People of Aceh win building battle

March 22, 2005
An Acehnese girl enjoys a lollipop at a festival in Blang Bintang, a village in tsunami-hit area near Banda Aceh.

Photo: Reuters

The Indonesian Government has decided it will not proceed with plans to impose a building exclusion zone along the Aceh coastline and will allow people to rebuild where they lived before the tsunami.

A final draft of the Government plan, known as the blueprint, proposes the construction of a series of escape hills and earthquake-resistant concrete buildings, the planting of mangroves and the use of a tsunami early warning system.

Those living nearest the coast should be able to reach a hill within five minutes, while those further away would have hills they could reach within 10, 15 or 20 minutes, depending on how far they were from the sea. Each hill should have a flat top of 1000 square metres, big enough to hold about 1000 people.

After the December 26 tsunami, the Government considered banning all building within two kilometres of the coast to minimise the risk from future tsunamis. But after resistance from the Acehnese people, the idea was abandoned.

Aid agencies with billions of dollars to spend have been waiting for the release of the master plan before deciding where to allocate money on reconstruction projects.

Many agencies feared that providing money for the Acehnese to rebuild their homes in the original locations could lead to conflict with the Government if it decided to impose a building exclusion zone.

The exclusion zone was rejected by Acehnese, especially fishermen, who said they needed to live at the coast to work and who are already rebuilding their houses on their original sites.

The draft of the plan, sections of which have been obtained by The Age and which is due to be released this week, estimates the cost of reconstruction in Aceh at just over $A6.3 billion, with the money to come from the Indonesian Government and foreign aid donations. The figure is the estimate for the total reconstruction cost. Rebuilding public infrastructure, such as road and power systems, is estimated to cost around $A1.3 billion.

Around three times that amount is needed to compensate for private sector losses from the destruction of businesses.

There is no breakdown of how much money the Government expects to get from foreign and local sources.

To spend the money, the plan calls for the creation of an ad hoc agency to be called Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Implementation Agency.

It would be chaired by a ministerial level officer who would report directly to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Control of the board would be in the hands of a steering committee made up of a group of ministries, local government representatives and parliamentarians from Aceh, and representatives from universities and other public institutions.

To oversee the spending of this huge amount of money, an oversight board would be created with members of Indonesia's State Audit Agency and representatives of international donors, non-government organisations and civil society representatives.

The plan has nominated three phases for the reconstruction of Aceh, with the emergency phase to run until June 26.

A second rehabilitation phase would last between seven months and two years and a reconstruction phase would run for up to five years.

The Government had originally planned to reduce the number of foreign aid workers in Aceh from March 26, but announced in recent days that all foreign aid workers could stay for at least another month or two.


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