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.

Aceh gets ready for Tsunami Commemorations . . . and swallows a big handful of amnesia pills.

On December 28, 2004, 2 days after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed over 160,000 people in Aceh alone, Paul Reynolds of the BBC News wrote an article entitled The World Helps—But Will it Forget?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4130127.stm

Of all the hundreds of articles, documentaries and media reports written since, of all the tens of thousands of pages documenting the emergency response and subsequent “reconstruction,” this little article still stands out as being eerily prescient.

Reynolds points to an earthquake that struck the city of Bam in Iran a year previously in which 30,000 people died; at the time of the tsunami, those survivors were still living in temporary shelters.  He notes that in order for the disaster caused by the tsunami to not be a repeat of the Bam earthquake, three things needed to happen:

First, the immediate relief has to be of the right type and sent to the right places.  Former President Bill Clinton, who has always been keenly interested in Aceh, said  "I think one of the problems is when everybody takes responsibility it's almost like no-one's responsibility." He suggested that because so many countries are affected, [Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Maldives, Bangladesh, Somalia, and Tanzania among others] donors should each take responsibility for helping one or two. In that way duplication, always an issue in disaster relief, could be better avoided.  "It is really important that somebody take the lead in this," he said.

Although Reynolds conceded “that might be a bit complicated in the immediate aftermath,” it should certainly be considered for the second stage of relief.

As we know, that never happened.  Countries, governments and private donors developed their own ideas of what assistance was needed based on the Aceh they wanted to see emerge fro the rubble.  The Multi-Donor Fund, while shepherding much of the global outpouring into one location, did not stem the tide of individual donors and NGOs developing and implementing project after project whose unreal duplication and lack of monitoring did more to confuse both survivors and government officials than it did to set the economy and civil society back on track.

“The second stage,” wrote Reynolds, “ is for medium and long term help. . . The UN's emergency co-coordinator Jan Egeland has said this might be the worst natural disaster ever. That implies the need for unusually large contributions.”

And unusually large they were indeed. The problem was that the majority of these funds went right back to the international NGOs who swooped down to implement projects that they should have been training the Acehnese to implement, and collect funds for.

Next!

“The third stage is to see what can be done to avoid disasters or the effects of them. “

Well, ten years later Indonesia is still hoping that the international community and its Southeast Asia partners will bail it out of the necessity of building an adequate warning system.  Some officials, however, are quite proud of the strides Indonesia has made, as noted at the International Conference on Tsunamis in Jakarta this past November.  http://www.antaranews.com/en/news/96688/indonesia-better-prepared-for-tsunamis

Indonesia’s Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister M. Nasir stated that “the current tsunami early warning system called InaTEWs, which is being developed by Indonesia, is quite good as it can provide potential tsunami information within five minutes.”

Director of Science from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for Asia Region Hubert J Gijzen said Indonesia’s current tsunami warning system, “has turned out to be the best in the world."

Tell that to the Mentawi islands, off the west coast of Sumatra (sound familiar?), that was decimated in 2010 and left 450 dead. Villagers were not given any advanced warning because two seismic detection buoys out at sea had allegedly been vandalised.

"There was not any siren to warn people," said Ferdinand Salamanang, whose village was hit by the tsunami. "Yes there was a quake and tsunami detection system in our port, but they are broken down. We did not hear any warning this time."

Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the Natural Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB has pointed out that Indonesia’s early warning infrastructure is insufficient considering its vast coastline. Indonesia has 4,500 kilometers of long coastal lines that are vulnerable to tsunamis, but only 38 sirens are available when, ideally, there should be one thousand sirens.

According to him, of the total 2,500 evacuation shelters needed, the country has only 50 shelters.

Meanwhile, notes the Antara News, “the Aceh provincial government has expressed hope that President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo would attend a commemoration of the 10th year of the 2004 tsunami.”

