Abstract:
Studies of disaster and conflict often mention the Indonesian case of Aceh province because of its twin histories of separatist conflict and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, each with massive losses of life and infrastructural damages. This chapter addresses the tourism angle in Aceh’s tourism–disaster–conflict nexus with a review and analysis of the efforts to memorialise these events through the establishment of museums in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. Museums that preserve dark aspects of the past, such as violent wars, disasters and mass death must navigate the tension between providing a record of what has occurred and engaging with collective memory while not denying the individual experience of the event. The tsunami has been formally commemorated with a monumental, centrally located museum. Meanwhile, a few local non-governmental organisations with a small grant from an international donor struggled to establish a Peace and Human Rights Museum to commemorate the violence and human rights violations of the war in Aceh. Memories of Aceh’s conflict remain largely in the informal sphere. These divergent memorialisations of Aceh’s disasters and conflicts serve as a point of entry for examining how museums and their benefactors engage in contested memory politics.
