AAP, Friday Mar 17 14:31 AEDT
Three killed in Indonesian tsunami
Three people have been killed and another is missing after an earthquake triggered a
tsunami that struck eastern Indonesia, wiping away at least one village on a remote
island once infamous as a prison for exiled communists.
The quake, measuring between 6.4 and 6.7 in magnitude, occurred on Tuesday and
triggered a seven-metre-high tsunami that struck Pela village on Buru Island in eastern
Maluku province, a local earthquake observation centre said.
The local deputy mayor, Bakri Lumbessy, said the tsunami swept away an entire
village and destroyed 116 houses, forcing the evacuation of more than 1,200 people.
"The villagers from Pela ran to a mountain about 5km away for refuge," he told the
Republika newspaper.
The Jakarta-based Meteorological and Geophysics Agency said the earthquake
registered a magnitude of 6.4, while the US Geological Survey put the magnitude at
6.7.
Lumbessy said the tsunami damaged six villages just days before President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono was to visit the island for a harvest festival.
The area affected was remote and it had taken authorities some days to reach it, he
said.
A devastating December 2004 earthquake and tsunami hit Aceh and other parts of the
Indian Ocean, swallowing cities and killing up to 170,000 people.
Buru Island, which lies beside Ambon in the Banda Sea, gained notoriety as an island
prison colony under the former Suharto dictatorship and was used to hold accused
communists and other dissidents.
One of the most famous was author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who wrote a
politically-charged series of four novels known as the Buru Quartet about the rise of
Indonesian nationalism.
Pramoedya opposed the policies of both Indonesia's founding father Sukarno and
Suharto's New Order military regime.
He was jailed on Buru after a bloody crackdown on communists and leftists in 1965.
He was not permitted to write and instead told his stories orally to his fellow
prisoners.
Released from imprisonment in 1979 and house arrest in Jakarta in 1992, he is now
regarded as Indonesia's leading human rights advocate and a possible future Nobel
Prize in Literature winner.
©AAP 2006
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