And will he, like Bill Clinton, stroll through Banda Aceh and be given a whitewashed tour of the rehabilitated businesses, the gleaming ports, the happy citizens (at least those who aren’t being caned by the Sharia police that day), the evidence of goodwill between the global community and the government of Aceh?

Will he heave a sigh of relief and mutter to his aides, “Well, at least that’s taken care of,” and the ignore requests for assistance from the province for the next 10 years?  Will he be shown the immaculate palm oil plantations and be satisfied that a few hundred thousand or so more acres of those cute trees couldn’t hurt the rainforest, and would certainly show the world (and his wealthy supporters) that Indonesia is “back in business?”

Your guess is as good as mine, because as I said before, I’ve been invited and I’m not going.  I’d be caned for not wearing a headscarf and tossed in jail for opening my mouth.

All I ask is that you listen and read with an open mind, and whenever someone mentions “how far Aceh has come,” ask yourself if that person knew anything about the province before all this “help” arrived.

Too Big to Fail

Last week I was invited to Aceh, along with several other colleagues with whom I worked in 2005 in the early days of reconstruction, to a commemorative celebration honoring the 10 year anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. I am not the only one who is too disgusted to go.
 

I know what I will hear.  I know I will be expected to smile, and thank the current Governor for inviting me, and look down demurely when he praises the work the NGOs did to bring the province back from the brink of disaster and make it the vibrant, positive, humane and safe place it is today. . . I am not going because if I have to hear that drivel I fear I will vomit.  My colleagues agree; most are declining the invitation.  It is, so sadly, all a farce.

Shortly after this invitation I received an email from our Australian colleague Michael Bachelard, who met and traveled with JMD this past April when covering the legislative elections.  I’d first gotten in touch with him because of all the international journalists reporting on the ravages and dire global consequences of palm oil’s destruction of the Aceh rainforest, he was by far the most eloquent, thorough, and passionate.  His beat isn’t just palm oil, however, and the Sydney Morning Herald has pulled him in many directions this past year.

I knew he was returning to Aceh this month to do a story on the 10-year anniversary of the tsunami, which happened on Boxing Day (December 26) 2004.  If you’ve been reading this blog you know that I’ve been urging any and all media outlets to take an honest look at Aceh and examine whether, 10 years later, the province is truly “better” than it was before the tsunami, in terms of quality of life, equal access, and economic prosperity for more than just the wealthy and the multi-national corporations.

Michael’s email included an apology for not being able to spend any time in his articles discussing palm oil, or how cocoa was “relevant,” although he was astute enough to cover topics such as “empty housing and personal stories of the wave, misgovernance, sharia law, environmental doom and electoral misbehavior.”

I think that Michael’s email was the final missile in a depressing barrage I’d been receiving all week that has me convinced, sadly, that the entitles responsible for the most horrific things on the planet these days, are, in the final analysis, to big to fail.

Take four seemingly separate events:

There is new focus on the continuing horror story of jade mining in Myanmar and how corporate interests trump the rights of marginalized groups.  I read this (and blogged about it a few days ago) and was struck by the sheer enormity of the problem—not the HIV/AIDS epidemic that will soon spread all over the country, but the seemingly insurmountable issue that is the profitability of the Jade market in China.

Freeport, the world’s largest copper mine in Paupua, Indonesia, is “sponsoring” an exhibit of sculpture and jewelry by the Kamoro, a tribe the company basically wiped out in what is seen as one of the world' worst examples of environmental destruction and genocide.  But a significant number of southeast Asia’s wealthy elites are attending the show, to ooh and ahh over the “exquisitely made” handcrafted pieces available. Those little brown people.  So clever.  Much is made over the “champion” of the Komoro, Mr Kal Muller, a transplant who’s acted not necessarily as humanitarian advocate but as PR marketing firm for those Komoro who are still living.  He’s an employee of Freeport (A US firm), after all.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and imagine him as painfully torn between the irreversible damage his company has done to this group’s culture and homeland, and his need to keep his job so that he can at least squeeze a couple of bucks (and permission) from this lumbering behemoth of a company in order to preserve what little space they have left in this now-wasteland.

