Aceh's tsunami recovery hits snags over relocation

Aceh's tsunami recovery hits snags over relocation

Koh Gui Qing, Reuters/Ujung Karang, Aceh

After a month scavenging planks from ruined villages in Indonesia's tsunami-hit Aceh province, former truck driver Muhari built a shack that he has turned into a coffee shop.

Business in the 4-square-metre (13-square-foot) shop by the beach has been brisk. Muhari said he earns about Rp 600,000 ($61) on weekdays and up to one million rupiah on weekends, an impressive sum by local standards.

Little wonder that he is unhappy with government plans to relocate him.

"I don't want to move because I don't know what to do in the new village," said the 53-year-old, who has lived all his life in the now flattened village of Ujung Karang in the city of Meulaboh.

Many thousands died in this west-coast city when giant waves smashed into the coast on Dec. 26, sweeping away houses, businesses, cars and roads.

But Muhari, like many survivors, is tired of government promises to help and is determined to rebuild his life.

"Do I just sit in my house? I need a job. I need money."

Jakarta plans to develop a tsunami memorial zone along Meulaboh's coastal area on Aceh's hard-hit west coast. The park, which will be as big as 18 football fields, will be touted as a tourist attraction and will include a museum.

Nobody will be allowed to live in the zone because it is deemed too dangerous if another tsunami were to hit. Current residents are to be resettled further inland.

"We will replace the land and housing of those who lived here, but we prohibit them to stay," west Aceh district head H. Nasruddin told Reuters, referring to survivors who lived in the area before the tsunami.

But experts say the relocation plan is a delicate issue that will get trickier as more people return to rebuild their lives.

"If the villagers don't want to move, the government would have to do something. But to forcibly remove them would not be wise," said Yang Razali Kassim, an Aceh expert with the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore.

In the past two months, more than 50 tents and wooden shacks have sprung up across Ujung Kalak, a destroyed seaside village, about 150 kilometers (93 miles) from the epicenter of the Dec. 26 earthquake that triggered the giant waves.

To assert land ownership, villagers have put up wooden sign boards with their names and the sizes of their claimed sites.

"More people are coming back to stay because this is home," said 47-year-old Assya'ry who has set up a beachside drink stall to cash in on the growing crowd. "All the houses here have to move but we want to stay because we want to resume our old life."

Some survivors are unhappy about being relocated as they may be moved as far as 70 km inland -- a sticking point for fishermen who make up almost half of Aceh's population.

Meanwhile, a landowner in Lapang, Meulaboh, is threatening to evict more than 1,400 survivors who took shelter in a camp after officials failed to relocate the families as promised three months after the tsunami.

Such brewing frustration among survivors could spell trouble.

"If the government cannot act fast enough, there may be a clash," Yang Razali from IDSS said, adding that relocation plans should not neglect survivors' need for jobs.

Under Jakarta's Aceh rehabilitation plan, key industries such as agriculture and fisheries will be restored to create jobs, while loans will be offered to encourage growth of small enterprises.

Reconstructed villages will house schools and mosques although the building of basic infrastructure such as roads and housing will be prioritized.

But on the ground, locals complained about the sluggish pace of recovery while officials said the rebuilding effort was still struggling with the arduous task of redistributing untitled land.

According to the World Bank, about 300,000 land parcels in Aceh were hit by the tsunami, of which less than 25 percent was titled before the disaster struck. Worse, most land documents were lost in the waves.

"Our people want to have houses quickly but the government is replacing titles very slowly," said T. Ahmad Dadek, an official in charge of 21 villages, or neighborhoods, in Johor Palawan in Meulaboh.

As NGOs are not allowed to rebuild houses on untitled land, Dadek has resorted to issuing temporary land titles to speed up the reconstruction effort. Under the system, land ownership is signed into confirmation by the claimed owner, a fellow villager, the village head and Dadek himself.

When the killer waves struck, Aceh -- already plagued by a decades-old conflict between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) rebels -- was the hardest-hit area among 13 Indian Ocean nations. Some 170,000 were left dead or missing in the province.

The U.N. has estimated that Jakarta would need at least two years to house the 500,000 Indonesians left homeless by the tsunami in either semi-permanent or permanent housing.