Government scraps Aceh Authority Board plan
Rendi A. Witular and Eva C. Komandjaja, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The government has decided to drop its plan to set up a special authority for Aceh since the tsunami-stricken areas in the province already had functioning local governments, according to Vice President Jusuf Kalla.
"The government has discussed this and decided to scrap the plan," he told reporters on Friday.
"This kind of authority only exists in empty, underdeveloped areas, like Batam used to be. It was an empty island back then," Kalla said, referring to the Batam Authority, which governs the industrial island of Batam together with the local administration.
The plan to set up the Aceh Authority came at the suggestion of the House of Representatives during a meeting with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in the aftermath of the Dec. 26 tsunami disaster.
The authority was supposed to oversee the rehabilitation and reconstruction work in Aceh and would have been directly responsible to the President.
The plan also came as Susilo openly criticized the poor handling of emergency relief operations in Aceh, citing a lack of coordination, a criticism that raised speculation about a rift between Susilo and Kalla as the latter is also the chairman of the National Disaster Management and Refugee Coordination Board (Bakornas PBP), which oversees the relief work.
Presidential spokesman Andi Mallarangeng told the press earlier this week that the authority was expected to start functioning on March 26 as the government was still discussing the structure of the organization. Andi said that the members of the authority would include both formal and informal Acehnese leaders to help ensure that the reconstruction of Aceh would be in line with local values and culture.
According to Kalla, Aceh already had an administration and therefore it did not need a new authority to govern the province. It only needed an organizing body that would fit in with the existing rules.
"Therefore, it is not feasible for Aceh to be governed by such an authority," Kalla said.
He added that currently the government was still considering the best ways of rebuilding infrastructure in the province. The reconstruction effort would be need to maximize local resources in Aceh so that the country would not become overly dependent on foreign aid.
Nearly two months after the Indian Ocean tsunami ravaged many parts of oil-and-gas-rich Aceh province, the government said that the emergency in the affect areas was nearly over and that the government and foreign agencies working in the region had commenced the rehabilitation and reconstruction phase.
The government is now pushing to complete the construction of barracks for the more than 400,000 tsunami survivors.
Meanwhile, foreign volunteers and warships have started to withdraw from the area.
The USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier and the first naval vessel to arrive off the coast of Aceh after the Dec. 26 disaster, departed on Friday according to AFP.
Australia was also set to withdraw up to 1,000 of its troops from Aceh. Military contingents from Singapore and Malaysia had previously started to withdraw their troops and equipment from Aceh.
Meanwhile, workers cleaning up the debris left by the tsunami found 1,108 more bodies, increasing the confirmed death toll from the disaster to 112,279, Bakornas PBP said on Friday.