Black Road: On the Front Line of Aceh's War, The (ATOM Study Guide)

Shot over four years, The Black Road is a powerful, sometimes harrowing account of William Nessen's involvement in Aceh's struggle for independence from Indonesia. Nessen, an American freelance journalist initially based in Jakarta, finds his professional objectivity increasingly compromised by the atrocities he witnesses. How can he remain neutral when people are losing their lives every day, when his friends are under threat? With his sympathies engaged by the plight of the proud Acehnese he encounters, his life will never be the same.

The Black Road gives us a complex account of a war in which thousands of lives have been lost – 13,000 Acehnese have been killed in the last decade alone – a conflict of decades' duration that bears the tragic distinction of being one of the world's longest running wars. It is also, on another level, the moving story of one man's journey, a journey through suffering, fear and loss to a place of compassion and commitment.