruins of their town.

There may be some truth in that theory. Almost three weeks after the disaster, several large boats sit intact in bizarre isolation in the middle of ruined streets near the centre of town and the impossibly small fleet of 40 dumper trucks assigned to the clearance task appear to move their loads around in circles with little obvious direction.

Only the open-backed trucks that carry the latest collection of bodies drive with purpose, the soldiers who hang from the guard rails at each side ordering the perpetual undisciplined traffic out of their way.

People stand and stare after them as they drive away, then go back to work or the markets or the ruins of their homes.

Graffiti artists have got there before them.

"No pain, no gain" screams one message which is unlikely to give comfort to those who dwell there. "Banda Aceh 26/12/04" is the respectful attempt of another to capture the enormity of the date that changed everything.

Yet another sums it all up with poignant understatement: "Banda Aceh sad."