Searching the database of donors, including USAID, who are  funding large projects in and around Aceh, I notice that international subcontractors are being awarded mega-sums to establish either “sustainable palm oil practices” or assist with “palm oil biofuel projects.” Nowhere is it ever mentioned that any significant funding is to be spent to reduce or control palm oil plantation expansion, or to seriously look at ways to limit the environmental catastrophes that are being caused due to plantations’ current methods of operation.  This would make sense, considering President Jokowi’s interpretation of his own energy policy to mean “capitalize on every natural resource we have and increase production.” (Interestingly, he hasn’t yet noticed the disparity between his “let’s stop deforestation, save the peat bogs, and control palm oil in Aceh” rhetoric and his “economic expansion at any cost” battle cry.  Or else he doesn’t care.)

A recent Bloomberg report on “palm oil futures” criticizing the new Indonesian regulations for mixing palm biodiesel with other fuels wept that this would severely hurt the price of palm oil.

Indonesia plans to increase biodiesel blending to 20 percent in 2016, requiring more than 8 million tons of palm oil, according to the Energy Ministry. . . .  The government is committed to expanding palm biodiesel, Hari Priyono, secretary general at Agriculture Ministry, told reporters yesterday. . . . "If Indonesia ignores its (biodiesel) mandate completely, the palm oil industry will face a crisis in the last half of 2015," Mistry said. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-28/indonesia-s-toothless-mandate-for-biofuel-seen-hurting-palm.html

Most of the articles I read regarding palm oil are, in fact, from the commodities side.  Palm oil is so huge, so important in the international market with respect to making people money, that it is no longer pertinent to even allude to its horrific effects. That just isn’t important to anyone except the “activists.”  And what do they know anyway?  Buncha spoiled little punks.

But all these things: the invitation, the jade mining, the Komoro, Big Palm . . . they got me thinking . . . about what good people do when their backs are against a wall. How do concerned and committed individuals and groups respond to entities that are “too big to fail?”

What would the Komoro do if Kal Muller did not convince Freeport to be interested in their culture and sponsor at least a tiny way for what’s left of them to make money? If we are realists we will see that Freeport is not going away and the Komoro are not coming back.  So is it bad to try and provide some type of compensation to those remaining even if it is “blood money?”

If the world’s large donors are staffed by people who truly understand that carbon emissions and deforestation are vitally important, then they have to develop plans that can address this in pragmatic ways—and that means catering to the interests of the extraordinarily immoral entities that got us into this mess in the first place.  When fighting a war for your freedom, said Marx, use the tools of the oppressor. They will eventually wear him down.

I’m not so sure.

So once there is a mess (Freeport, palm oil, HIV jade) what is the best thing to do about it?  “Go away” is not working.  Can we make it smaller?  Maybe, but how much smaller is smaller enough?  Should we just be addressing the fallout?  Like in the Kachin state, what is needed is a methadone program and street outreach for IV drug users to learn how to clean their needles.  But in a way, that just reinforces the strength of the jade industry that sucked them into this vortex in the first place.

All over the world, what we are doing to the enormous creatures that have harmed us, altered our food, poisoned our water, screwed around with our oxygen, eliminated animal species, and displaced people with no voice, what we are doing is helping them survive.  Because they have created a different physical, social and economic reality from the one we knew before they came, and now much of our survival depends on theirs.  So we become complicit, and talk about “sustainable” palm oil and “area-sensitive expansion” and fair labor standards and artisanal marketing and eco-tourism.  And we sugar-coat the mismanagement of billions of dollars that could have been the salvation of a province but instead plunged it further into poverty and pseudo-religious extremism.

I know it’s a reality but I still want to vomit.  Good thing I won’t be going to Aceh.

