Aceh a testament to aid successes and failures

As the weeks passed, order did come to Aceh. The smaller aid groups began to leave, the remaining agencies began to work together more closely and the Indonesian government launched a surprisingly successful agency to help oversee reconstruction.

The Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency is headed by Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, a former energy minister famous for remaining untainted by corruption in a nation where bureaucratic inefficiency is often the norm and where government officials regularly become rich.

Kuntoro began work with a broadside at the chaos.

“It’s shocking,” he told reporters in early May, barely a week after taking over the agency. “There are no roads being built, there are no bridges being built, there are no harbors being built. When it comes to reconstruction — zero.”

Corruption probes
He cast aside much the government’s massive reconstruction plan, brought in outside consultants, asked for community input, and pushed problems into the open.

He also invited international auditors to examine the agency’s books and created an anti-corruption investigation team to probe his own department.

While no one is insisting that corruption has been eradicated in Aceh — the province has long been one of Indonesia’s most corrupt, with the state governor himself serving a 10-year prison sentence in a pre-tsunami corruption case — the reconstruction efforts have been largely free of accusations of serious graft.

Housing shortfalls
If there has been one standout aid failure in Aceh, it’s housing.

Flush with funds and staff, planners at first focused on building permanent replacement houses for the nearly half-million people left homeless.

But problems began to mount quickly. The biggest issue was legal: Only a tiny percentage of people who lost their homes turned out to hold title to their land. Often, their families had lived on the land for generations as renters or squatters, or their ownership papers had been lost in the tsunami.

Compounding this were issues ranging from a shortage of timber to poor planning.

As a result, thousands of survivors were left in tents and shanty towns that began slowly falling apart as Sumatra’s brutal heat gave way to the rainy season.

“For the survivors who are in the tents, the conditions are unacceptable. There is no other word for it,” Eric Morris, the U.N. Recovery Coordinator for Aceh and the nearby island of Nias, said in a September interview with The Associated Press.

It was only in the summer, long after the tsunami, that most aid agencies shifted their approaches and began planning tens of thousands of sturdy temporary shelters that could last until permanent housing could be built.

“This is fundamental,” said Paul Dillon, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, which has become a construction force in Aceh, building roughly 900 homes for tsunami survivors, 37 medical clinics and 113 temporary schools. “People have been patient, they’ve been supportive ... but to have (aid workers) go into a particular area and say “we will do this” and then fail to do it that is unacceptable.”

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