Indonesia and natural disasters

In March 2006 around 1,800 containers filled with international humanitarian aid sent for the December 2004 tsunami victims, were still piled up unopened at Tanjung Priok docks in Jakarta. Those containers were in addition to the more than 900 ones -- all from the same source -- held in Medan port, Banda Aceh, also unopened.

About the same time The Jakarta Post published an article on the situation of those containers and the astonishing administrative anomaly which had condemned them to lay stacked up at the country's two main ports, thus denying the tsunami victims the humanitarian assistance they carried, for more than one full year after they were dispatched.

What reasons assisted the administrative authorities of those two ports to block such necessary help for the benefit of poor Indonesians? In that article, the government of Indonesia's customs director general tried to justify that anomaly on the grounds of clearance procedures' complexities affecting all freight coming from abroad. Procedures to which, sadly enough, the international humanitarian aid couldn't be an exception.

Adding to the absurdity, the president of the organization created to channel humanitarian aid to the tsunami victims, tried also to justify the overcrowding of nearly 200,000 people in temporary shelters in Banda Aceh, more than one year after the tsunami, because of those same intricate procedures in distributing the international help.

It is not surprising, thus, that the damage inflicted by the Merapi eruption in Java in March 2006, which quickly devastated large areas on the island and buried more that 4,000 people, didn't receive the same international coverage, and the humanitarian aid sent was slow and meager. And that a recent tsunami in Pangadaran, Java, has gone almost unnoticed in the main European papers. The explanation given by the Indonesian authorities on the impossibility to effectively warn the inhabitants of the affected zone was simply laughable to anyone who knows the country.

JUAN LUIS
DOMINGUEZ-GONZALEZ
Girona, Spain