A Portuguese journalist visits Aceh and asks for our help

Andreia Noguiera, a journalist from the Portuguese news outlet LUSA, visited Aceh last week as part of an investigation into the successes and challenges of reconstruction 10 years after the 2004 tsunami.  We were told by the Clinton Foundation that November would be the month that the global media would invade Aceh to do commemorative stories, and they were right.  What I wanted to make sure of was that the positive gushing that I am anticipating by other media will be tempered by a small sliver of journalistic integrity, which takes into account the economic and political situations of people outside the capital, in the rural areas, in the ostensibly protected forests, in the lands of the ex-combatants.

Andreia contacted us after seeing a 2010 video done by the Australian Broadcasting Company of how we stayed in the province long after most international NGOs had left. 

ABC News (Australia) - Video Interview with JMD's Founder, Sara Henderson

Aceh Afterwards, Foreign Correspondent - ABC, April 5, 2010
Sara Henderson is interviewed in the field in this ABC News report that reviews lessons learned from the international relief effort and ways to improve future responses to disaster.

She was especially interested in the hundreds of houses that were constructed by BRR (the reconstruction agency) in Aceh Jaya which were never finished and never lived in.

We were most eager to help her and so Junaidi, JMD’s Associate Director, volunteered to be her guide and gave her a very thorough tour of the parts of the province that were the hardest hit by the tsunami, including Lamno where JMD had conducted many projects and where some JMD staff are still living.  

Here is Andreia in Lamno with JMD's Education Coordinator Rosie and two of her boys 

in front of the home that JMD built for her.

I spoke briefly with Andreia on the phone but the connection was rather terrible so she sent me some questions and I’m re-printing them below. I answered as truthfully as I could.  I am just wondering if when other news media visits Aceh, they will see just a little of what I am talking about, or only have a day to zip in, get the whitewash tour, and zip out, pronouncing Aceh’s reconstruction a “success.”

And at this point I don’t know that acknowledging the many flaws in this effort will improve anything.  What it might do, however, is prepare people to administer the next huge humanitarian relief effort (and we all know there will be one) with a bit more far-sightedness and a lot more emphasis on the local population's involvement in and management of  their own recovery based on their own identified needs.

What are the biggest problems that you identify in the reconstruction?

·      No training of Acehnese staff to implement projects

·      Gutting of local NGOs to fill international vacancies

·      Misplaced priorities (tons of food was sent to Aceh but food was not needed—the survivors always had enough to eat and cargo ships full of food were rotting in the ports)

·      No involvement of local communities and Acehnese civil society in the planning process and implementation of projects

·      Insistence on the part of the international community that Aceh’s local NGOs and institutions can’t be autonomous in implementing projects

·      Infrastructure initiatives based on international business community needs (such as roads to palm oil plantations but no farm to market roads)

·      BRA never received promised portion of MDF funds for ex-combatants

·      Culturally inept approach to community needs

·      donor-driven rather than community-driven projects based on the donors’ preconception of what was “needed”

·      after the emergency health/medical services were rendered, there was no investigation into appropriate and needed sustainable livelihoods initiatives (see above: no interaction with local communities and civil society)

·      World Bank representatives admit there was too much money to keep track of

·      No coordination between NGOs and donor agencies/countries—everyone wanted to work independently in order to get credit—so duplication of services was rampant

·      The thing that was most needed early on was listening—no one listened to survivors.

From your point of view what still needs to be done in Aceh?

