Black and blue
Outrageous is one word to describe a beating Indonesian soldiers meted out to anticorruption activist Farid Faqih in Banda Aceh, an outspoken critic of the military, who now faces charges of stealing donated goods from the Iskandar Muda Airport. Another might be insolence, yet another sheer stupidity. A preliminary investigation into the coordinator of Government Watch should have immediately revealed his true intentions when taking two truckloads of aid from the airbase, to be sent, he said, to a warehouse and out of the rain.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono rightly slammed Wednesday's beating, which directly contradicted what he has said about the importance of law enforcement; that people, including soldiers, should not take the law into their own hands.
These "people" included elements of security forces, which we rely on so much these days to help with the emergency relief work in the tsunami-hit provinces and the reconstruction that follows.
Their work has led to much praise, a luxury for the Indonesian Military (TNI), which has yet to shed its image of a national asset that views itself as so important that it has often seemed beyond the law.
So far we have reports of investigations into the activist beginning almost instantly after Farid was beaten and declared a suspect. We have yet to hear about any investigations into the soldiers.
The actions of the soldiers who had waited for two days to distribute the aid was "unavoidable", the air base commander was quoted as saying. Stealing aid from refugees who have lost everything may indeed be an unpardoned crime but the "unavoidable" beating only reflected the one language understood most by our supposedly reformed soldiers: Violence. To them, the language of the law is still likely an alien tongue.
Such old habits of the past are the last thing needed in this time of distress for hundreds of thousands of survivors, while we have not even solved adequate coordination in the distribution of aid to different areas.
"Chaotic" was the blunt verdict of the United Nations report issued Thursday about how aid was being distributed on the west coast of Aceh. The UN report by an inter-agency team including the Indonesian government, the U.S. military and UN agencies, cited "the continued absence of a systematic response to the multiple needs of the population". Lack of coordination of health services and fragmented information were also cited.
Thankfully, among the good news, the report also said that food was reaching "most large population groups".
Coordination is just one worry. Monitoring of the aid including all that donated cash is another. Already the Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Alwi Shihab is baffled about the balance sheet of public donations drawn up by his own office. The balance sheet, he told lawmakers on Thursday, "shows that a large amount of money was paid out to help organize the recent Infrastructure Summit. I am baffled as to what this summit had to do with the tsunami."
Although not often voiced amid the global empathy following the Dec. 26 disaster, the international spotlight is now on whether Indonesia can overcome its track record of corruption in managing the distribution of at least US$3 billion in aid.
It means one question: With so much lost, can Indonesians turn over a new leaf, at least for the sake of those who survived? Can we not steal their money? Can we not revert to old tricks and engage in "marking up" needs, as Farid reportedly accused officials of? And can we investigate and prosecute alleged thieves and not beat them up before any trial? The early signs are that many among us cannot give up our very old habits -- as is evident from the pictures of Farid Faqih's bloated face.