[nasional_list] [ppiindia] Aid Groups Are Criticized Over Tsunami Reconstruction

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**http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/world/asia/27indo.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin



Aid Groups Are Criticized Over Tsunami Reconstruction 

 
Kemal Jufri/Imaji, for The New York Times
Brick houses built in Aceh Province by the Turkish Red Crescent Society have 
received the most praise. 



By JANE PERLEZ
Published: July 27, 2006
MASJID, Indonesia - For a moment, the villagers in this seaside community 
glimpsed a vision of a splendid future: houses with shady verandas, a new 
elementary school and an end to the squalid barracks that had been their world 
since the Asian tsunami swept all before it 19 months ago. 


 
Kemal Jufri/Imaji, for The New York Times
Abdullah, left, and his family live in temporary housing built by Oxfam, which 
has fired several staff members over its reconstruction effort. 

But the houses, built with untreated, rickety wood by the aid agency Save the 
Children, turned out to be uninhabitable - some of them were thrown together in 
three days and nights, the villagers said. The foundations of the school remain 
abandoned, overgrown with weeds. 

"People are mad," said Innu A. Barkar, the village head, as he walked around 
the empty houses, some of them relegated for use as chicken yards. "The aid 
workers gave promises, but they don't turn out to be reality." 

Life in Aceh, the northernmost province of Indonesia where 170,000 people 
perished in the December 2004 tsunami, has resumed a semblance of normality. 

For the most part, children are in school, roads are being rebuilt, outdoor 
markets are packed with local produce, employment is not too hard to find, and 
even the peace accord between the national government and separatist guerrillas 
is sticking. Almost everyone has been moved out of muddy tents, though many 
families still live in dilapidated barracks. 

But beneath the activity, a veil of disenchantment with international aid 
agencies pervades, a feeling that extravagant promises backed by unprecedented 
donations, large and small, from the around the world have yet to materialize. 

To many, the $8.5 billion that humanitarian agencies, foreign governments and 
Indonesia say they will spend on the rebuilding of Aceh seems a mirage. In some 
ways, they are right. So far, the World Bank says only $1.5 billion of the $8.5 
billion dedicated to the disaster has yet been disbursed. 

More than that, much of what has been spent has not been spent well. A scathing 
report issued in mid-July by experts from governments, the United Nations and 
international aid agencies, and endorsed by former President Bill Clinton, 
makes clear that the villagers are not just grumbling. 

Many of the hundreds of aid agencies that poured into Aceh in the aftermath of 
the tsunami displayed "arrogance and ignorance" and were often staffed by 
"incompetent workers" who came and went quickly, the report said. 

Although the billions of dollars in donations translated into a record $7,100 
for each affected person - compared with $3 for each survivor of the 2004 
floods in Bangladesh - the people of Aceh have not seen the fruits of the 
generosity, the report added. 

The assessment, which Mr. Clinton noted in a foreword contained "uncomfortable 
reading," rapped the aid agencies for paying more attention to advertising 
their "brands" and releasing self-laudatory reports than accounting for their 
expenditures. 

The agencies performed relatively well during the first three months after the 
tsunami when they delivered food and water, and kept diseases at bay. Much of 
that success was "thanks largely to local inputs," the report said.

For the longer term reconstruction, the report said that lack of expertise by 
the agencies had led to "shoddy results." 

House building is in fact the main source of complaint. In some areas, clusters 
of new houses, their corrugated iron roofs glinting in the tropical sun, have 
sprouted in the barren landscape. In others, row upon row of dilapidated 
barracks, swollen with families squatting in tiny rooms, attest to the slow 
going in building new family dwellings. 

In all, about 25,000 houses, constructed by a wide variety of agencies, have 
been completed out of a projected 120,000 that are needed, according to the 
United Nations agency Habitat.

There were many reasons the rebuilding has fallen short, said Kuntoro 
Mangkusubroto, director of the Indonesian rehabilitation and reconstruction 
agency. 

Flush with donations from the public as never before, the aid agencies felt 
compelled to press ahead with building houses even though they lacked 
experience. 

"They said, 'Let's build,' " Mr. Kuntoro explained. "They don't talk about 
contracts; there are no agreements with contractors. It's build houses, boom, 
boom, boom." 

He said he had warned the agencies. "I kept telling them that the type of 
people they had, the way they managed, had to change," he said. "It took until 
the end of last December to convince them to change." 