The question is hard to answer because “still to be done” implies that progress was made with reconstruction.  I do not think that things are any better now in 2014 than they were before the tsunami.  Reconstruction cleared away debris and attended to immediate health needs.  Beside the emergency response, there was no planned “way forward.” So the following are a few suggestions of things that need to be done in Aceh, but it is by no means an exhaustive list:

·      Capacity building for local NGOs and official support of local NGOs/community organizations by the provincial government

·      Elimination/reduction of sharia police activities

·      Education campaigns regarding conservation

·      Upholding laws protecting forests

·      Developing maintenance plan for all the infrastructure

·      Teacher training

·      Public works plans in the outlying districts

·      Transparency in terms of dealing with extraction interests

·      Appropriate funding in place to patrol forests, and arrest/fine/jail illegal loggers and poachers—strengthen the Department of Forestry and the environmental protection ministry

·      Fines and sanctions for extraction interests that do not follow fair labor and conservation practices

·      Opting out of MPOC (which is corrupt and useless) and developing independent standards for palm oil

·      Removing the new zoning regulations for protected forests which have rendered them unprotected

·      True promotion of smallholder farmer and small-business enterprise

·      Compensation for ex-combatants

·      Holding civil servants accountable for their positions, hiring based on qualifications and not political/family affiliation (revamping and adherence to labor law) 

Many of these changes require that a select few very wealthy, very powerful people in Aceh (some of them legislators) forego their billion-dollar (illegal) profits and work to make the province more stable, as opposed to making themselves wildly wealthy.

(The 4 richest men in Indonesia own and have made their fortunes from palm oil plantations.  This fact alone shows how incredibly difficult it is to separate the reconstruction and the peace accord from ex-combatant violence, rampant deforestation and destruction, corruption, increased rural poverty and displacement, and political greed.)

In Aceh Timur there are a minimum of 100 ex-GAM fighters who have declared war on the current governor.  They are armed an there are more joined daily.  What they want was promised by the MoU (and never delivered) which is distribution of land and training for sustainability.

And in Gayo coffee country (central Aceh), indigenous citizens want autonomy; they say that they are not treated fairly and they are the indigenous people.  Many of them are armed also.

These types of legitimate grievances must be heard by the provincial government or violence will erupt throughout the province and the TNI will once again be frighteningly called in to “neutralize” the threats.

Could you tell me why do you think that the reconstruction made by your organization was better for the people?

JMD was one of the few agencies working in the province that was local and staffed by Acehnese.  In most cases we were the only ones working remote districts. Staff were given training in administration, financial management, liaising with donor agencies, and preparing proposals, reports and budget documents.  The other local NGOs were gutted by international NGOs who stole staff and paid them wages that the local NGOs could not afford, including extremely highly paid “consultants with little on-site knowledge or awareness of traditions, cultural issues, etc.  When the projects were over there were many well-trained Acehnese but no local agencies to return to.  So the majority of these people left.  Aceh currently has very few locally-staffed NGOs for this reason.  There is no donor who is willing to invest in local capacity building with the objective of leaving the donor community autonomous—there is still too much money at stake for international NGOs to bow out.

The other reason JMD was successful is that it developed projects based on community need and not donor demand.  It conducted many focus groups and lived with rural and marginalized communities to understand what and how communities wanted their projects to look like. JMD went to the most remote, hard-to-access, and insecure areas because that’s where the most need was, and international NGOs were not willing to take those risks.  Additionally, JMD worked on small scale projects whose beneficiary count was sometimes too low for larger NGOs to serve due to the extreme amount of administrative overhead that they worked under, so they could not provide direct services to small pockets of individuals. 

JMD finished many of the projects started by large international NGOs because when security issues arose, the NGOs left to go back to their HQs and asked us to remain—at this point JMD was a tiny local agency with no experience at all—but was trusted to complete projects such as health clinics, water projects, schools, markets, community centers, etc. tat netted the international NGOs millions of dollars.  At the same time, JMD was deemed “too small” to apply for these same funds in order to do projects on our own and receive these funds.  Yet JMD completed them.

Until the MoU was signed, there wasn’t proper security—we used to travel through the mountains all the time—apart from a few TNI checkpoints there was little security—there were many instances of shootings, kidnappings, etc.

