Our favorite reporter on the 10th anniversary of the 2004 tsunami

Michael Bachelard’s article came out in The Age on the 20^th. He had warned me that he didn’t have enough space to include palm oil destruction, the many EDFF blunders or the AAA/Keumang disappearing $6.7 million. “In the midst of the tsunami reconstruction stuff,” he wrote, “it was too hard to explain why a highland cocoa plantation was relevant.”

Well, okay.  I guess.

He did express sadness that he couldn’t include it but reminded me that the story was “full of other things: empty housing and personal stories of the wave, misgovernance, sharia law, environmental doom and electoral misbehavior.”   So that’s good.  He also said that our “ideas and help were invaluable in shaping the piece as something other than just a tsunami reconstruction.”

So I’ll forgive him.

And share his article with you.  

I do have to say, however, that he put most of the blame at the feet at one or another Indonesian or Acehnese entity (government, GAM, BRR, etc) and pretty much gave a hall pass to the international NGOs who lined their pockets with a significant portion of the reconstruction in the name of consultants, salaries and “administrative fees.”

But we still love him, and he will still keep an eye on Aceh. 

[I’ve inserted a few comments, in blue.]

Aceh: after the wave

December 20, 2014

--Michael Bachelard

http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/aceh-after-the-wave-20141219-11w71n.html

 

Alongside the loss of lives, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami wiped out a long-time separatist conflict in Aceh. Ten years on, Michael Bachelard finds renewed tensions in the Indonesian province.

A diorama recreates the horror of 2004 at Aceh's Tsunami museum. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

First, the earthquake struck. Roads buckled and houses cracked. Two explosions rent the air and thousands of voices cried out in fear. Then the waves swelled up from the sea and scoured Aceh's west coast with water, bringing debris and death.

But it's not the memory of noise that keeps fisherman Andi Yusuf awake at night when he thinks of the tsunami 10 years ago - it's the silence that followed.

Yusuf was asleep when the earth started shaking at 7.59am on Sunday, December 26, 2004. Informed by half-remembered family lore about earthquakes and killer waves, this fisherman from Aceh's coastal village of Calang fled to higher ground with his wife, baby and young child. Clinging with grim determination to a hillside durian tree, his wife fainting from shock, Yusuf watched as some of his neighbours ran away from the beach while others ran towards it, looking for open ground. The tsunami's towering, 30-metre second wave consumed them all, coming or going.

A hilltop settlement of recently built houses in Lhok Kruet is mostly abandoned, as they have no running water. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

"Before the water came, I heard people panicking, shouting, screaming. They looked like chickens," Yusuf recalls, his fisherman's eyes, which are habituated to the horizon, turning inwards and to the past. "I saw the roof of the school flying into the air, big timber floating. But after the second wave, the big one, I heard nothing. Not a single voice. Silence."

Into this silence, an estimated 167,000 voices fell in Aceh alone. Hearing Yusuf speak, it's amazing not that so many died, but that any survived. He saved his wife and children, but lost perhaps 50 members of his extended family.

In Sri Lanka, 35,000 were killed; in India, 18,000. Thailand lost more than 8000 including 24 of the 26 Australians who died. Globally, 230,000 people lost their lives and perhaps 1.7 million were displaced.

Tsunami survivor Andi Yusuf. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

This was a freak geological event: a "mega thrust" earthquake measuring up to 9.3 on the Richter scale that pushed a 1600-kilometre stretch of the Indian Ocean 15 metres higher. The resultant wave - the biggest tsunami in history - reshaped 800 kilometres of the Indonesian province's western coastline, penetrating three to six kilometres inland. More than 120,000 houses were flattened, 500,000 left homeless, the road system obliterated. Administrative data - birth and death records, property ownership details - were destroyed and public servants killed or incapacitated by grief. The rebuilding of western Aceh started from scratch.

But the tsunami was not just a physical event, it was also a profound political event - the single most important spur to ending a 30-year civil war between the Indonesian government and the separatist Free Aceh Movement (known as GAM for its Indonesian initials).

