AFTER THE TSUNAMI – HARNESSING AUSTRALIAN EXPERTISE FOR RECOVERY
Canberra, 31 March 2005

Cultural and economic aspects of disaster
Professor Jim Fox
Director, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU

Powerpoint presentation (1934KB)

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Colleagues, friends, I think we have all been swept away by the scale of the loss and destruction caused by the Indian [Ocean] tsunami, so it is appropriate that we take stock, as we are doing today, on what is to be done next. There has also been a virtual tidal wave of reports on the tsunami. If you go to Google and you put in ‘tsunami’, you will come up with 19 million different items on the Net just relating to the tsunami. If you put in ‘Aceh’ there are only 3 million.

I will be focusing mainly on Aceh and north Sumatra, Nias island. But this occurrence of the latest earthquake probably means that the full stocktake will be postponed.

It is interesting that today, officially in Indonesia as far as the Indonesian government is concerned, is the day when the emergency phase for Aceh and north Sumatra ends and they go into the new phase of rehabilitation. It is important, I think, to know something about the structures that have been put in place in Indonesia for managing this. By presidential decree three days ago, an Aceh Management Board has been established to oversee the task of rehabilitation and reconstruction. Separate to that has been an independent supervisory board which is to be made up of both local and overseas representatives. The task of this supervisory board will be to see that the programs are carried out as planned and without corruption.

It is very interesting, I was at AusAID yesterday and speaking with one of the leading figures in development in Indonesia, and he was full of praise for the way in which Australia has determined that it will keep its own funding line into this program, rather than merge it with a lot of the multilateral donors. He thought this was a better structure for also overseeing and preventing corruption in the reconstruction process.

In addition to these two boards there is going to be a separate steering committee made up of Cabinet ministers, who will have the task of assigning line specifications from the Management Board to the different departments in Indonesia. Now, all of that has been put in place in the last three days. The names of appointees to these different boards have not been finalised.

In this presentation, the question is where to begin. I want to focus primarily on coastal fisheries and on the educational sector, because I think these are the two areas where Australian expertise can indeed be very well focused.

The local fisheries industry in Aceh and northern Sumatra is estimated to have suffered the greatest damage of any single sector. The FAO estimates that there were 111,000 fishing vessels lost or damaged, and the loss to fisheries and aquaculture is estimated to be a minimum of $520 million. This doesn’t even begin to talk about environmental restoration. And the working on the environmental restoration that will have to occur over time will have far-reaching consequences for the future, and will probably pose some of the most difficult problems in the whole process.

By the same token, the restoration of the educational sector in Aceh and elsewhere is vital for the continuity of social and cultural identities. The tasks in this sector are both formidable and fundamental.

Before I go into looking at these two sectors, however, I want to make one or two points about what I call the ‘new demography’ of these areas, particularly of Aceh. We are all aware of the loss of life in Aceh and Nias, in northern Sumatra, and we have seen the figures put up on the screen of almost 300,000 lives lost. It is important to realise, however – and this is not just a technical point – that for the years leading up to this there were considerable security problems throughout the Aceh region. And although the Indonesian census in 2000 was a good census, the Census Board made it very, very clear that that quality did not hold for Aceh. There were large gaps throughout Aceh in the census figures for Aceh. So when we begin with a baseline of figures for Aceh we are almost certainly looking at an underestimation. So then when we calculate losses, we have to take it into account that we are beginning with a very insecure, probably inaccurate, baseline.

But that is not the big point. The big point is the incredible imbalance in the present population. A disproportionate number of women died as a result of the tsunami. For example, we have only small surveys but the small surveys give us a hint of what probably happened throughout. An Oxfam survey of four villages in Aceh Besar indicated that male survivors outnumbered female survivors by three to one. In another survey, in north Aceh, in Kuala Cangkoy, 80 per cent of those who died were women. So we have an extraordinary gender imbalance of survivors, and we have to take that into account in our planning for the future.

At the same time, although we have only anecdotal evidence, it is very clear that a high proportion of young children in the age group from, say, 4 to 15 were lost, were drowned, were swept away, as compared with the adult population. One of the first reactions in the restoration in Indonesia was to re-establish the schools. Well, in many cases the number of children available to attend those schools was dismayingly low.

So the point I would make, and one of the points I would leave with you, is that when we are looking at this new demography in these areas, we have to realise that though there is a five-year plan for the restoration of some of the physical infrastructure, it will take more than a generation to restore some of the former balance of the population in the devastated areas. And it is probable – indeed, almost certain – that part of that restoration will involve a local redistribution of populations.

Now, a few points on the fisheries. The World Bank, FAO, the Asian Development Bank have been working with the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries in preparing a strategic program for the rehabilitation and the reconstruction of the fisheries industry in Aceh and Nias. It is interesting that Nias suffered very considerable damage and has now in this latest earthquake suffered even more damage. By contrast, the island of Sabang, directly off the northern tip of Aceh, suffered relatively little damage compared with some of the other areas of Aceh. You would have thought it was right in the forefront of the tsunami.