JMD stayed in Aceh after the worst was over.  The majority of other NGOs left.  Paradoxically, those international NGOs that have stayed are still not training local staff to eventually become autonomous.  There is a pervasive feeling in the international NGO and donor community that local NGOs are intellectually incapable of running their own programs, so “we” must remain to assist them.  And at the same time, regardless of Aceh’s (and Indonesia’s) posturing to the contrary, local agencies are seen by the government itself as weak and inefficient; the government would always prefer to do business with a foreign NGO than a local one. 

This misconception cripples Aceh’s ability to adequately address its own social, economic and infrastructure issues. Unfortunately, it is not a total misconception for the reasons outlined above—civil society in Aceh died with the tsunami, both literally in the form of the majority of NGO staff being killed, and administratively through the refusal of the global community to include local capacity building as a priority of the reconstruction effort. (This is mentioned over and over in al the post-reconstruction reports from BRR to World bank to the UN—the failure of the groups that got the most money to engage with the people they were supposedly “helping.”)

One good example of this is the establishment of three consecutive databases designed to track all reconstruction projects.  With costs of tens of millions of dollars, each of these incredibly complex and comprehensive databases were developed by global teams funded with reconstruction funds and maintained by international IT specialists.  At no time were Acehnese staff trained in their implementation, and so when EDFF closed, and international staff went away, there was no one left who understood how to operate or maintain them. Three separate databases were established, as if each consecutive one would be different in terms of sustainability.  The waste of resources was phenomenal.  There exists no centralized project database for the reconstruction effort.  (Financial data exists, we are told, and individual organizations kept their own records, but nowhere in Aceh is anything centralized.)  Additionally, there was no thought to budgeting for the maintenance and future upkeep of these databases—or any of the capital improvement projects in Aceh (roads, bridges, schools, ports, etc.)  So when Bappenas took over after EDFF closed, no one paid the hosting fee and the database disappeared.  And the roads that were built are now falling apart—not a criticism of their construction but of the knowledge that infrastructure here needs lots of maintenance—and never received it.

Beside the fact that some builders and suppliers got rich with this process, do you also think that there was corruption among NGOs and the local authorities?

We know of at least one documented instance of corruption, which we have investigated and documented extensively and received confirmation from EDFF/World bank regarding its veracity. (It involves Action Aid Australia and Yayasan Keumang and a $6.7 cocoa farming improvement project that was never implemented—and no one knows where the funds went.)  However, there are many, many more instances of this.  I would call it “corruption” when an international NGO continues to pad its administrative costs, sending 80% or reconstruction funds back to its own country HQ, leaving 20% for direct services.  Just looking at the EDF completion report, about 90% of the $50million in projects were rated “Moderately unsatisfactory” by World Bank, due mostly to project proposals that promised goals that were impossible to achieve, and hence had to “scale back” on expectations and services.  International NGOs got very, very wealthy with these funds.  It is no wonder that many in Aceh consider “NGO” to be a dirty word.

The government/BRR staff was also complicit in fairly widespread and well-known corruption.  It was common knowledge that if an agency wished to implement a BRR project and get funds from the Multi-Donor Fund, it had to pay an official or staff member to "accept" the proposal and/or release the funds. Local officials tried to extort money from JMD a couple of times—the payment was usually around 20,000,000IDR (about $1,500) the cacique or someone would say “if you want to do this project it will cost X.”  But we never would pay; we'd threaten to do the project somewhere else, and they would back off and eventually let us do it.  But we never asked for BRR funds—even if we had, as I mentioned, we were deemed "too small."   We just went and did projects without the MDF money—as many other agencies also did.  And most were asked to pay the "premium" for the "opportunity" to do projects.  Some paid, some did not.

The ill-fated “peace accord” directed funds and positions of power to certain ex-GAM leaders, who then forsook the remaining 3,000 ex-combatants and, we are sure, profited from reconstruction in some form. As I mentioned, the agreement to take some of the reconstruction funds and direct it to ex-combatants through BRA never was carried out; BRA was (and is) considered a miserable failure.  

