29/11/2006
Campaigning has begun for long-awaited elections in the Indonesian province of Aceh, due to take place on December 11. For the first time, Acehnese will directly elect their own governor and vice-governor. In another first for Indonesia, independent candidates, without backing from political parties, will be allowed to run for election.
Dr Damien Kingsbury, an Indonesia specialist at Deakin University in Australia, discusses what the vote means to the people of Aceh.
The elections have the capacity to be very important, because for the first time it gives the Acehnese people the opportunity to decide on a local government which will reflect local interests and be based around local candidates. The issues are conventional in a sense. They are around things like education, health care, how the provincial government allocates the funds that it's been promised under the peace agreement.
There is, of course, the controversial matter of Sharia, or Islamic law, in Aceh. However, I don't think that's going to be a major issue in the campaign, simply because it already exists and most candidates think it's too sensitive at this stage to actually tackle head on.
Is that because the implementation of Sharia is a popular move among Acehnese?
It's not so much that it's popular. It's popular within some segments of the community, particularly amongst the Ulama, the Islamic priests. But the problem is if there are moves against it now, there's no capacity to actually overturn it. So it doesn't have any upside if you like for the candidates. But the downside is that they will get the hostility of the Ulama, and the Ulama are very influential amongst sections of Acehnese society. So it would be a negative political move.
And of course Sharia, as I understand it was introduced by Jakarta, by the Indonesian government. So even if they wanted to remove it, they'd have to go through Jakarta first?
Well, it is able to be removed by the local legislature, but not by a provincial governor decree. So what they really do have to do is now wait until the provincial elections for the legislature come around in a couple of years time and then look at that issue after then. So I think that it may be considered in the future, but the governor doesn't really have the capacity to remove the legislation, so it's not a winning issue to go into the campaign on.
From your observation, has there been much enthusiasm on the ground and support by the Acehnese for this election?
Yes, I understand that there is a lot of interest and a lot of enthusiasm for the election process. The interesting thing is that the campaign has started off in a fairly quiet manner. There is none of the usual banners and joy rides that you associate with Indonesian elections.
I think in part that reflects the fact there's just not much money around for that sort of campaigning, but the responses that I've been able to pick up so far have indicated there is a lot of interest in the elections and that the local people are quite enthusiastic having the opportunity to at least have some say over their own future.
I understand that this is also the first time that independents get to take part. Were you surprised that among the candidates were a former military commander and also candidates from the once all power Golkar Party?
No I'm not surprised that they would stand. There are a number of interests that play out in Aceh and of course if you can get the governorship then you can more firmly entrench your interests, and the military has a very longstanding interest in Aceh through illegal forces of income, political domination and so on.
But are the Acehnese likely to vote for them?
I would doubt it very much. I think Golkar does have some support, but I think the United Development Party, which is also Jakarta-based, has some support, particularly because it has the backing of the former political leader of the Free Aceh Movement, and that's a rather sad move on behalf of the Free Aceh Movement - that its political leader should side with the Jakarta-based party.
But that means that that party will have some significant support, [which] would I think go to the other Free Aceh Movement candidate. He won the Yusuf and I think he has significant support in the villages. The visions that are really opening up now are not in Acehnese political society, more generally, but within what used to be the Free Aceh Movement, which is now split down the middle. There certainly is some tension within what was the Free Aceh Movement over this electoral process, but I don't see it being translated into violence or aggression.
Dr Damien Kingsbury, Indonesia specialist
Dr Damien Kingsbury is an Indonesia specialist at Deakin University in Australia, and a one-time adviser to the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) negotiating team.
This Viewpoint is taken from an interview conducted with Sen Lam, which was first broadcast on Radio Australia's Asia Pacific program on 27 November, 2006.
http://abc.net.au/ra/news/viewpoints/s1800365_to.htm
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Monday, November 27, 2006
After the deluge, aid agencies find themselves in unfamiliar terrain
By Shawn Donnan,By Shawn Donnan and Taufan Hidayat
Published: October 2 2006 02:00 | Last updated: October 2 2006 02:00
In a place where more than 160,000 people died and whole bustling villages were reduced to rubble within minutes, Heni Flora is one of the lucky ones. The 26-year-old housewife, her mechanic husband and their three children lost only the new home into which they had sunk all their savings when the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami ravaged through Indonesia's Aceh province.
Yet 21 months after the tsunami, to ask her how she feels is to encounter a whirlwind of dissatisfaction, most of it focused on the dismal state of the house built for her family as part of a project overseen by Oxfam, the British charity.
