Monday, January 3, 2005

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) -- The tsunami smashed into the offices of Aceh's only newspaper with awesome force, picking up its two huge printing presses like toys and tumbling them into the parking lot. The human toll was worse: 100 staff are feared dead.

But just six days after the disaster, Serambi Indonesia -- which has survived threats from both the government and rebels for its hard-hitting coverage of this war-torn corner of Indonesia -- was back in circulation.

"Cholera is threatening our refugees," read the banner headline of the first edition, a slimmed down version printed in Aceh province's second city, Lhokseumawe, and handed out free.

Also on the front page: a telephone number and message urging employees to call in and let the editors know they were still alive.

"We were badly hit, but the spirit of our journalists got this edition out," said Ismail Syah, the paper's Lhokseumawe bureau chief. "We need to give information to the people and allow our employees to get in touch with us."

Media people say it will be a blow to free speech in one of Indonesia's most tightly controlled and trouble-prone regions if Serambi cannot get up and running again in its previous tenacious form.

"Serambi has played an extraordinary role in Aceh, not only in providing information and education on the conflict but also in brightening the minds of Acehnese people," said Eddy Suprapto of the Alliance of Independent Journalists.

"It is a big loss. We may find qualified and skilled journalists, but it is not easy to find those with idealism like those at Serambi," he said.

The Dec. 26 earthquake that sent walls of water crashing onto shores around the Indian Ocean was centered off the west coast of Aceh, a province on the northern tip of Sumatra island. Coastal towns staggered by the quake were among the first hit by the waves. Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and home to Serambi's main office, was badly damaged, and villages along the west coast were destroyed.

More than a week after the tsunami, which is thought to have killed some 100,000 of Sumatra's 4.3 million people, it is still not clear how many Serambi journalists and other employees died.

Syah said about 60 percent of the paper's 270 staff are unaccounted for. Editors hope many are still alive and just haven't been able to check in because phone lines are down in many parts of the province. But Syah estimated the final death toll for the paper would be around 100.

Along with the newspaper's two-story offices, a housing compound where many of its employees lived was leveled.

Mohammed Rokan, a 53-year-old political and security reporter for the paper, is among the missing. His son, Iqbal, still holds out hope he is alive.

"My father may have lost his memory," he said, offering a possible explanation why he hasn't contacted his family. "We will check at the hospital, and then refugee camps. If we cannot find him, then we will accept it as God's will."

The Associated Press' longtime stringer in Aceh, Muharram N. Nur, was also a Serambi journalist. He is missing and repeated efforts by AP to contact his family have been unsuccessful. His house in the compound was among hundreds reduced to rubble.

Serambi started publishing underground in the late 1980s, but came to prominence after Indonesia's longtime dictator, Gen. Suharto, was forced from office in 1998 by widespread pro-democracy protests.

Suharto, who like many Indonesians uses just one name, had closed newspapers that were critical of his rule or that reported the brutality of his security forces in suppressing separatist movements in Aceh and other outlying regions.

With Suharto gone, Serambi was able to report more freely on the rebels, and quote their commanders for the first time.

But last year, the military -- the province's most powerful institution -- summoned the paper's editors and threatened to shut Serambi down unless its reporters stopped asking the rebels for comment for their stories. The editors reluctantly agreed and cut off contacts with the insurgents.

The paper, which has a circulation around 40,000, has also been criticized and threatened by the rebels, who accuse it of siding with the government.

In recent years, its sister publication, the weekly Kontras magazine, has exposed crooked politicians in Aceh, a province widely known for corruption and bad governance.

Copyright 2005