It's easy, in the tsunami's awesome wake, to diminish the conflict that predated it. But ordinary people do not forget the separatist era's disappearances, the random killings, the relatives dead in the street. Calang villager Rosmalia remembers constant fear. "You heard shootings in the nearby town. You heard stories that people were killed by the security apparatus - shot from head to toe by bullets so that their body just split in half," she says.

This mosque, 20 kilometres from Aceh’s capital Banda Aceh, was the only building left in the area 

after the tsunami. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

"In 2004, after 30 years of conflict, there was no development in Aceh: schools were being burned down, the social fabric was in pieces," says Heru Prasetyo, the former deputy head of the Indonesian tsunami reconstruction authority. "The only thing that was safe was the forest, because the rebels lived there and nobody was brave enough to go in and cut down trees."

In his view, nature did Aceh a favour. "Aceh was like a person who was almost dead from a heart attack. The tsunami was a jolt that brought it back to life."

Asked about Prasetyo's analogy, Rosmalia barely pauses before agreeing: "The trauma of the conflict was worse than the tsunami."

Lhok Nga school students practice a tsunami drill. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

The size of the disaster was incomprehensible, the global response unprecedented. A 2008 Brookings Institution paper estimated the total damage to Aceh at $US4.45 billion. In response, the international community pledged $US7.7 billion. Two-thirds of that was spent in just three years by 463 organisations across 2200 projects. Remote Meulaboh had, at one point, 20 surgeons in field hospitals.

The aid was "like a second tsunami", says Prasetyo. "Catholic relief worked with Muslim aid and non-government organisations (NGOs) from Israel were working in the land of sharia, and working effectively. It was like the John Lennon song Imagine: no religion, no country. It was so powerful."

Huge international organisations, including the World Bank, USAID, the United Nations Development Programme and Australia's AusAID, co-operated with a quickly formed Indonesian agency, the Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency, under a straight-talking former minister, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto.

Australia contributed $600 million - more than half of it donated by the public. Our money trained people and built capacity in education and health, livelihoods, infrastructure and the public service.

Mangkusubroto's reconstruction authority stands as a "remarkable success", according to Australian National University academic Ed Aspinall. "It's a landmark in Indonesia's modern political economy about how to run a large development or construction endeavour in a way that significantly avoids or minimises corruption."

But it was never going to be perfect. The first priority was housing: 140,000 houses were eventually required, and agencies were under pressure to spend their funds quickly to satisfy donors and watchful journalists.

In the northern suburbs of Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, lies a beachside community called Lhok Nga. Here, the mountains funneled the wave into a torrent which wiped away everything but the mosque. Not long after, though, it had regrown like a simulacrum of a 1950s suburb: identical, box-like, 36-square-metre rendered concrete houses standing in symmetrical rows. Many now stand empty.

"They are empty because for most of them only the children are left: the parents are dead. They were only small [when the wave hit], so they live with extended family," says Umran Amril, smoking a quiet afternoon cigarette in a Lhok Nga cafe. Some are rented out, but the Acehnese attachment to land means few want to sell: "We wanted it rebuilt because the land belongs to our great-grandparents," Amril says. "We won't sell for same reason."

It's a similar story all down the tsunami-devastated western coast. In Lhok Kruet, about 30 minutes from hard-hit Calang, Canadian money built a settlement of 250 houses atop a hill, at the request of local fishermen. They are certainly high enough to survive any future tsunami, but only 28 are now occupied. The fishermen changed their minds when they realised there was no running water and, until recently, no electricity.

In Calang, itself, Yusuf takes shelter from the heat of the day in a rubbish-strewn village harbour. He's unwinding old nylon ropes, preserving the individual strings to re-weave into nets. Nearby is a concrete pier, an office building, a small market area and a petrol station, all built (and decorated with maritime themes) by international donors. All now are abandoned.