What is painfully obvious is that despite the billions of dollars spent in Aceh, no government official, agriculture extensionist, health/education professional or ministry representative received any additional training or got any better at his/her job. Local authorities’ responsiveness to community need also did not improve.  Why should it have?  The international community basically told Aceh, “Stand back—we’ll handle this.”  So the Acehnese—what was left of them—said, “okay.”  And when the money ran out, the foreigners left.  Very little technical or educational capital was left.

Why do you believe that GAM is a threat again in Aceh and why do you think this is happening?

What can be done to solve this problem?  

 Below is a position paper that was written at the request of President Clinton for the Clinton Foundation in 2012.   The political situation in Aceh is extremely complex, and at this time I believe that the majority of ex-combatants who are not in government positions are merely pawns in a power struggle between Partai Aceh and PDIP.  No good will come of it.

This time, it will become GAM against GAM.  Although TNI has said that if these GAM guys try to overthrow Zaini, they will act quickly and squelch this uprising, and it will not be pretty.

May I know your nationality?

I was born in Brooklyn, New York and am a US citizen.  I lived and worked in Jakarta for 20 years prior to the 2004 tsunami, and remained in Aceh for seven years afterwards.

GAM "White Paper" 2012

Dear Mr. Clinton,

I enjoyed speaking with you during the Nelson Mandela reception held in your office; it was an honor to join you and the other attendees in paying tribute to such a great man.  I’m also grateful that you are still concerned for, and continue to monitor, the welfare of the citizens of Aceh, and had asked me to give you an update on the situation with former GAM combatants and their potential for violence especially during the next few election weeks.  I’m more than happy for this opportunity sum up what we believe to be about as close to the truth about this situation as possible, and I’ll be as brief as I can.

As I mentioned to you, Jembatan Masa Depan (JMD) has been working in the more remote areas of the province since 2005 and as a small grass-roots sustainable livelihoods and adult education agency we have strong ties to both local communities and political/government institutions, and are also fortunate enough to have over the years gained the trust and cooperation of a number of leaders in the Free Aceh (GAM) movement. The experience we’ve had and the information we’ve received during these past years is a bit different from the summaries presented in World Bank-funded reports and government-issued statements regarding the attention paid to ex-combatants and the very real problems they currently face.

Numbers vary slightly, but approximately 3,000 of the 21,000 known GAM combatants were reported by GAM leaders to the government immediately following the peace agreement/MoU signing.  (Indeed, even the 2009 World Bank-supported Multi-Stakeholder Review, considered to be the seminal document on the GAM issue, estimates that “there currently are around 14,300 former GAM combatants in Aceh, many more than the 3,000 claimed in the Helsinki MoU”).  There are many reasons why the large remaining numbers were not reported, chief among them being that GAM feared that the Indonesian government, once receiving the surrendered weapons of GAM’s entire militia, would renege on any peace agreement and retaliate with violence on now-unarmed “enemies of the state.”  Subsequently, the 3,000 who were registered were compensated in the form of government positions, financial remuneration, etc.  GAM members felt that these 3,000 would be the harbingers of a finally integrated province and would act as their advocates and supporters in the form of insuring that their remaining ranks of 14-18,000 would receive reintegration assistance as well.

