The Dec. 26, 2004, wave left 228,000 dead or missing in a dozen countries. Nowhere was the devastation and loss of life worse than in Aceh. Along the coast, waves flattened neighborhoods as much as 2 miles inland and left behind a wasteland of corpses and debris.
The devastation was so overwhelming that separatist rebels of the Free Aceh Movement and the government of then-President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono agreed to end hostilities to help deliver emergency aid and bury the dead. By August 2005, they had hammered out a deal to end Aceh’s 29-year fight for independence, at the time Asia’s longest-running war.
The agreement expanded the province’s autonomy and handed it a greater share of government revenues. It also allowed the existence of local political parties, and a party formed by former rebels, the Aceh Party, came to dominate local politics.
Aceh already had begun implementing Shariah law, with separate police and courts set up in parallel with the secular legal system in the years just before the disaster. Over the past decade, Shariah has taken a firmer hold of the province. This year, the provincial government extended Shariah law to non-Muslims and added the provisions that adulterers and homosexuals could be caned.
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