The pier, Yusuf says, splashes back waves which swamp their boats, so locals built a replacement from wood. The market has none of the equipment they need and there's no toilet or other facilities in the office building, so people won't work there. Salt, wind and rain are now picking these buildings apart as surely as Yusuf dismembers old ropes. Two large boats are keeled over in the shallows and also decaying. They were donated but never used - too light, too dangerous, he says.

"There was a lot of assistance but they came rushing to help; they didn't ask what we need." He also has a more fundamental complaint, this one against the local government authorities. He's one of 25 local victims who missed out on the new houses, while some "who are not native to this area - civil servants from [East coast province] Bireuën - got them". This blatant misallocation "is very much about corruption", he says.

Corruption is baked into politics in Indonesia, and Aceh probably never stood a chance of avoiding it.

After the wave, peace came surprisingly quickly. An informal, though shaky ceasefire in the last days of 2004 was followed by talks endorsed by then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who had only been in office for two months when the tsunami hit. He had little choice: donors, aid agencies and journalists were prising open a previously airtight state in their rush to oversee the recovery. Continuing a war, or even the prevailing state of martial law, was untenable, though hard-liners on both sides tried. In August, 2005, in Helsinki, Finland, the two sides ended 30 years of brutality by signing a Memorandum of Understanding. Suddenly, about 30,000 armed and largely uneducated former separatist rebels were demobbed. Hardened by combat and accustomed to collecting money using extortion justified locally as "war taxes", many found it hard to mend their ways. [especially when they were promised livelihoods and compensation in exchange for agreeing to the cease-fire and to this day have never been compensated.]

The rampant inflation that came with an influx of foreign funds to Aceh was accelerated by these former GAM rebels - now rebadged as the Aceh Transitional Committee, or KPA - "taxing" the reconstruction.

Even USAID's landmark project, a silk-smooth western highway, was subject to "epic blackmail", one former consultant recalls, to the extent that the project director publicly threatened to cancel it.

"The extortion attempts on NGO projects in Aceh followed a familiar pattern," wrote aid worker Bobby Anderson in 2013. "Persons claiming KPA affiliation would make demands to field staff for protection fees or material, often vehicles . . .  The threats often implied the arson of vehicles and the killing of staff. Numerous projects were shut down due to this." [I have to say that in all that time, during those first months and years after the tsunami, JMD never had a problem, and we worked in the most remote and conflict-affected areas of the province.  I’m not saying that these events did not happen, but I think there was, at times, a specific hostility towards large and fairly presumptuous NGOS who as the article mentions did not understand the context in which they were operating, nor did they care.]

Come election time, though, the former rebels, with their history of resistance and bullish sub-national pride, won overwhelming support. Former combatant Irwandi Yusuf became Aceh's governor in 2006. More educated than most of his compadres, he surprised observers and won wide international support as a pro-environment leader wanting to build an outward-looking economy by taking advantage of global carbon funding to preserve the province's forests. Aceh is the last place on earth where tigers, orangutans, elephants and rhinos still live together.

After a bitter internal GAM power struggle, though, Irwandi lost the governorship at the 2012 election to an old-generation combatant, Partei Aceh's Zaini Abdullah. Thirteen people were murdered during the campaign.  [And with the palm oil extraction interests winning over even large donors like USAID, the rhinos, elephants and tigers are not far behind.]

To this day, government loyalists in Aceh are accused of standover tactics, extortion and corruption, particularly involving construction projects. Aid worker and activist Muslahuddin Daud sees the ex-combatants as trying to preserve the "war psychology" that got them into power: "If you build a house, they'll say, 'The sand should be from me, or we'll blow up your car,' " he says. [I don’t know if it’s so much a “war psychology” as an “I need to eat” psychology.  These combatants saw a fraction of their numbers receive government positions and large pensions—and those same leaders then turned their backs on them.  In some ways they believe themselves to be the only legitimate defenders of the province left standing, and they are repaid with poverty and isolation.]

