Reuters - February 2, 2006

Achmad Sukarsono, Jakarta - Indonesia, which suffered the most from the Indian Ocean tsunami, dismissed on Thursday a report that accused several governments of failing to meet human rights standards in relief efforts.

ActionAid International, the Habitat International Coalition and the People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning charged on Wednesday that while the tsunami aid campaign had many successes, it failed to ensure the rights of many of those affected to food, clean water and a secure home and livelihood.

Aburizal Bakrie, chief social welfare minister in Indonesia, said the “the report sounds weird” to anyone who had seen the scale of the devastation.

Killer waves triggered by a magnitude 9.15 earthquake off Indonesia’s Sumatra island slammed into 13 Asian and African countries on December 26, 2004, flattening thousands of villages and killing around 230,000 people.

In Indonesia’s Aceh province alone, the tsunami left some 170,000 people dead or missing. The report acknowledged the severity of the tragedy but insisted failure to comply with human rights standards would deepen the suffering of those who survived the onslaught.

Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, head of Indonesia’s reconstruction agency in Aceh, said human rights had always been upheld. “I know we have holes here and there. I know some houses don’t have sanitation or electricity. I know that some of the displaced have not received their daily stipends,” he said. “But I live in Aceh and I know there is no human rights violation against the displaced.”

Women ignored?

Indonesia was particularly unhappy by accusations it had ignored women’s rights in relocation efforts. “In an emergency situation there is no immediate plan or script to give women different treatment. If women must stay with male survivors together in tents, that’s how it is,” said Bakrie.

Womens groups in Aceh have said female survivors who lost male relatives had been subject to sexual harassment in temporary wooden barracks.

“Rights abuses on women are not seen as offences in Aceh,” said Mia Emsa, head of the Aceh Gender Transformation Working Group, referring to the traditionally higher status accorded to men and the devout nature of Islam in the province.

“When we try to seek our rights we are seen as troublesome.” Her group wanted a clear allocation for female needs in the reconstruction budget, she added. Kuntoro said the building of female-only bathrooms and rest areas for the displaced was high on his agenda.

Nearly $14 billion has been pledged by donors to rebuild the affected regions since the disaster, which drove 2 million people from their homes, deprived 1.5 million of their livelihoods and destroyed some 400,000 houses worldwide.

But hundreds of thousands of survivors are still living in substandard shelters without adequate health care, said the report, based on visits to more than 50,000 people in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India in November 2005.

Besides Indonesia’s case on women rights, the report highlighted discrimination in aid distribution, government-backed land grabs and arbitrary arrests in the four other countries.

In Sri Lanka, where the tsunami hit communities already affected by the island’s two-decade long civil war, aid workers say aid distribution sometimes deepened existing divisions between minority Tamils and Muslims and the majority Sinhalese.

“In some villages, you see someone who has been affected by the tsunami and they’re getting lots of aid while in the same village you get someone who is war affected, who has spent 20 years without a house, gets nothing,” one aid worker said. Chris Lom from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Bangkok said it was obvious many people would suffer long-term privations as a result of such a massive disaster - but that governments were not exclusively to blame.

“The horrible situation is that, yes, there are still a lot of people living in tents. But it was a jolt to everybody how unprepared they were - not just the governments,” he said.

[Additional reporting by Telly Nathalia in Jakarta, Ed Cropley in Bangkok and Peter Apps in Colombo.]