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.
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.
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