Months after disaster, smashed Indonesian city is still a ghost town By Seth Mydans International Herald Tribune Wednesday, April 6, 2005
Paralyzed by a reconstruction effort that has yet to get off the ground BANDA ACEH, Indonesia "We are still alive!!!" . The big red words are painted three times on the broken plaster walls that were once somebody's home. . "There are still owners." . Not far away, a 10-foot, or three meter, stump of brick and plaster carries the warning: "Don't knock this down. It belongs to Romy." . All across a flatland of rubble, mud and stagnant water, spray-painted declarations like these are the only signs of life, like shouts from within the coffins of people buried before their time. . "Asma family still here." . "Ramli family still here." . "This house belongs to Helmi." . "This land is owned by the late Badriah, but his heirs are still alive." . Three months after the tsunami that leveled huge portions of this Indonesian city, almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairing it. . Tens of thousands of corpses from among more than 126,000 reported dead in Aceh Province have been cleared away. Looters have chewed their way through the ruins like carpenter ants. . But in this devastated city, and for many miles along the coastline of flattened fishing villages, there is little sign of the billions of dollars in assistance. . The aid has been donated by governments, aid organizations, civic groups and individuals 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 other people in a small room. "Where the money is, we don't know." . "It's just meetings, meetings, meetings," he said. . Aid officials say the international relief effort is a test case - an unprecedented response to one of the greatest natural disasters in recent history. . "There is so much at stake," said Lilianne Fan, 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." . Last week, 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. It acknowledged that international accounting standards were not being met. . Rufiradi, the head of an Aceh 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?" . As the months have passed, government action has been delayed. 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, 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 to long-term projects. . 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 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. There are all sorts of organizations, but nothing is going on." . The government faces a huge and complex task. It cannot simply throw up a few new dwellings; it must rebuild entire neighborhoods - 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," 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 Province alone could exceed 200,000. . But none of this seems to explain the silence of the barren city landscape, where only palm trees and fragments of ruined buildings punctuate the flat horizon. Along the coast, many fishing villages have simply disappeared. . 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 last of the looters, still 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." . 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," 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 after 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 Jakarta, civic groups fear that local needs and conditions are not being heard or taken into account. . 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 corruption on a gigantic scale. . 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 Rufiradi, the lawyer, meaning there would be fewer outsiders to monitor the use of recovery funds and try to prevent corruption and misuse. . Torn by unending war and political repression, battered by a natural disaster that may strike again, paralyzed by a reconstruction effort that just cannot seem to get started, Aceh today is not a place of hope. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. 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