The roof leaks. So do the gappy water-stained wood-plank walls. In a place where tropical rains pour down for months at a time each year, that means the house "is very uncomfortable", she says. "How can it be comfortable if there's rain and wind coming in all the time? They [Oxfam] should demolish it."
The international response to the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami has, with at least $13.5bn (£7.2bn, €10.6bn) raised, been held up as a heart-warming example of how generous the world can be. International aid agencies have made ambitious promises to "build back better" in affected areas from Aceh to Sri Lanka. For anyone who saw the disaster's immediate and grisly aftermath in somewhere such as the Indonesian province, it is hard not to be impressed with what has been accomplished in the past 21 months.
The equally valid reality, however, is that rebuilding has been fraught with difficulties that ought to be a wake-up call for the aid community. For the time being, it is people such as Ms Flora and her bemused neighbours on the outskirts of the Acehnese capital, Banda Aceh, who are shouldering the burden of the system's shortcomings.
"If the walls are a problem now, what will happen in the future?" asks Mutaqin, a 35-year-old widow who lives in an Oxfam house across the road with her three children and a clutch of orphaned nieces and nephews.
Ms Flora and her neighbours are far from the only ones pointing to problems. In a July report, consultants working for the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, a grouping of 40 charities and development agencies established to monitor the tsunami response, identified a "growing frustration with the speed, direction and ownership" of the reconstruction process from Aceh to Sri Lanka.
Spread across the 175-page report was a list of shortcomings ranging from co-ordination issues that, in at least one case, saw an aid agency erect houses where another had agreed to build a road, to a plethora of broken promises by international aid groups.
In his foreword to the report, former US President Bill Clinton, the UN's special tsunami envoy, described the findings as "uncomfortable reading" for an aid community more used to patting itself on the back than absorbing criticisms.
The report's authors wrote pointedly that the "generous funding" available for the tsunami response meant the "humanitarian industry" was "deprived of its customary excuse for built-in systemic shortcomings". Moreover, many of the systemic issues listed had been identified as much as a decade ago, in the aftermath of the international response to the slaughter in Rwanda.
"We can and must do better in responding to ongoing and future disaster relief and recovery challenges," Mr Clinton wrote.
In the case of Heni Flora's leaky house and those of her neighbours, Oxfam says it is reviewing what to do. But Melinda Young, the senior staff member in charge of Oxfam's Banda Aceh office during an August visit by the Financial Times, said the charity was unlikely to go back and do any repairs. "If you go back and repair that house then another person doesn't get a house," she said.
Oxfam has pledged to build more than 1,600 houses in Aceh and by last month it had completed nearly half of them - although Ms Young said building homes "is an area that we want to phase out of".
The agency is far from being the only one to have encountered problems working in Aceh. After spending more than $2m and finishing 571 homes using an Indonesian contractor, Save The Children this year fired three in-house building inspectors when it discovered big problems that meant 371 of the houses would have to be torn down.
When the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies unveiled a $100m plan last year to build 20,000 temporary homes, it struggled for months to find the sustainably-logged wood it needed. By August only about 13,000 had been erected and it seemed unclear whether the rest would ever be built - although Red Cross officials insisted they would.
The issue in Aceh is at least partly that the funds generated by the huge public response to the disaster prompted many agencies to embark on projects they had little expertise in, says Kevin Duignan, the New Zealand builder in charge of the IFRC project.
"No one had ever heard of the Red Cross construction company before. Or of the Concern construction company," he says. "Those are aid agencies!"
But even groups with significant experience in rebuilding in disaster zones say they have faced difficulties with corruption and land ownership, as well as price inflation for building materials.
The international community does not bear the responsibility for all the problems. In a September report, the World Bank warned that local governments were spending too much new-found wealth on flashy new offices and not enough on infrastructure.
The news is also not all bad. The Indonesian government's Aceh and Nias Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency, for example, has begun working with state-owned banks that buy up building materials in bulk before "loaning" them to contractors, resulting in less price inflation for items such as bricks and timber.
But the tsunami reconstruction is clearly replete with frustrations. For German contractor GITEC, the biggest has been a shortage of qualified labour. In the coastal village of Lamteungoh, where just 161 people out of a population of more than 1,300 before the tsunami survived, it has caused delays in the construction of houses that should have been finished last month in time for the start of Ramadan.
"We don't really care how much is spent on the houses," says Sanusi, the local village head. "What we really need is the houses to be finished for us."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/90bb1be0-51b1-11db-b736-0000779e2340.html
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Poll Campaign Kicks Off In Indonesia's Aceh Province
(RTTNews) - Campaigning kicked for the December 11 poll on Friday in Indonesia's once rebellious Aceh province, with one candidate vowing to speed up rehabilitation of victims of the December 2004 tsunami. Next month's landmark elections, the first ever direct vote for top executive posts in the province is expected to prove to be another milestone towards ending a conflict that has killed 15,000 people since the Free Aceh Movement or GAM launched a struggle for an independent state on Sumatra island's northern tip in 1976.