Since Abdullah's election, almost all international NGOs have left. Some, no doubt, believe Aceh no longer needs their help. The Indonesian government's own reconstruction authority was disbanded in 2009, and under a "special autonomy" arrangement, Aceh qualifies for generous central government funding, but former governor Irwandi told Good Weekend that they'd also been put off by Abdullah's decision to "win the 2012 election by force". [for some reason both governors have sent back the funding each month.  It boggles the mind.] And the forests - preserved for so many years as redoubts of the rebels - are now under threat from a proposed spatial plan that would allow massive industrial development.  [They became threatened as soon as the peace accord was signed in 2005 and the government welcomed international palm oil and mining cartels in to destroy the protected forest and use no discretion in obliterating the rest of it. Protection laws are not good if no one reinforces them.  The spatial plan is just closing the barn door after the horse has left.]

The worst outcome, Muslahuddin says, has been the government's administrative failures. Nine years after the peace deal was signed, negotiators for the Aceh and central governments have still not agreed on implementing laws for power sharing, oil and gas revenue and land ownership. This leads, for foreign investors in the oil-rich province, to persistent uncertainty and, for some Acehnese nationalists, to the belief that Jakarta is denying them fulfillment of their rights. "If [the full Helsinki agreement] is not granted, of course we will take up arms again," a senior Partei Aceh election committee member told Good Weekend. "We could declare war any time. We could declare war tomorrow."

[And just what have I been saying for a year?  Hah?  But does anyone listen to me??]

Aceh's use of Islamic sharia law in the criminal code likewise deters foreigners. It was introduced by Jakarta in 2001 to try to buy the support of Aceh's devout religious leaders, but it only came to international prominence after the tsunami. According to the director of the Jakarta-based Institute of Policy Analysis of Conflict, Sidney Jones, among the foreign organisations that flooded into the province were Islamic hardline lobby groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir. Until their arrival, Aceh - long known as the "verandah of Mecca" - was devout but also "very tolerant". Hardline Islamists succeeded recently in adding to long-standing bans on gambling, drinking and unmarried young people consorting. Now adultery and homosexuality are also criminal offences, subjecting to 100 lashes men who have anal sex with each other, and women who "rub together body parts for stimulation". [It is interesting, then, that World Vision operates so freely in the province, being an evangelical Christian organization—or do they not know that in Aceh?]

A censorious approach to opposition also prevails. "Any organisation which criticises the government is said to be anti Islamic sharia," says Roslina Rasyid, the leader of a network of local NGOs in the north-eastern Aceh city of Lhokseumawe. People are deterred from raising examples of abuses, she says.

"It's a real problem for Aceh now, and long-term, they have to deal with it if they want foreign investment and tourism," says Sidney Jones.

Aceh desperately needs economic growth. About 18 per cent of the population is still in poverty and new political schisms, fuelled by poverty and thwarted hopes, are emerging among former combatants. "You wouldn't want to predict a regression to any full-scale separatist conflict, but on the other hand, you would have hoped that 10 years after the peace deal you'd have seen a stronger fading of that sense of resilient, resistant Aceh identity," the ANU's Aspinall says. "It bubbles away, but it's much closer to the surface than you'd expect."

At Lhok Nga primary school in Banda Aceh's suburbs, where the wave killed all but 90 of its 400 students, the recovery is obvious in the numbers: 435 children are enrolled this year.

Shifa Teskia's father died in the wave. Now 12, she says she wants to be a doctor. For today, she and her classmates are performing one of their regular tsunami drills - initiated by World Vision - and Shifa wears a sash proclaiming her a dokter kecil (small doctor). She's earnestly dabbing a pretend wound of pretend patient Mohammad Azri, 10, who in real life was orphaned as a baby by the wave.

Their teacher, Laili Hafna, saved her own four children a decade ago by rushing to the local mosque. Her sister, husband and baby all perished. As she looked out at the devastation that day, Hafna says she truly believed she was watching the world end: "I never thought I would be here today, that there would be life after all."

