Aceh a testament to aid successes and failures

By Tim Sullivan

updated 8:06 a.m. ET Dec. 19, 2005

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - It has been a year since the tsunami laid waste to the isolated Indonesian province of Aceh, but tens of thousands of people still live in a vast archipelago of shanty towns made of scrap wood spit back by the sea. Along the coast, towns and villages remain nothing but swampland and ankle-high rubble. In plywood barracks hurriedly built across the region, survivors are jammed together in windowless rooms.

Many people are desperately frustrated.

“We know a lot of money is going to Aceh, but where is it? Where are the buildings? Where is the construction?” demanded Zoelfitri, a 32-year-old man who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name. He lives in a homemade shanty on the fringes of Banda Aceh, the provincial capital on the northwestern edge of Sumatra island, and cares for nearly a dozen relatives who lost parents, children and siblings in the tsunami.

But the reality here runs deeper than the devastation, deeper even than the frustration of survivors.

Slow recovery
To see only the destruction is to miss what else has come to Aceh since the tsunami: the villages slowly rebuilding with the help of aid workers; the miles of sewage pipes drilled in the rich Aceh soil; the hospital emergency rooms that, despite the dread of the early days, never filled with victims of post-tsunami disease epidemics.

One year later, Aceh is testament both to the successes and the failures that can come from billions of dollars in aid money.

It is also testament to the strength of the Acehnese people, a long-ignored Indonesian minority who were already suffering through a bloody separatist movement and a brutal government crackdown when the sea rose up that Sunday morning, killing at least 131,338 people in Indonesia and leaving more than 25,000 missing.

It wasn’t just Aceh that suffered. At least 31,229 people died in Sri Lanka, 10,749 in India and 5,395 in Thailand. More than 500 others were killed in countries as distant as Somalia. The total across the dozen nations hit is at least 216,000 dead and missing.

But it was in Aceh, just 160 miles from the epicenter of the undersea earthquake that fathered the tsunami, that the destruction reached biblical proportions, with 100-foot walls of water slamming into the coast at more than 350 mph.

It was 7:59 a.m.

In a moment, tens of thousands of people were dead and much of Aceh’s coastline was in ruins. The worst-hit areas were simply obliterated. Even now, it is often difficult to distinguish between a destroyed rice paddy and a once-crowded neighborhood. In many areas, both remain nothing but swampland.

Enormous sums
Within hours, as the world watched on TV, the international aid community began one of the biggest emergency assistance programs in history.

The sums involved, both what was needed and what was donated, were enormous.

Indonesia estimated its post-tsunami needs at $5 billion to $5.5 billion and received pledges totaling $6.5 billion, of which nearly $4.5 billion has been collected, according to estimates compiled by The Associated Press.

Where has the money gone?

—By the end of the year, the World Food Program estimates it will have spent more than $125 million in Aceh. Among its expenses: nearly $20 million on helicopters and airplanes that have ferried 40,000 passengers and 1,000 tons of cargo across the region and $26 million to buy more than 72,000 tons of food aid.

—Oxfam, the Britain-based aid organization, has spent some $11.5 million on public health, water and sanitation programs in Aceh. That includes everything from building or repairing 3,200 wells to delivering more than 300 million liters of drinking water.

—Save the Children spent more than $1 million buying textbooks and school supplies after one-fifth of Aceh’s schools were damaged or destroyed.

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