Japan helps Indonesia restore tsunami-damaged Aceh land files

Japan helps Indonesia restore tsunami-damaged Aceh land files

The Indonesian government, with assistance from Tokyo, began on Wednesday the final process in the painstaking restoration of thousands of land title documents damaged when the tsunami hit Aceh province in December.

Thousands of documents stored at the land registry office in the provincial capital Banda Aceh were damaged when the tsunami and ensuing flooding hit the province on Dec. 26.

Their restoration "has become possible only with the unique technology and know-how developed in Japan for historical document conservation," the Japanese embassy said in a press release.

Japan provided the technical expertise as well as the necessary equipment worth US$146 million for the task.

The start of the final process of restoration was marked by a ceremony here where the heads of the National Archives and the Land Registry Office and Japanese ambassador Yutaka Iimura pressed the button to activate a freeze dry vacuum chamber used in the process.

In January, a Japanese expert started working with Indonesian partners to save 6,565 land document files, corresponding to 42,966 land titles, damaged at the Banda Aceh land registry office.

The documents were first sterilized and then stabilized in a freezer to protect them from further damage.

On Wednesday, the documents began to be dried in the freeze dry vacuum chamber, before being digitally recorded to build up map databases of land titles.

Aceh province and Nias island were the hardest hit by the tsunami that killed more than 270,000 people on the rim of the Indian Ocean. -- AFP