Like many, though, Hafna now wonders if the tsunami, a bit like Noah's flood in the Bible, was Allah's way of saving them from what went before. "During the combat, we always lived in fear," she recalls. "Life was very difficult ... we thank Allah that we can have this life now, and that it's a different life."

Surely, though, it was a brutal price to pay?

"That is His mystery," she replies with a smile.

The case of the $6.7million phantom cocoa improvement project, part V

There are lots of things that JMD does well, and maybe the reason it has had such success in Aceh is because it is so small, and has such a clearly defined focus: sustainable livelihoods for people in nearly-inaccessible places.  And by inaccessible I mean too far away from the capital for large NGOs to make it worth their while, too far into territory where ex-combatants are still pretty furious about the short shrift they’ve been given by the government, and too remote for government departments to visit very often.  As soon as we had addressed emergency housing and health issues in Aceh Jaya, the epicenter of the 2004 tsunami, JMD went inland, to those areas that had been ravaged not only by the tsunami but by the conflict as well.  So the agency became quite familiar with what needed doing in the northeastern part of the province, and we let the large international agencies continue to work around the fringes of the capital and, to some extent, in the central highlands, where JMD acted as implementing partner for an Arabica coffee improvement project. 

But JMD’s forte was its intimate knowledge of districts included in AAA/Keumang’s cocoa farmer improvement proposal: Aceh Timur, Pidie, Pidie Jaya, Bener Maria, Aceh Utara.

That was one of the reasons we though we could be helpful: staff knew the local leaders, and were familiar with the current projects and local NGOs implementing them.  It would be relatively easy for us (if we secured a small amount of funding) to take AAA’s final report and conduct a program/activity monitoring evaluation. Obviously, Keumang, having left the province, and AAA, no longer working in Indonesia, could not provide this.

When I wrote (twice) to AAA, however, and called (twice) their corporate offices, I was met with silence.  Not “no thanks.”  Not “It’s really not necessary, but how kind of you.”  Nothing.  Zip.  It was as if, with that offer, the agency had decided I was too much trouble to even communicate with. Or did they just hope we would go away and not bother to evaluate what was appearing to be more and more of a mere phantom program?

So we decoded to find out what type of narrative document was on file with World Bank at the PMU (Project Management Unit).

Now, the PMU of any project strikes fear in the hearts of most implementing agencies.  It’s kind of like the IRS: they exist in some shadowy but very real way, they demand lots of paperwork, and stern-looking, overdressed people make visits when things are really going south, but you never really know to whom they contractually owe their allegiance. Whose side are they on?

In the case of the EDFF funds, the PMU were World Bank employees (as always) but they seemed to have a much larger role in program implementation than in other countries—possibly because the “capacity,” as some like to say, of the recipient agency and its subcontractors was not up to par with WB regulations.  So even large agencies like AAA and IOM and World Wildlife Fund had PMU members trotting round after them because let’s face it, no one had ever been to post-tsunami, post-conflict Aceh before, or had worked with suddenly-flung-together local NGOs or, for that matter, been given so much money in such a short span of time. And neither had any World Bank Branch.  As one World Bank manager told me last year, “No one in that office had ever dealt with that much money.  There were a lot of, well, competence problems.  But the weird thing is, most of those people who were with the PMU, and all of World Bank in Indonesia, were promoted to positions in other countries, just because the amount of money they were given to manage was so huge.  It didn’t have anything to do with how good they were at their job—it was just that they got to say, ‘Look, I handled a $50 million portfolio’ and up the ladder they went.”

Comforting, huh?

But I wanted to make sure that there really weren’t any more documents, or evaluations, or monitoring visits conducted for the AAA program on file at World Bank or whatever passed for the post-EDFF entity in Aceh.

So I asked our Aceh staff to see if they could contact someone at World Bank in Jakarta to find out where they had what I assumed was an enormous database of projects. 

