'No helping hands, just spectators for blast victims'

Zakki Hakim, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

"People were like flies swarming around food," said Ino Simatupang, describing how most people did nothing to help the injured and dying victims, but only gawked around them in the immediate aftermath of last week's JW Marriott Hotel blast.

Ino, 48, vice president at communication company PT Pasifik Satelit Nusantara, arrived at the site minutes after he witnessed the blast through the window of his office building, located only a few hundred meters from the hotel.

He was on the phone when he heard the blast, and saw a 10- meter-high fireball mushroom in front of the hotel.

He rushed to the site to see two police officers who looked panicked themselves, and helpless to offer any assistance to the victims, let alone to evacuate them.

The stench of gunpowder, burning rubber and blood permeated the air. Ino soon felt rage, sadness and disbelief at seeing the devastation left by the bomb.

His attention soon turned to one severely burned victim who was crying out for help, but the crowd around the victim did nothing, only stared at the man's singed knee, noticing that he had lost a leg.

Ino wanted to help, but he did not know what to do until someone in the crowd said, "Talk to him to keep him alive."

So Ino talked to the man and found out that his name was Hidayat, and that he was a Silver Bird taxi driver who lived in Depok with his two children.

While he was talking to Hidayat, Ino noticed a foreigner was helping another man. He approached the foreigner and asked him to help Hidayat.

In a matter of minutes, the foreigner, Simon, joined Ino to help Hidayat, using some bandages he had somehow found.

The crowd, though, only watched anxiously and warned Ino that he might hurt Hidayat even more.

"It was an open wound, we thought we had to protect him immediately from infection," he said.

A couple of days later, he learned that Hidayat did not survive.

It was obvious that no one at the site knew anything about what to do in terms of basic first aid, he said, including himself. The crowd even debated on whether they should give the victims a sip of water. Nobody knew for sure, not even the paramedics that came later.

When the ambulances eventually came, the paramedics were unprepared and confused. One paramedic did not even know how to move an injured person onto a stretcher.

So Ino and several others put Hidayat onto the stretcher and carried him to the ambulance. Then they turned to help move three other victims into other ambulances that arrived later.

Ino also noticed while moving the victims that several other emergency personnel had arrived, but the firefighters, soldiers and police officers swarming the site only minded their own tasks.

The firefighters dealt with the fire, the police officers secured the scene and put up police lines, while the soldiers cordoned off the perimeter. He said it was a pity that none of them assisted the 149 injured victims.

The personnel were so busy with their own business, and there seemed to be no coordination among them.

"There should be a crisis management officer or something, who will take charge of the emergency services and the chaos and evacuate the victims properly," he said.

Ino said the city's residents should also be trained in first aid skills and urged institutions, such as the Indonesian Red Cross, to provide basic first aid training, considering that Jakarta was facing more and more bomb threats.

"It could be started by establishing community-based groups in our neighborhoods or offices," he said.

We can only imagine the anguish and pain suffered by the burn victims as they reached out to the circle of staring faces surrounding them -- to find not a single helping hand.