Ethnic Chinese key to Aceh fix-up

In a crammed row of storefronts, only Joy Optikal, an eyeglasses shop, has reopened on a dusty street of the tsunami-battered city of Banda Aceh.

"Live or die, I will stay in Aceh," says a defiant Maria Herawati, who has run the store with her husband, Joannes Jony Pandy, for 16 years.

The two are part of Banda Aceh's small ethnic Chinese minority. Unlike an estimated 6,000 other Chinese who left, they decided to stay behind in the city after the Dec. 26 tsunami that killed some 240,000 people in Indonesia.

Ethnic Chinese are the heart of Aceh's trading community. How fast they return and set up shop will help determine the speed of recovery in the province hardest-hit by the tsunami.

Mrs. Herawati, whose family has survived wars, revolution, and persecution since migrating from China about a century ago, says she is determined to start business again, selling eyeglasses to the citizens of Banda Aceh.

In an interview last month, her husband recounts the story of standing guard on their shop's roof over five days and nights while looters pillaged their neighbor's deserted shops. "Either I was going to die, or they were going to die," says Mr. Pandy. "People thought I was crazy." The two are bitter that police and military officers stood by as looters swept through the city's trading district.

After braving the deadly flood waters, the two now face a much longer challenge: rebuilding a business in a city where up to 40 percent of the population perished in the tsunami.

Aceh's economy will benefit from an aid effort expected to cost $4.5 billion over the next five years, some of that distributed by Western nongovernmental organizations and companies. And the biggest industrial enterprise in Aceh, the PT Arun natural gas facility, is operated by a US company, ExxonMobil Corp., along with a Japanese partner and the Indonesian government.

But the small ethnic Chinese businesses such as Joy Optikal have formed a vital trading network linking economic sectors in Aceh, and indeed much of Southeast Asia. Business conglomerates founded by ethnic Chinese tycoons dominate Indonesia's stock exchanges and much of the economy. In Banda Aceh, ethnic Chinese own an estimated 60 percent of the shops and distribute everything from spare parts to business loans.

"If they [the ethnic Chinese] don't come back, the economy here will die," said Udin, a Muslim construction worker taking refuge in a Buddhist temple.

The temple, a few hundred yards from Joy Optikal, is a way station for Tolong Menolong, an organization that has been helping Aceh's estimated 200,000 ethnic Chinese. In the city of Medan, hundreds of Acehnese Chinese are living in a camp known as Metal Street, set up by the organization.

Tolong Menolong, founded in 1970, also has its roots in political turmoil and exile. Chin Chung Mao, Tolong Menolong's 75-year old coordinator and one of its founders, says the flood of homeless people in the days after the tsunami evokes painful memories of another exodus 40 years ago.

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