As for the disappointments in Masjid, Save the Children said it would demolish 
371 unusable houses it had built here and elsewhere, and would repair 200 
others. 

The agency, which suspended its construction programs in order to investigate 
what went wrong, has ordered prefabricated houses from Canada. Starting in 
September, it plans to train villagers on how to assemble them, said Mike 
Kiernan, the group's director of communications. 

Skip to next paragraph 
 
The New York Times
Masjid residents said the houses built for them were uninhabitable. 

Three housing inspectors have been fired from the agency for failing to do 
their jobs, Mr. Kiernan said. 

Similarly, Oxfam dismissed 10 staff members on grounds of gross misconduct 
after uncovering collusion between them and Indonesian contractors that 
resulted in shoddy houses, said Ian Small, the director of Oxfam in Aceh. 

There were other problems as well, some peculiar to Aceh. One of the big 
stumbling blocks, for instance, has been the supply of wood, the most common 
material in local housing. 

The province of Aceh, a great storehouse of timber with some of the most 
valuable forests in Indonesia, is also one of the most over-logged places in 
the nation. In a move to preserve the endangered forests, the Indonesian 
rehabilitation and reconstruction agency, which is overseeing the rebuilding, 
issued a ruling that basically prohibited the use of wood from Aceh. 

The scramble for enough wood for 20,000 one-room temporary houses became an 
enduring quest for Kevin Duignan, a building contractor from New Zealand who 
came to Aceh to head up the housing efforts of the International Federation of 
the Red Cross. 

To build the houses, he issued families do-it-yourself kits with tools and 
steel frames bought in Bangkok. But to get the wood planks for the walls, the 
Red Cross signed on with a British timber company, which supplied Baltic pine 
bought in Scandinavia.

Concerned about potential health problems associated with the wood's 
antitermite treatment, the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva took two months to 
approve the contract. 

Finally, the wood was milled in Britain, and then shipped via Singapore to 
Medan, the Indonesian port just south of Aceh, Mr. Duignan said.

But often the journey by ship from Britain to Singapore took much longer than 
the three weeks it was supposed to take, and delivering the wood over Aceh's 
rotten roads ate up still more time. 

By mid-July, just 8,900 of the planned 20,000 temporary houses that were 
supposed to be up months ago were finished, Mr. Duignan said. 

One of the occupants of the tiny new homes, Cut Darnita, decorated her interior 
with vases of fabric roses and orchids, a cheery red rug and a coffee table 
draped with a white linen cloth. The five-member family lay down mats on the 
floor to sleep at night. 

"It's small but nice," she said of the room, about 226 square feet. When would 
she get a permanent home? Ms. Darnita shrugged. 

Not all the news is bad. Work on a highway down the devastated west coast of 
the province, financed by the United States government, is under way, and a new 
port has opened in Meulaboh, the seaside town that was smashed to smithereens.

Of the lucky ones with a roof over their heads, those with houses built by the 
Turkish Red Crescent Society are the most pleased. 

"They've given us good quality," said Khairuman, 45, a building laborer, and 
his wife, Suginah, 43, as they showed off their blue-tiled bathroom replete 
with bath and shower in the beachside community of Lampuuk. Like many 
Indonesians, they use one name.

The Red Crescent Society paid $10,000 for each brick house, about double the 
cost of houses built by other agencies. And it sent a team of engineers with 
experience from the 1999 earthquake in Turkey.

"The people of Aceh suffered; they need to stay in good houses," said an 
engineer, Ali Pekoz. From the sunproof window glass to imported hinges on the 
doors, the Turks chose the best fittings, he said. 

The harsh analysis by Mr. Clinton's evaluation group has prompted some 
introspection among the major aid agencies. The criticisms come as some argue 
here in Aceh, and in Washington, that more experienced private contractors or 
national armies should take on future reconstruction efforts in disaster areas. 

But the humanitarian agencies reject that idea, saying they bring a special 
dimension to the work that is implied in their very name. 

"I suppose we all could have given the billions raised for the effort to the 
Halliburtons of this world, and perhaps the job would be done by now," Mr. 
Small of Oxfam said in a recent speech. "But would that build a fairer, more 
accountable and equitable society where the poor are not left behind for the 
lack of a voice and where women are empowered to effect change, and society as 
a whole has built up the capacity to go forward on its own?" 



  a.. 1 The agency, which suspended its construction programs in order to 
investigate what went wrong, has ordered prefabricated houses from Canada. 
Starting in September, it plans to train village
  b.. 2
Next 

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