GAM and the Indonesian government signed a truce in August 2005 under Finnish mediation, partly spurred by the Indian Ocean tsunami that left around 170,000 Acehnese dead or missing. The pact paved the way for former separatists' involvement in Aceh politics after they agreed to end their rebellion.
Previous polls in Aceh, including the 2004 Indonesian presidential and legislative elections were conducted under tight security and open campaigning was forbidden in many areas due to the insurgency.
http://www.nasdaq.com/aspxcontent/NewsStory.aspx?cpath=20061126%5cACQRTT200611260011RTTRADERUSEQUITY_0001.htm&
INTERVIEW - World Neglects Tsunami Risk Lessons - Red Cross
JAKARTA, Nov 26 - The world could see a replay of the massive death and destruction caused by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami if it fails to spend more on disaster risk reduction, the Red Cross/Red Crescent said on Monday.
The tsunami that left more than 200,000 people dead or missing around the Indian Ocean should have taught the value of preparedness, but "risk reduction has remained low on the international agenda," the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement.
It called for a rise in annual disaster preparedness global spending to US$1 billion, 10 percent of the amount spent on humanitarian aid. The figure is now around four percent.
Too often "when the first assessment of damage is done and the costing of reconstruction after an earthquake or some other disaster is done, risk reduction is not immediately factored in," Johan Schaar, federation special representative for the tsunami, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"What's most often done is simply rebuilding what was there, (but) if what was there constituted risk for people it has to change" to reduce chances of similar death and destruction in the future.
Risk reduction can range from educating people in first aid and what to do if disasters occur, to protecting coastlines from tsunamis and implementing earthquake-safe construction codes.
Aside from the potential lives to be saved, the federation estimates a dollar spent on prevention can save as much as US$10 in reconstruction and rebuilding costs.
In one such measure, the Indonesian Red Cross launched a radio network to transmit early warnings to communities in Aceh, the Indonesian province hardest hit by the tsunami with more than 170,000 killed or missing.
In such efforts, an important part of success is educating people on how to use the system, not just getting the hardware in place, said the Geneva-based Schaar, who was in Jakarta for meetings after a visit to Aceh.
"There's been good efforts at building this early warning system for the Indian Ocean countries but it's been a lot of focus on the technical aspects," he said.
"...if people are not reached by the warning and if they don't know what to do when the warning comes -- we often talk about the last mile of an early warning system -- then it will not be effective."
On other aspects of the tsunami recovery effort, Schaar said the federation as well as governments and other agencies have had to cope with unrealistic expectations at times.
In Aceh, for example, "it affected an area that had been in conflict for 20 years and you had weak government and very undeveloped infrastructure," he said, referring to a simmering civil war between separatists and the Indonesian government.
A peace agreement a few months after the tsunami has thus far been effective in stopping the Aceh fighting.
While reconstruction there is in "a dynamic phase" and a federation programme has helped get virtually all refugees who were in tents into better shelters, it will still be years before recovery is complete, Schaar said.
"...this is something we are going to be involved in for five years or more to really see this through," he said.
Story by Jerry Norton
Story Date: 27/11/2006
© Reuters News Service 2006
The tsunami that left more than 200,000 people dead or missing around the Indian Ocean should have taught the value of preparedness, but "risk reduction has remained low on the international agenda," the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement.
It called for a rise in annual disaster preparedness global spending to US$1 billion, 10 percent of the amount spent on humanitarian aid. The figure is now around four percent.
Too often "when the first assessment of damage is done and the costing of reconstruction after an earthquake or some other disaster is done, risk reduction is not immediately factored in," Johan Schaar, federation special representative for the tsunami, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"What's most often done is simply rebuilding what was there, (but) if what was there constituted risk for people it has to change" to reduce chances of similar death and destruction in the future.
Risk reduction can range from educating people in first aid and what to do if disasters occur, to protecting coastlines from tsunamis and implementing earthquake-safe construction codes.
Aside from the potential lives to be saved, the federation estimates a dollar spent on prevention can save as much as US$10 in reconstruction and rebuilding costs.
In one such measure, the Indonesian Red Cross launched a radio network to transmit early warnings to communities in Aceh, the Indonesian province hardest hit by the tsunami with more than 170,000 killed or missing.
