In crisis, Jakarta was slow to respond By Jane Perlez The New York Times Tuesday, January 4, 2005
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia The Indonesian Army, which has ruled this restive province for 30 years, should have been able to easily mobilize a relief operation after the tsunami that swept away half of this provincial capital on Dec. 26. But there was a problem: Nearly all the military drivers here fled their posts for safer ground - some even escaping hundreds of kilometers away. . The mass desertion of drivers meant that the military's trucks and other heavy equipment, needed to rescue survivors and remove dead bodies, had no operators. . It was one example of how Indonesia, which suffered the greatest loss of life of nations affected by the tsunami, appeared the slowest to grapple with the enormity of what happened - and the slowest to comprehend the world's sympathy. . Many ordinary Indonesians understood better than the government the need for help. With the dead still lying in the streets here, the editor in chief of The Jakarta Post scolded the government for its refusal to capitalize on foreign good will. Endy Bayuni, the editor, headlined his article, "Don't Betray Aceh - Get Coordinated." He concluded by saying to the government: "Save our Aceh. Save our souls." . The suspicion of the Indonesian military was on show this past weekend, when two U.S. naval doctors arrived in Malibo to help but were confronted by skeptical local commanders. "What are you doing here?" was the greeting they were given, a U.S. official said. In the end, the hostility dropped, the American said, but the incident seemed to be an example of the failure of communications during the disaster's first days. . A major limitation was the fact the calamity occurred in Aceh, Indonesia's most sensitive and secretive province, where a civil war has been fought on and off for three decades. . In contrast to Sri Lanka, where the government and a rebel movement have declared a truce during the disaster, Indonesia's military remains suspicious that Aceh separatists could exploit the chaos. . Foreigners were virtually forbidden here before the disaster. Journalists needed permission to enter Aceh, and it was rarely granted. . So when foreign governments and organizations asked to land relief aircraft in Banda Aceh, the first instinct of the government was to insist that they land in the city of Medan, 400 kilometers - or 250 miles - and a grueling 12-hour drive away. . Some aircraft carrying emergency equipment, including a plane with a water purification system dispatched by the British organization Oxfam, was held up for nearly a week because it lacked special permits. . By Saturday, when President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited here, the policy had changed. International aircraft, including U.S. helicopters from a battle fleet carrier, were landing at the military airport. . The United States broke formal military relations with Indonesia early in the Clinton administration over what Washington regarded as the Indonesia military's poor human rights record. Efforts to resume those relations are still tangled up over the question of human rights. . "In normal times, Indonesia's worst nightmare was having American marines arrive on the Banda Aceh tarmac," said Daniel Ziv, a U.S. aid worker with several years of recent experience in the province. . "Yet here we are in the middle of this operation and we have marines here. It's a sign of progress. Normally they wouldn't stand for it." . Now, the U.S. military is camped alongside Indonesian soldiers at their air base here, a site unthinkable 10 days ago. . The bad road from Medan to Banda Aceh was not the only infrastructure problem. Aceh has a feeble electricity supply and even in normal times this provincial capital does not have steady 24-hour electricity. The phone system, also creaky, was wiped out by the damage. . A senior aide to Yudhoyono, Dino Djalal, said when he visited Banda Aceh with the president on the second day after the tsunami, Djalal asked a senior general for the general's cellphone number so they could keep in touch. . "He replied, 'You must be joking,"' Djalal said. The general's cellphone only started working a few days later. . The president was at the farthest Western extremity of Indonesia, in western Papua, when the tsunami struck, and only heard news of it in bits and pieces, from press reports, and scattered reports from officials in Jakarta, Djalal said. . The president flew directly from western Papua to the disaster scene on the second day. . Much of the weakness of the government response reflected a lack of understanding by senior officials for the need of setting priorities and coordinating the branches of government to carry them out, said Emmy Hatfield, the national coordinator for the Civil Society Coalition for Tsunami Victims, a group of nongovernmental organizations in Indonesia. . "We don't have a FEMA yet, yet this is a country sitting on earthquakes and volcanoes," she said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States. . In the first days of the crisis, Hatfield said, the government rejected many of the offers made by groups like hers. . "They didn't trust us," she said. . After a lot of "screaming," she said, she won permission to airlift from Banda Aceh to Jakarta 75 children suffering lung problems caused by the dirty water they had swallowed as the waves washed over them. . The hesitant response from the government opened a window not only for civil activists like Hatfield, but also from political groups, particularly the well-organized Islamic party, known as the Justice Party for Prosperity. The party's cadres, in their conspicuously marked T-shirts, are visible all over the hardest-hit areas of this city, helping to uncover bodies and distribute second-hand clothes. . On Sunday, the minister for social services, Alwi Shihab, who this weekend moved his operations from Jakarta to the disaster scene, said he was still not happy with the pace. . Indonesian soldiers from other provinces were brought in to help man equipment, and Shihab announced the appointment of General Bambang Dharmono as the coordinator of the relief effort. . The general's first directive, Shihab said, was to remove "all visible bodies" that remained piled on a city bridge. 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