FROM Hurricane Katrina to the Kashmir earthquake, a string of recent natural disasters has laid bare some very unnatural structures of privilege and power. Indonesians know this better than anyone. First the Boxing Day tsunami, which claimed 170,000, lives in Aceh in 2004, then the Yogyakarta earthquake this May and the southern Java tsunami in July, have revealed a catalogue of official incompetence, corruption and indifference. None of these are new.

But the neo-liberal dismantling of even the most minimal vestiges of public welfare has made them even worse. At the same time, these natural disasters have released something else: a rich vein of community resilience, collective action, self-sufficiency and solidarity. This is something local student activists and militants of the PRD (People’s Democratic Party) have been supporting since day one.

And it’s one of the expressions of local struggle that Indonesia’s new left party, PAPERNAS, aims to link up with, as Stuart Piper discovered in Bantul, one of the areas hardest hit by the Yogyakarta earthquake. On my first visit, it didn’t look much like one of our most successful relief efforts ever, as one International Red Cross official had described it to me. Under a blistering Sunday sun, Ngadilan, Rohadi, Wahyudi and their neighbours were clearing the last bits of rubble from the floor of their village mosque.

t was exactly five weeks since an earthquake lasting 58 seconds had killed around 6,000 people and destroyed some 300,000 homes in the Yogyakarta area. Almost everyone was still living under canvas.

Here in this village of Glondong, they told me, 90% of the houses were destroyed. There was both sadness and a strange good humour in their voices as they remembered. The first thing I saw was the wells bursting and the water shooting up into the air. From the 87 families here, two girls were killed and twenty-five people were injured. We were lucky it struck a little before 6am. Most people are up by then. Many were already out in the rice fields, or had gone to work in one of the local workshops. Most of the rest of us were able to get out of the houses.

And they burst into laughter when they recalled one neighbour who had just been getting dressed. He was running around naked begging someone to give him a towel to cover himself up. The people of Glondong had to rely almost entirely on their own efforts to deal with the injured, and after that to clear up their community.

They met and decided their priorities: first to clear out the ruined homes, to erect temporary shelters and to re-open the access roads; then to clean up the village’s public spaces, first and foremost this bare shell that was all that remained of their mosque. The government is all promises, Ngadilan told me. He is in fact the local government rep for Glondong, but he said the only official help he or anyone here had received came one full month after the tremor US$ 10 per person per month and 10 kilos of rice for each family. And in some places even this had only gone to the favoured few. .The Vice-President said we would get US$ 3,000 to rebuild each destroyed house, with US$ 2,000 or 1,000 for partially damaged homes. But no-one has received any of that. Wahyudi added that the international relief effort was not much better. The international organizations and big NGO’s just camp out along the main road. They never came to less accessible communities like ours. And all the aid they bring is delivered to the local government, where it gets stuck in the bureaucracy.

The only outside help we’ve had, Rohadi told me, has come from the volunteers of SORAK (People’s Solidarity for Humanity). They are the ones who treat us like human beings and give us a new vision of the future. Further down the road, I saw what he meant. In a large tent, students from the nearby Arts Faculty were organizing painting and singing classes for thirty local children.

It gives the parents a break, and it helps them get over their trauma, Andres, a sculpture student told me. And even the little ones do these amazing paintings of the village. What it looked like before and how they want it to look in the future. Two of the SORAK organisers, Fery and Eman, told me how just hours after the quake happened, a group of friends, militants from the PRD and the LMND student movement met to plan a rapid response.

At first there were 20 of them, but they soon built up to about 150. As well as directly helping to get the injured to hospital, they set up soup kitchens, helped distribute food and began looking for tents. At that stage there was literally no help from the emergency services in these outlying villages of the Bantul district. Some soldiers and policemen living locally were even given orders not to help, but to report to barracks.

SORAK soon had 17 permanent camps set up in these villages, with a central command post in the grounds of the Arts Institute, itself largely destroyed by the quake. They worked with the communities, traditional organisations, for youth, for housewives, and so on.

These were not at all political, but they had now become much more active and were playing an important part in the communities’ own relief efforts. .There is a spontaneous reaction to the slowness of the government’s action. We try to encourage them to move from a purely moral reaction, to a more political one, Fery and Eman explained.

We try to help them understand how everything that happens, or doesn’t happen, has its roots in a whole set of government policies and the system behind that. It’s a slow process. But they are building up their confidence and their ability to struggle. Another local PRD organiser added, we’re not trying to turn these people into socialists overnight. But we are trying to get them to think and act more critically.

When I returned to Yogyakarta two months later, the problems facing the earthquake victims had changed little. In some respects they were worse. Despite the protests, several thousand strong, that SORAK had helped them to organise outside the Governor’s palace, they had still received no reconstruction aid. The figures just announced by central government meant that if and when it did come, these grants would amount not to 3000 dollars, but just under 500 dollars for every home destroyed, or possibly 1,500 for just a quarter of those houses.

The attention of the international media had also shifted. And so the international relief agencies, for what they were worth, had pulled out. The only ones that remained were the Cubans, whose two field hospitals and 135-strong medical team, in the Klaten region, continued to see up to a thousand patients a day for free. As had happened in Kashmir before, for the local population the Cubans had proved to be the stars of the international relief effort, and they’d asked them to stay on for another six months.

And there was a hope that some lasting political lessons had been learnt. The local PRD militants, and other involved in SORAK, were preparing a local launch for the new broad left party, PAPERNAS. And they were aiming to make the bedrock of the new party those communities like Glondong, which had borne the brunt of both the natural disaster, and its unnatural aftermath.