In such efforts, an important part of success is educating people on how to use the system, not just getting the hardware in place, said the Geneva-based Schaar, who was in Jakarta for meetings after a visit to Aceh.
"There's been good efforts at building this early warning system for the Indian Ocean countries but it's been a lot of focus on the technical aspects," he said.
"...if people are not reached by the warning and if they don't know what to do when the warning comes -- we often talk about the last mile of an early warning system -- then it will not be effective."
On other aspects of the tsunami recovery effort, Schaar said the federation as well as governments and other agencies have had to cope with unrealistic expectations at times.
In Aceh, for example, "it affected an area that had been in conflict for 20 years and you had weak government and very undeveloped infrastructure," he said, referring to a simmering civil war between separatists and the Indonesian government.
A peace agreement a few months after the tsunami has thus far been effective in stopping the Aceh fighting.
While reconstruction there is in "a dynamic phase" and a federation programme has helped get virtually all refugees who were in tents into better shelters, it will still be years before recovery is complete, Schaar said.
"...this is something we are going to be involved in for five years or more to really see this through," he said.
Story by Jerry Norton
Story Date: 27/11/2006
© Reuters News Service 2006
Indonesia bans films about Aceh, East Timor
Indonesia’s censors have banned four films from an international film festival to be held in the capital of Jakarta, citing fears that they could create instability.
Organizers of the festival, to be held from Dec. 8 to 17th, revealed Saturday the government has prohibited the documentary The Black Road, American journalist William Nessen’s documentary about the 30-year separatist conflict in the Aceh region of Indonesia that has killed 15,000 people.
The militant Islamic group Free Aceh Movement signed a peace agreement last year, spurred by the massive tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004 that left almost 200,000 people in Aceh dead.
"Aceh nowadays is good," said Titie Said, chair of the Indonesian Censor Film Board. "With the situation like this, will we want to change it?"
Nessen, who has been barred from entering Aceh, was sentenced to time in prison in 2003 after a court found him guilty of violating Indonesia’s immigration regulations.
Banned films include a 12-minute cartoon
The censors have also prohibited three films focusing on East Timor: Tales of Crocodiles from the Netherlands; Passabe from Singapore and a 12-minute piece of animation about the country’s history called Timor Loro Sae, from Portugal.
Censors say they fear the films could affect ties with East Timor, which voted for independence from Indonesia in 1999.
"They are worried it could trigger problems," said the festival’s program manager, Lalu Roisamri.
However, A Hero's Journey, about the life of East Timorese President Xanana Gusmao, was passed. The 80-minute documentary is narrated by Gusmao, who led East Timor's fight for separation from Indonesia.
The eighth annual Jakarta International Film Festival will feature 250 movies from more than 35 countries.
Last Updated: Saturday, November 25, 2006 | 4:37 PM ET
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2006/11/25/indonesia-films-banned.html?ref=rss#skip300x250
Organizers of the festival, to be held from Dec. 8 to 17th, revealed Saturday the government has prohibited the documentary The Black Road, American journalist William Nessen’s documentary about the 30-year separatist conflict in the Aceh region of Indonesia that has killed 15,000 people.
The militant Islamic group Free Aceh Movement signed a peace agreement last year, spurred by the massive tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004 that left almost 200,000 people in Aceh dead.
"Aceh nowadays is good," said Titie Said, chair of the Indonesian Censor Film Board. "With the situation like this, will we want to change it?"
Nessen, who has been barred from entering Aceh, was sentenced to time in prison in 2003 after a court found him guilty of violating Indonesia’s immigration regulations.
Banned films include a 12-minute cartoon
The censors have also prohibited three films focusing on East Timor: Tales of Crocodiles from the Netherlands; Passabe from Singapore and a 12-minute piece of animation about the country’s history called Timor Loro Sae, from Portugal.
Censors say they fear the films could affect ties with East Timor, which voted for independence from Indonesia in 1999.
"They are worried it could trigger problems," said the festival’s program manager, Lalu Roisamri.
However, A Hero's Journey, about the life of East Timorese President Xanana Gusmao, was passed. The 80-minute documentary is narrated by Gusmao, who led East Timor's fight for separation from Indonesia.
The eighth annual Jakarta International Film Festival will feature 250 movies from more than 35 countries.
Last Updated: Saturday, November 25, 2006 | 4:37 PM ET
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2006/11/25/indonesia-films-banned.html?ref=rss#skip300x250
bits and pieces ...
A huge HELLO to everyone from Coast 2 Coast!!!
This is by no means an exhaustive blog. Just bits and pieces of readings on Aceh that I have picked up, and putting them here to share with you!
You can add what you have read in the comments, or send them to me, and I'll upload it.
Cheerio! :-)
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