INDONESIA: Loss hits home for radio presenter

Singapore-based Acehnese journalist loses 42 relatives in the tsunami disaster

The Straits Times
Thursday, January 13, 2005

By Arti Mulchand

She had spent six days covering the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami. Waiting to leave, on the tarmac of the Sultan Iskandar Muda Air Base in Aceh on Jan 2, Singapore-based Acehnese journalist Eva Mazrieva finally realised how great her own loss was.
 
Fifty-seven of her paternal relatives lived in the villages of Ulee Lheu and Lingke, both now a mess of debris and bodies.

With no hope that any of them had survived, she got on with her job, said the 33-year-old Radio Singapore International presenter.

But just before she left, she spotted a pair of twins among the thousands of refugees at the air base. Hardly daring to hope, she looked for their mother - and screamed in delight, for it was her cousin, Ade.

Ade, her husband and three children as well as 10 other relatives from the village of Lingke had survived.

But the good news stopped there - 42 other family members - seven from Lingke and all 35 relatives from Ulee Lheu, were dead.

'It's hard to say we feel lucky. There are so many more sad stories,' she said.

Ade's brother Mis and his wife survived, but they lost their daughter, nearly two.

'A villager said the girl was saved, but they can't find her anywhere. It would be easier to accept that she's dead,' said Ms Mazrieva, who has been living in Singapore for five years.

Equally shaken is her 70-year-old father, Mr Macmud Dahlam, who lost three of his sisters and members of their families. He still refuses to perform the traditional last rites.

Mr Dahlam, a building contractor, was the only one of eight siblings who was convinced to leave Aceh and joined his wife and daughters in Jakarta in the late 1980s.

So it was in their West Jakarta home that Ms Mazrieva and her parents heard the news. As the scale of the disaster became apparent, the panicked family tried calling Aceh, but in vain.

'We couldn't reach anyone, even in Lingke, which is more than 30km from the coast...And deep in my heart, I believed that they were all dead,' Ms Mazrieva said.

She was sent to report on the situation two days later, and was greeted by thousands of refugees in Banda Aceh.

'I had been to East Timor in 1999, (I) saw Dayaks behead Madurese in West Kalimantan and Christians and Muslims clash in Ambon. But I had never seen panic and desperation like that,' she said.

In Lambaro, now a mass grave littered with bodies, she recognised no one.

'You want to pray for their souls, but how do you do that? There were just so many bodies...in the river, in the streets, in cars. Any one of them could have been my family,' she said, her voice quivering.

As she neared the coast, the si- tuation only became worse, especially in her father's home town, Ulee Lheu, 8km from the coast.

'Only the mosque was standing. I couldn't even recognise my own home. Other villagers were screaming for their family members. But everything was gone,' she said.

Following Ms Mazrieva's departure from Aceh, her two cousins - Ade and Mis - have gone to Jakarta.

She returned to Singapore last Saturday carrying images of a 'broken Aceh' - images that still haunt her.

'As Acehnese, they have faced so many problems before, and they are almost used to losing their loved ones. It's part of their lives and they learn to let them go. But this time, it is different,' she said.

To make the nightmare worse, she found out yesterday that her producer-presenter husband, who works with Indonesian television station SCTV, is going to Aceh on Monday.

Said a tense Ms Mazrieva: 'I know he is doing his job. But it makes me worry. I have already lost so much family there and I want the people closest to me to be safe.'

Date Posted: 1/13/2005