Well, I guess I’m totally shocked. I expected idealistic, high quality
work from the Indonesian government. Look what actually happened.April 6, 2005 In Tsunami Area, Relief Is Very Slow in Coming
By SETH MYDANS International Herald Tribune
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, April 3 - Three months after a tsunami devastated this city, vast areas remain a flatland of rubble, mud and stagnant water where only palm trees and the stumps of broken buildings break the low horizon.
Three months after a tsunami devastated the Aceh Province, almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding.
Tens of thousands of bodies from among more than 126,000 reported dead in Aceh Province have been cleared away and nearly half a million homeless people have found other places to live.
But among the ruins here, and for many miles along the coastline of barren fishing villages, almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding.
There is little sign in Aceh of the billions of dollars in donations from governments, aid organizations, civic groups and individual people who reached out to help from around the world.
"The only thing we've gotten is small packets of food and supplies," said Samsur Bahri, 54, a shopkeeper who lost his home and now lives with nine people in a small room. "Where the money is, we don't know. It's just meetings, meetings, meetings."
The government and the United Nations defend the pace of the reconstruction, saying the scope and complexity of the challenge requires a careful and well-planned response.
"Governments need to take time, and this in-between period is a difficult time," said Margareta Wahlstrom, the deputy emergency relief coordinator at the United Nations. "It's a time of managing expectation, when progress is not so visible as the expectation is."
Aid officials say the international relief effort is a test case, an unprecedented response to one of the greatest natural disasters in history.
"There is so much at stake," said Lilianne Fan, the advocacy coordinator for Oxfam Aceh. "The international community has invested so much, not just governments but on an individual level. People need to know what is happening and where their money is going."
Indonesia's state auditing agency said it was having difficulty accounting for portions of more than $4 billion it says has been received so far in donations, mostly from abroad, as it was being put in the hand of various government agencies.
Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who has been at the center of the response effort, said any shortcomings in the handling of aid money came from the pressures of what he called an emergency situation that had strained government resources.
Rufiradi, who heads a local lawyers' group called the Legal Aid Foundation, said: "We have seen no reports from the government. We only read in the media that there are large amounts of money coming in. But it is not clear how much exactly that is, or how it is being used or where it is going. Did it come to Aceh at all?"
There are no bulldozers or heavy equipment to be seen here; no one is clearing away rubble or repairing roads or bridges; wells are not being decontaminated; power lines are not being put up; there are no sounds of hammers or saws.
The only people who seem to be hard at work are the looters, who have chewed their way through the ruins like carpenter ants and are now ripping at the guts of buildings for scrap metal to sell.
"In our area there are 15 families that want to go back home," said Isna Nusulul, 21, a university student. "We can fix our houses but we cannot clean the wells and we cannot live without sanitation. I do expect that from the government."
As the months have passed, the government has been taking a long run- up before it jumps into action. On March 26, well past the original deadline, it issued a draft of what it calls its blueprint for rehabilitation and reconstruction, subject to discussion, local input and revision.
"It's still an overview," said Imogen Wall, the spokeswoman for the United Nations Development Program in Aceh. "The details of course will take several months to work out." Until the blueprint is ready, international aid groups are also constrained in committing money.
The draft itself is a daunting thing; it comes in 12 volumes. Even lawyers and aid officials say it is a challenge to read. For the people here who simply want to start rebuilding their homes, it is baffling.
"They say they have a blueprint," said Andi Ryanidi, 23, a street vendor, as he stood in the drizzle near the ruins of his home. "What's a blueprint? Blueprint - we don't even know what that means. And meanwhile, nothing happens."
The devastation in Aceh was so total, said Ms. Wahlstrom, the United Nations official, who recently spent six weeks in the region, that advances were sometimes hard to appreciate.
"I met some people in Banda Aceh who had started in that terrible barrenness to rebuild their house," she recalled. "It was a sad little house, and then we talked to them and they told us that out of their community of 1,300 people, only 11 had survived."
Indeed the government faces a huge and complex task. It cannot simply throw up a few new dwellings; it must rebuild entire neighborhoods and towns, entire economic and social environments.
"It is very difficult to rebuild, especially permanent structures, if you don't have a clear idea who the land belongs to and how many people are going to be living there," Ms. Wall said.
To begin with, a clear tally of the dead and living must be made, and with more than 100,000 people still listed as missing, the final death toll in Aceh alone is likely to be well above 200,000.
The complications of rebuilding come in many forms.
For one thing, this disaster may not yet be over. Seismologists predict more earthquakes, perhaps even stronger than the aftershock that devastated several small islands last week. Aid groups are already stockpiling more relief materials. "This is going to happen again," Ms. Wall said.
For another, there is a war going on: For more than a decade, Aceh has been the scene of a Muslim separatist rebellion and brutal military repression. There are reports that violence from both sides has continued since the tsunami.
The greatest problem is a circular one. To a large extent, the tsunami swept away the basic elements of recovery, destroying personal and government records and taking the lives of many of the city's officials and skilled people. Thousands of civil servants, teachers, medical workers, engineers and technicians were killed.
With recovery plans being formulated in the capital, Jakarta, civic groups here fear that local needs and conditions are not being heard.
As recovery inches forward, these groups say, it will encounter conflicts over inheritance and land ownership, bureaucratic inefficiency, competition among aid groups and among government departments and, with so much money flooding in, the possibility of vast corruption.
Several aid officials said they were concerned that the blueprint for reconstruction was being drawn up in the context of the martial law restrictions already in place in Aceh.
Among other things, martial law could provide a reason for expelling most foreign aid groups from Aceh, said Mr. Rufiradi, the lawyer, meaning there would be few outsiders to monitor the use of recovery funds. Torn by unending war and repression, battered by a natural disaster that may not yet be over, paralyzed by a reconstruction effort that just cannot seem to get started, Aceh today is not a place of hope.
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations for this article.
[ 07 April 2005: Message edited by: Left Wing Zealot ]
[ 07 April 2005: Message edited by: Left Wing Zealot ]
Email this thread to someone!
posted 07 April 2005 08:40 PM