What we discovered was that a) no one at the PMU in Jakarta would talk to us, and b) a staff member’s associate, who had been on the PMU during the height of the EDFF funds dispersal, told him (before he stopped talking altogether) that there was no database, there were no records, and that the PMU was basically a bunch of badly-trained wannabe bureaucrats who had all left the province, and that we’d never get anything out of World Bank, programmatic document-wise, so we should just stop looking.

We will take a nice jaw-dropping pause here, and a moment of silence to reflect upon $7billion worth of international assistance and no centralized database of programs, activities, or evaluations.  Financials, yes.  There were enough fiscal outlay justifications and balanced budgets to sink a container ship.  But not one document stating that yes we saw the health clinic building, or the 5 fruit transport trucks, or the vastly improved lifestyle of the new shrimp farmers.  I’m not saying that the implementing NGOs themselves did not have in their own offices --and subsequently online--volumes and volumes and exhaustive exit study after exit study of their projects and their fabulous effects on the province and their (get me the vapors) “lessons learned.” But the projects had no independent evaluation component, and the fiduciary (BRR/WB) did not require one, or, after a while, any project/activity narrative.

There’s certainly more to this onion than the outer layer I’ve peeled off here, so next time I will tell you about the RAN database and its spawn of other brainstorms from the (very well-funded) Good Idea Fairy, and why they all went belly-up, leaving me and JMD wondering how we could ever hope to find out if it was true that AAA/Keumang had mishandled a good portion of their allocated $6.7 million, or if indeed anyone cared.

(And by the way, if anyone reading this has some information that can demonstrate to me why I am dead wrong about this, please get in touch with me because I would dearly love to believe that all these funds were appropriately spent and  these projects that we cannot find really do exist and are doing well.  Nothing would please me more.  I'm not in this for the yellow journalism, believe me.)

Part II: Preface to the $6.7million cocoa improvement project that wasn’t

The 2006 NGO Impact Initiative: An Assessment by the International Humanitarian NGO Community (preface by Bill Cinton) stressed the failure of the international community in Aceh to include local NGOs in the recovery and reconstruction process.

“International NGOs should expand efforts to recognize and promote the leadership of local communities, local aid groups, and, where appropriate, affected governments in recovery from major disasters; they should also make the strengthening of local capacity in recovery from an emergency a priority equal to that of service delivery.”

As many of you know, I’ve been blathering on about sustainability in this blog because I really have come to the conclusion that the word has lost all its meaning and is just trotted out in grant proposals and political speeches to get people to like whichever project or business or candidate or product is marketing itself.  To us, in Aceh, sustainability means the continuation of a practice long after outsiders have left.  It’s carried on by future generations, who decide to stick around instead of escaping at the earliest possible opportunity from a life that has always been too hard, too poor, too boring, too dangerous.

One of the things JMD keeps asking its women cocoa farmers is: do you think your kids will want to do this?  Not only do the farmers in Aceh Timur have to want to follow tradition, they have to re-invent that tradition after its nearly 30-year coma. 

Imagine if all during your childhood you were told that your family were fishermen, but the ocean was off limits and your parents never went out on the water.  You heard about it all the time from your grandparents.  Then when you’re 30, the ocean becomes open for business, someone points you to the family boat (up on blocks and rotting) and says “okay, go continue the tradition.”  You want to.  You know it’s your legacy.  But you don’t have a frigging clue.  

Welcome to cocoa farming in Aceh Timur.

As Field Officer Robert said, “The only reason people are still here growing cocoa is that their families really loved growing cocoa.”  It’s one of the most labor-intensive crops on the planet, and if it doesn’t show you an increased return, well, after a while you just have to give it up--if not for you, for the sake of your kids. 

So ever since the 2004 tsunami, JMD has been helping people across Aceh with small projects that the communities thought were important. and then we leave, and come back every year or so to see how everyone’s doing, and if they are still doing it, or if if they have modified it to respond to natural or demographic changes, then it’s still sustainable. 

