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.