Hassan calls for more debt relief on visit to London

Hassan calls for more debt relief on visit to London

Peter Walker, Agence France-Presse/London

Indonesia's foreign minister Hassan Wirayuda, on a visit to
London, called on Monday for more debt relief for his tsunami-
devastated country to ensure the disaster did not derail other
national priorities.

Speaking after talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Chancellor of the Exchequer
Gordon Brown, Hassan stopped short of calling for Indonesia's
foreign debt to be canceled.

He warned, however, that more was needed than a current plan
to freeze debt payments on bilateral debts owed by countries
affected by the Dec. 26 catastrophe, which killed more than
100,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province alone.

Speaking during a joint press conference with Straw at the
Foreign Office in London, Hassan said his country sought "any
schemes that would allow us operating space".

"We need to focus on the reconstruction in Aceh, but we do not
want other programs to be affected," he said.

Asked whether he meant debt cancellation or rescheduling,
rather than just a moratorium, Wirayuda said his government had
been "very careful to talk about debt cancellations or debt
rescheduling, because in the past 30 to 35 years we have been
faithful payers of our debts".

Jakarta was asking the Paris Club of creditor nations "not
only to look at the problem that we are facing in Aceh, but to
look at the much larger picture, the situation faced by the newly
elected, democratically elected (Indonesian) government", he
said.

"While there is a need to focus on Aceh, we would like to see
that other national priorities and programs are not affected
negatively."

Hassan declined to give a specific figure for how much debt
relief his government sought.

But he added: "I simply want to quote the figure that as of
now, we allocate 50 percent of our budget for debt servicing. It
tells you a lot about the situation we are facing."

Hassan left Jakarta on Sunday for a visit to Britain, France,
Italy, and Germany to seek clarity on international offers of a
debt moratorium.

With an external debt of US$132 billion, Indonesia has said it
hopes debt relief will be proffered without conditions.

France said on Sunday that the Paris Club of creditor nations,
which meets on Wednesday in the French capital, had agreed on a
moratorium on repayments for countries hit by the tsunami that
killed at least 156,000 people in nearly a dozen nations.

Straw noted that while Britain had suffered 50 confirmed
fatalities in the disaster, with almost 400 more nationals
presumed dead, "our losses are dwarfed by those of Indonesia".

"The terrible events of Dec. 26 represent a natural disaster
on a scale which none of us has ever witnessed before, and we
pray will never witness again," he added.