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“End of the world”: the nightmares of a corpse collector 20 years later
“This is where the corpses piled up, mixed with pieces of wood carried away by the current”: returning 20 years later to the place where he collected the bodies, Djafaruddin claims to have recovered from the trauma of this morbid collection even if he still collapses when thinking of orphaned children. In the aftermath of the tsunami of December 26, 2004, Djafaruddin, now 69 years old and like many Indonesians, goes by only one name, jumped into his black pickup truck to retrieve and transport dozens of corpses, some mutilated, others crushed, to a nearby hospital. “When I saw the state of the river with bodies scattered… I screamed and cried,” he remembers. “I said to myself, 'But what is this? The Apocalypse?'.” On Boxing Day 2004, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake near the Indonesian island of Sumatra generated giant waves that swept the coasts and killed more than 220,000 people in 14 countries. Banda Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra, where Djafaruddin lived, was the most affected area, with more than 120,000 deaths in the region, out of a total of 165,708 deaths throughout Indonesia. The city has been almost completely rebuilt. “It is simply unimaginable that this could happen. It was as if it was the end of the world,” he adds. “I saw children, I picked them up as if they were still alive, just to realize that they were inert and lifeless,” he confides, back near the Grand Mosque of Banda Aceh where he claims to have recovered at least 40 victims. – 'Fathers and mothers crying' – Indonesia was the country hardest hit by the tsunami with more than 165,000 dead, although the actual death toll is believed to be higher as many bodies were not recovered. never been found or identified.The provincial capital of Aceh has regained its excitement, amid scooters and tourists, but Djafaruddin cannot forget this very different scene when the giant wave broke.”Here, we saw fathers and mothers crying, looking for their wives, their husbands, their children,” he said. Employed in a transport agency, Djafaruddin was at home when the disaster occurred .In front of his house, the road was full of people who were fleeing but he took the opposite direction, the direction of disaster. His son had returned from the city center shouting “the water is rising!” but the father of five then told his family to stay put, safe, knowing that the water would not reach his house five kilometers from the shore. He then jumped behind the wheel of his car, in which he usually carried traffic lights and road signs and which would soon be filled with corpses. “It was a spontaneous gesture. I told myself that we had to help,” he explains. After several exhausting shuttles to the military hospital where the army had arrived and the Indonesian Red Cross, they offered him bread and water as he seemed so exhausted. “We were covered in blood and mud, so they gave us food.” – Screams in the night – Suffering from this trauma for years after the tragedy, he estimates that he has recovered two decades later, because “it's been a long time. But he still bursts into tears remembering the children who called for their missing parents. “It was really sad. We heard them screaming at night, calling their parents,” says Djafaruddin, sobbing. The orphans were then evacuated to shelters across the city. Then he, like the inhabitants of Aceh, had to accept this terrible toll. “He don't be sad. We let them go. I think all the people of Aceh think like that,” he says. Twenty years later, he is today the chief of a village in the Banda Aceh region, saying he is “at the service of the population “This disaster, he believes, was a “warning” from God after a decades-long separatist conflict with the Indonesian state that ended after the tragedy.mrc/jfx/ebe/lpa