When we came back to Aceh Timur in 2009 after giving an integrated agriculture training the previous year, there had been an incredible flood that washed out one of the beekeeping projects.  That’s when the first group of women approached us and asked for some help re-starting their cocoa fields.  Since then, the projects have been community-led: JMD doesn’t decide what people want; they tell us, and we see if it’s manageable, and we develop a model that can be replicated in other parts of the district or the province, because we figure, if it plays in Peoria, it might find success somewhere else.

That’s when a company called Cocoa Ventures from Medan contacted JMD and asked us to please replicate a really incredibly successful training we had developed, in what’s called IPM—integrated pest management.  Cocoa ventures wanted to purchase large amounts of beans from a group of villages to the east, almost on the border of Aceh Utara, where the land was exceptionally fertile.  Problem was, no one was helping those farmers with any type of cultivation, harvest and pest control assistance. They had lots of cocoa trees, but no idea how to recondition and maintain them.

This was a great opportunity—JMD could take its pest control clinic on the road—possibly even set up a duplicate project in the area around Pante Bidari.

First, however, JMD researched the possibility that there had been projects in that area.  If it was so fertile, if cocoa was so important a commodity, surely some of the post-tsunami Multi-Donor Fund money would have gone there.

And sure enough, we found a project, funded by EDFF/The Economic Development Financing Facility, which was the “umbrella” mechanism set up to disburse the remaining $50 million of the tsunami assistance Multi Donor Fund/MDF.  As its title suggests, it focused more on development and less on post-disaster reconstruction.  Its object was to disburse the remainder of the fund as quickly and as easily as possible, and so its allocations were in the $3-10 million range.

Gosh, I do go on.

But first, a word about the EDFF funds.  Like their big brother the MDF, EDFF funds were primarily allocated to large foreign NGOs such as IOM, Mercy Corps, Oxfam, DAI, World Wildlife Fund, etc., the rationale being that these agencies had large enough administrative and fiscal departments to adequately track the awarded funds and to file appropriate reports.  In other words, the MDF/EDFF did not trust any of the local Acehnese agencies enough to directly award them the funds.  Instead, one of two things happened: the international NGO would subcontract with a smaller local agency (IOM did this with JMD for its coffee improvement project), or it would simply poach staff from the existing local agencies, paying them far more than the local agencies could, gutting those agencies until they folded and then turning their Acehnese employees loose at the end of the project.   As far as we know, and we have done extensive research on this, there was never any money devoted to improving the administrative capacity of any local agency so that it could continue the work of reconstruction after the foreign NGOs had left. Why?  Because those NGOs had no intention of leaving until the last rupiah was extracted from the World Bank’s coffers.  And there were billions and billions—not of rupiah but of dollars.  “But we trained Acehnese staff!” they will whine, from their air conditioned HQs.  Yup, you trained ‘em all right.  And where will they go work now?  All the local agencies are gone.  So the best talent Aceh has . . . leaves the province because there is no agency there to support them.

So the EDFF has $50 million and JMD gets busy developing proposals, based on all the successful projects they’d done since 2005: an extensive goat fattening and dairy project, a sustainable livelihoods initiative in the protected forest, a cocoa improvement project for widows and fighting age males, a Robusta coffee revitalization project that included a professional coffee consultant.

And -–funny story--each of these projects was approved and adored.

They just didn’t want dinky old JMD to be the agency to get the majority of the funds.

So they took the dairy project model and gave it to then-governor Irwandi’s wife, who thought she’d like to do something like that; they asked Fauna and Flora International to implement a community forest ranger training program with JMD’s livelihoods model, they asked IOM to replicate JMD’s Robusta project, only in central Aceh and for Arabica, and they showed JMD’s model to an agency called Action Aid Australia (AAA), and gave them $6.7 million to implement a cocoa improvement project in five districts including Aceh Timur.  All of these projects have a story.  All of them made me seethe.  But the one that is so exquisitely sleazy, the one that is indeed impossible to believe, is the story of AAA and the $6.7 million that vanished without a trace, and how no one seems to be too worried about that.  I’m going to tell you about all of them.  But tomorrow we’ll start with AAA and the 3,000 imaginary cocoa farmers.