Dead Centre Read Free

cot. I’d leave the two cage-fighters to sort themselves out. We were due to set off in about three hours. We’d get the job done and then fuck off back home.
    I watched the hi-tech campsite at work through our tent flaps. Star Trek had finally met Carry on Camping . Relief warriors wearing one badge or another rushed about and spoke urgently into radios, ordering somebody somewhere to do something.
    I listened to the groan of aircraft overhead. Food and water were being flown in, only some of which would get where it was needed. There were already complaints that 30 per cent of the food and shelter equipment coming into the airport had been confiscated by the military as import duty. Yesterday we’d seen soldiers selling 20-kilo bags of rice – with UN stamped all over them – to the begging locals. Then the gangs demanded their cut before it could travel down the road. Even the pirates who worked the straits between Sumatra, Thailand and Malaysia were looking for their slice now there was fuck-all left to rape and pillage at sea.
    Camp Hope – I had no idea who’d given it the name but they had a sense of humour – was to the south of Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and the largest city of Aceh Province. It was right at the north-western tip of Indonesia. Until 26 December last year, the only people with any interest in the place – apart from its 250,000 population – were oil companies and the Aceh separatist fighters.
    Then the Indian Ocean earthquake struck about 150 miles off the coast and this part of the world was literally turned upside down. Banda Aceh was the closest major city to the earthquake’s epicentre. So far, they reckoned on about 160,000 deaths in the area, and they were braced for more in the weeks to come, once the rubble started to be cleared and the sea brought more bodies back to land. Cholera would soon be spreading like wildfire, along with the contamination caused by the yellow and green shit leaking from the drums that came in on every tide.
    To make things worse, the area had been at war since the mid-1970s. Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, the Free Aceh Movement, was trying to force Indonesia to accept an independent Islamic state. Aceh had a higher proportion of Muslims than other areas of the country, and had been allowed to introduce Sharia law in 2001, but GAM wanted a lot more than just religious control. They wanted the revenue from the province’s rich oil and gas deposits, most of which went straight to the central coffers – no doubt with a few rupiah s skimmed off the top.
    Major disaster or not, the Indonesian military didn’t like us coming in. They didn’t like foreigners at the best of times, but this last week, in the wake of the tsunami, they’d had no option. Now they were re-exerting their authority. They were starting to restrict our movements, scared our supplies would go to GAM. They wanted to keep the fuckers starving, and didn’t give a shit if everyone else was too.

6
    AN ARGUMENT ERUPTED outside between an American and a German who sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a wedgie. It was over what group was going to get the military permit to travel to some remote village with aid.
    Over the years, I’d seen NGOs running around in places like Africa and I never really liked what I saw. It seemed to me that they were businesses, at the end of the day, and these two sounded like they were busy competing for a slice of the disaster pie. The locals didn’t just need food and shelter. They needed protection from this fucking lot.
    The MONGOs – My Own NGO – could be even worse. They were the guys who thought they could get things sorted more cheaply and effectively than the real aid workers. Most of them arrived under their own steam. Tourist visa in hand – if there was anyone around to issue one – they rented a vehicle, bunged on an ID sticker and, bingo, they were in business.
    I’d Googled ‘tsunami’ and ‘donation’ just before we left and got