Though the report by the Ministry of Marine Affairs was prepared in February, almost all of that report has now been re-incorporated into the new master plan for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Aceh and north Sumatra. That plan was released on 26 March, just a few days ago. It is available on the Net. It is entirely in Indonesian; it comes to 11 volumes; it is a massive document, with an enormous number of maps and appendices. It is something that will itself take weeks or months to digest and understand. But it is a master plan and it shows the seriousness with which the Indonesian government is going ahead with its plans for reconstruction.

To focus now on the local fisheries: both Aceh and Nias had vibrant local fishing industries – 16 per cent of the coastal population was directly involved in fishing and it is estimated that up to 20 per cent of active fishers lost their lives. Their families along the coast, especially wives and young children, suffered even greater losses. The large fishing ports of Banda Aceh and Nias were severely damaged, as well as 49 other small fishing ports and even more fish-landing facilities. Sixty-five per cent of boats and equipment were destroyed.

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This gives you a photograph of the harbour in Banda Aceh before the tsunami.

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And there it is afterwards. You get some sense of the extraordinary loss, the change, the transformation of the harbour in Banda Aceh, the whole sweep of debris that was carried into Banda Aceh.

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Here is a field, or sawa of fields in the divided parts of the city.

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This is the flow-through of that.

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There is the city; there is the debris that has been carried into the city.

One of the important things to talk about is in fact what Bruce Billson mentioned: the amount of marine debris and salination that have occurred throughout the areas, especially along the coast. This poses major problems in planning coastal rehabilitation for the future. There is no likelihood of a return to the previous conditions. There are in the Indonesian master plan all sorts of plans for rezoning and for considerable restoration of mangroves, because all of Sumatra – and Aceh as well – has gone into a frenzy of clearing mangroves in order to build up ponds and fishing areas for shrimp. Shrimp commands a very high export price. As a consequence, all of those areas where the mangroves had been cleared have been far more devastated than the areas that had still retained their mangroves. There is a plan now to return a lot of that area to mangrove as a kind of protection for the future. All of that is built in to this master plan; whether it is effected, whether it can be effected, remains to be seen.

It is important, I think, to mention that ACIAR have been leading the charge in this. They have allocated $5.8 [million] in new money immediately for a combination of 50 per cent for agricultural soil research and development and 50 per cent to look at coastal habitats and fisheries. John Skerritt, who is Deputy Director of ACIAR, as we speak is in Bangkok making a presentation to FAO on ACIAR work into Aceh and north Sumatra. ACIAR have designated three or four project areas for 18 months’ study on the effects of change in soil salinity, the effects of marine sedimentation on agriculture. They will be developing techniques for salinity reduction and the modification of planting strategies, because if you are to restore the planting strategies you are going to have to restore them into soils whose conditions have been significantly altered.

Interestingly and very importantly, they have already established training programs for students at Syiah Kuala University to carry out some of these new analyses, and these training programs begin this month, both in Medan, in north Sumatra, and also on the island of Batam. They are also now formulating plans for the work in this brackish-water aquaculture and for the assessment of damage to coral reefs and coastal habitats.

I will just go on quickly to mention the work in the educational sector. There are two universities. There is the university of Syiah Kuala and there is also an Islamic institute, Ar-Raniry. Both of them suffered incredible damage, particularly the Islamic institute of Ar-Raniry. Over 100 lecturers lost their lives, and again because the housing complex was nearer the sea the families of those lecturers suffered even more damage and loss of life. The ANU has had close relations in training lecturers at Ar-Raniry, and so the Rector of Ar-Raniry called me when he reached Jakarta some week or so after the disaster to tell me how many of our ANU graduates had died. It turns out a number have died. Fortunately, one graduate, my own student there, survived; he was visiting his in-laws at the time. The Rector was very concerned and very anxious for Australian involvement in retraining, and redeveloping the institutions in Banda Aceh. The poor man, over the phone, finally broke down and cried. It is a very, very traumatic thing when you lose so many of your good up-and-coming people.

In any case, there is an enormous amount that needs to be done in the educational sector, in the higher educational sector. A number of good reports have already been prepared, with proposals. Probably the most interesting and the most valuable is a report on the Aceh higher education sector by Professor Michael Leigh, who is the Director of the Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies. That sets one possible agenda for moving forward a consortium among Australian universities. I might mention also that Virginia Hooker, at the ANU, has succeeded in getting places for Acehnese students from Ar-Raniry to come down for a sandwich program, and we are expecting some five students to come down either to the ANU or to Melbourne in this sandwich program in the near future.

Finally, to wrap up I would just like to make one comment. It is about Acehnese renewal. Two days ago Robert Glaser, in an article in the Canberra Times, wrote, ‘It has been a longstanding tenet of good development practice that donors should support and encourage governments to take responsibility for and control their own development agendas.’ This also applies, I think, very specifically to the Acehnese. There is a period of great trauma when you are faced with and overwhelmed by a disaster. But, as we have seen also in East Timor, there comes a point when the local people demand to have a greater say in how they run their own affairs. That stage is now beginning to be reached among the Acehnese. The Acehnese are a people with a long and very proud past. I would say that any involvement that we have with Aceh will need not only to take into account not just the plans made and the master plans of the Indonesian government but to specifically involve the interests and concerns of the local Acehnese in defining their own future.