This was not the case.  While many of the 3,000 registered members became quite powerful and “reintegrated” comfortably into their communities (Governor Irwandi himself is a former GAM leader) they abandoned many of the promises to their constituents that had elevated them to this status in the first place.  Former combatants had taken to heart Governor Irwandi’s promise of approximately $40 million for rural development projects, as well as assurances that they would receive land and livelihoods training as part of reintegration activities.  Although many public documents state that all ex-combatants have received some type of assistance, the reality is that very few have received any assistance at all.  They live in remote districts where few if any government officials or agency has visited, and the assistance that they may have received has come through tsunami relief, which was far more broadly distributed and tracked than any relief to former GAM Members.  Indeed, the tsunami relief (Multi-Donor) funds were significantly lacking in any mandated provisions for ex-combatants and their particular issues and needs.  Notes one publication, “In their rush to provide assistance to tsunami victims, many international agencies signed undertakings that they would not ‘interfere’ in the conflict.  By and large the US$600 million Multi-Donor Fund (MDF) could not be used in conflict-affected areas that were not hit by the tsunami. As a result, there has been a significant discrepancy between the aid reaching tsunami-affected areas and that to many heavily conflict-affected regions, creating an artificial dichotomy between post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh.”

Many of the authors of the documents extolling the (relative) success of the reintegration programs were in fact hand-picked by those government officials eager to put a successful face on the reintegration issue, and much of the data and conclusions are suspect.

In successive Governor’s Decrees, BRA (the agency responsible for reintegration) has been tasked with “formulating programs for the reintegration of former GAM into society in the fields of government, political participation, integration, and community empowerment in the social and economic spheres.” Public documents also indicate that BRA “has managed to directly facilitate individual assistance to approximately 20,000 conflict actors.”  This is not true.  Very little money has flowed directly to former combatants.  The reason for this are presented eloquently in a number of publications, usually accompanied by complaints from BRA as to why they could not comply, but the results are the same: approximately 15,000 fighting-age males in Aceh province feel as though they have been abandoned by the government that they believed, through the peace accord, had promised to welcome them as citizens with bright futures.

The violence surrounding the elections is a culmination of sentiment that has been percolating in Aceh for years.  The Aceh party, comprised of former GAM members, is furious with Governor Irwandi for what they perceive as near treasonous actions towards them.  BRA and other agencies have not bothered to address the issue of appropriate reintegration and what it means.  Much-needed education and vocational training programs, land allocations, agriculture and livestock and training have never been launched, despite claims to the contrary.  “Field reports” go out of their way to explain the complexity of the MoU and how it can’t be implemented easily due to language regarding individual vs. community-wide benefits.  Partai Aceh is now seen as filled with strong-arming thugs who disrupt elections in order to get their needs met and who have their fingers on the pulse of all large development projects.  In a sense, these non-3,000 former GAM members have played as cast—marginalized, ignored troublemakers who according to those in power should have been grateful they weren’t all rounded up and dispatched.

These former combatants extend through the province like a web, earning money by growing marijuana, logging illegally in protected forests, and sometimes committing robbery and shootings for hire, trying to compensate for the sustainability the government refuses to give them, says it has already given them.  They are also resourceful, determined, and in some cases very well-respected in the communities they inhabit, and their disgust with the care that has been extended them and their families transmits exponentially through the districts so that young men in remote villages with few opportunities of their own begin to see these disenfranchised fighters as their role models.

It is JMD’s belief that far more attention should be paid to providing education assistance (high school equivalency programs) and vocational training to former combatants, and that the Acehnese government can facilitate this initiative quite easily.  The hardest thing for NGOs to address is a community of former GAM saying “Our government gave us nothing. We were promised land and training.  We were promised that we’d be able to care for our families legally and respectfully.  There is no way for us to survive now except through violence and crime.”  Because we can’t tell them “No, that’s not true, you weren’t abandoned, your government cares about you.”

There are many specific and documented instances of former combatants’ not receiving the services that various entities claim to have provided.  If you’d like a more “formal” presentation of what agencies on the ground in Aceh see as the cause and possible solution to the “GAM vs GAM” issue, I would be most happy to provide it. I would also welcome the opportunity to discuss further with your team how you may be able to influence a positive outcome in terms of both mitigating election violence and helping the doubly-marginalized citizens of Aceh reclaim their livelihoods, their dignity, and their ability to help the province grow and flourish economically and socially.

Thank you so much for your time, sir.  I do look forward to being able to speak with you again.