Shocked Aceh Town, Utterly Destroyed, Buries Its Own
By Dean Yates
LEUPUNG, Indonesia, Jan 27, 2005 (Reuters) - Two men dragged the decomposed body of a young girl out from rubble and twisted trees before lowering her into a small grave dug with a farming hoe. She looked about 10 years old.
With few shovels, gloves or masks, several dozen men who decided to stay in this town on the west coast of Indonesia's tsunami-hit Aceh province have used their bare hands to find and bury their dead for the past four weeks.
They reckon they have thousands more to dig out.
Once home to 10,000 people, not a single house or building remains standing in Leupung, 40 km (25 miles) south of Banda Aceh and reachable by road for the first time on Thursday after soldiers rebuilt a collapsed bridge halfway from the provincial capital.
Leupung is a tangled mess of broken concrete, wood and fallen coconut trees. Around 1,000 people survived the giant waves, residents and officials said.
"We keep coming back, but there are still many more bodies. We are using our own hands," said Armanizar, 27, a driver, as he dug the tiny grave a few feet from the dead girl.
Finished, he stepped over some debris before shouting out casually: "It's a big person." With some friends, they used pieces of wood to lever a fallen tree off the next corpse.
The bodies being dug out in Leupung show the Indonesian death toll from the Dec. 26 tsunami will keep rising for weeks. As of Thursday, 101,199 bodies had been buried in Indonesia. Nearly 130,000 people are still missing.
With the land route to Leupung now open -- albeit a bumpy 90-minute drive over partly gouged asphalt and dirt roads -- trucks with aid should soon start arriving.
For the last month, men here said they had received little help apart from U.S. military helicopters that dropped off supplies. They were not the only ones suffering.
WALKING AWAY FROM NOTHING
Just outside Leupung, five haggard men walked along the road. They said they had trudged from the town of Lhoong, 50 km (30 miles) further to the south, for two days.
Dede Saputra, 25, immediately begged for water. They had no water and no food.
"We are going to Banda Aceh to look for work. It's too hard back there," said Saputra.
At the entrance to what was Leupung, a few men had just finished digging a large hole by the roadside. Others carried purple body bags towards it.
They placed the bags in the hole, then emptied the contents. Out tumbled decomposed heads and torsos. Few were intact after being burned by fires that had been lit to clear the area.
The smell did not seem to bother the men. They were used to it. One man placed the heads side by side.
"We are taking them out of the plastic because that way they will become part of the earth quicker," said Masri, 37, a driver, adding that he had found none of his family.
"It's sad. These people are not even whole any more."
Fisherman Azhar, 44, was worried. "No one has given us anything. We are afraid of cholera. We are burying our own. No one is helping."
Most men here survived the tsunami because they were working as drivers in other parts of Aceh. They are now living in tents amid the ruins.
The men said they wanted to rebuild the town, but moving it a little further inland and away from the disaster zone. Leupung was now a graveyard, they said.
Rozani, a government official still here, estimated 90 percent of the town was dead. While Leupung is now reachable, it is the end of the line until Indonesian soldiers rebuild another bridge, this one at the town's southern tip.
Truckloads of Indonesian soldiers arrived to help collect bodies. Supplies from relief groups such as World Vision were also on their way.
The men filling the roadside grave had just finished covering it up. Asked how many they had buried, they said 42.