Indonesia dismisses tsunami rights abuse report

By Achmad Sukarsono

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia, which suffered the most from
the Indian Ocean tsunami, dismissed on Thursday a report that
accused several governments of failing to meet human rights
standards in relief efforts.

ActionAid International, the Habitat International
Coalition and the People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning
charged on Wednesday that while the tsunami aid campaign had
many successes, it failed to ensure the rights of many of those
affected to food, clean water and a secure home and livelihood.

Aburizal Bakrie, chief social welfare minister in
Indonesia, said the “the report sounds weird” to anyone who had
seen the scale of the devastation.

Killer waves triggered by a magnitude 9.15 earthquake off
Indonesia’s Sumatra island slammed into 13 Asian and African
countries on December 26, 2004, flattening thousands of
villages and killing around 230,000 people.

In Indonesia’s Aceh province alone, the tsunami left some
170,000 people dead or missing.

The report acknowledged the severity of the tragedy but
insisted failure to comply with human rights standards would
deepen the suffering of those who survived the onslaught.

Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, head of Indonesia’s reconstruction
agency in Aceh, said human rights had always been upheld.

“I know we have holes here and there. I know some houses
don’t have sanitation or electricity. I know that some of the
displaced have not received their daily stipends,” he said.

“But I live in Aceh and I know there is no human rights
violation against the displaced.”

WOMEN IGNORED?

Indonesia was particularly unhappy by accusations it had
ignored women’s rights in relocation efforts.

“In an emergency situation there is no immediate plan or
script to give women different treatment. If women must stay
with male survivors together in tents, that’s how it is,” said
Bakrie.

Womens groups in Aceh have said female survivors who lost
male relatives had been subject to sexual harassment in
temporary wooden barracks.

“Rights abuses on women are not seen as offences in Aceh,”
said Mia Emsa, head of the Aceh Gender Transformation Working
Group, referring to the traditionally higher status accorded to
men and the devout nature of Islam in the province.

“When we try to seek our rights we are seen as
troublesome.”

Her group wanted a clear allocation for female needs in the
reconstruction budget, she added.

Kuntoro said the building of female-only bathrooms and rest
areas for the displaced was high on his agenda.

Nearly $14 billion has been pledged by donors to rebuild
the affected regions since the disaster, which drove 2 million
people from their homes, deprived 1.5 million of their
livelihoods and destroyed some 400,000 houses worldwide.

But hundreds of thousands of survivors are still living in
substandard shelters without adequate health care, said the
report, based on visits to more than 50,000 people in
Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India in
November 2005.

Besides Indonesia’s case on women rights, the report
highlighted discrimination in aid distribution,
government-backed land grabs and arbitrary arrests in the four
other countries.

In Sri Lanka, where the tsunami hit communities already
affected by the island’s two-decade long civil war, aid workers
say aid distribution sometimes deepened existing divisions
between minority Tamils and Muslims and the majority Sinhalese.

“In some villages, you see someone who has been affected by
the tsunami and they’re getting lots of aid while in the same
village you get someone who is war affected, who has spent 20
years without a house, gets nothing,” one aid worker said.

Chris Lom from the International Organization for Migration
(IOM) in Bangkok said it was obvious many people would suffer
long-term privations as a result of such a massive disaster —
but that governments were not exclusively to blame.

“The horrible situation is that, yes, there are still a lot
of people living in tents. But it was a jolt to everybody how
unprepared they were — not just the governments,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Telly Nathalia in JAKARTA, Ed
Cropley in BANGKOK and Peter Apps in COLOMBO)