Agency renews vow to speed up Aceh recovery

Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency for Aceh and Nias (BRR) reiterated its promise on Tuesday to speed up reconstruction work in tsunami-affected areas.

The statement came during a biannual meeting of the agency with non-governmental agency grouping the Coordination Forum for Aceh and Nias (CFAN) to discuss the recovery process in the two disaster areas.

"The meeting concluded that BRR has made rapid progress, but we also agreed that the agency needed to (further) speed up its mission," BRR head Kuntoro Mangkusubroto told said after the meeting in Jakarta.

The BRR, which was set up in April, has completed the reconstruction of some 10,000 houses and was completing the building of 22,000 more homes, Kuntoro said.

"This is more than a half of the total number of houses constructed by (state developer) Perumnas across the country in one year," he said.

The BRR aims to have cleared tsunami debris in some 90 percent of fishing ponds and rice fields across Aceh by the end of 2005 in order to allow farmers to resume working.

World Bank country director Andrew Steer admitted that in the initial stages, the reconstruction process in Aceh and Nias was slow because Indonesia chose to set up a special agency to deal with the reconstruction process and to implement bottom-up, community-based policies.

"These two things have made the reconstruction process slow in the initial stages," Steer said.

However, he said the BRR had actively sped up the process to make it more effective.

United Nations resident coordinator in Jakarta Bo Asplund said the BRR had done a good job.

Kuntoro said there had been no substantial problems faced by the agency during the reconstruction process.

The BRR earlier said that the slow progress was partly due to the delays caused by bureaucracy. Another problem was a lack of coordination among donors, ministries and other government agencies.

Earlier Acehnese students staged a protest, demanding the government dissolve the BRR since it had failed to fulfill tsunami victims' expectations, with many still living in makeshift tents and eating only instant noodles ahead of the fasting month of Ramadhan.

Over 500,000 people lost their homes due to the Dec. 26 tsunami, while some 130,000 others were killed. The disaster also destroyed much of Aceh's infrastructure, particularly in Banda Aceh, and Nias.

The BRR plans to build some 70,000 houses, and repair or rebuild roads, bridges, harbors, schools and public health posts there.