No national disaster?

After continuous day by day reporting from The Jakarta Post on the floods disaster, the editorial of the Feb. 4 edition stands out in retrospect as a conspicuous highlight. The title read: Lessons from the deluge.

I believe that many people failed to sense the magnitude of the event when it was designated as a deluge. Those who are interested will recall the Biblical story of the great flood in Noah's time. To be sure, not every event involving extreme misfortune is called a deluge. More common descriptions are calamity and disaster. So I think that the word used in the editorial aptly befits the magnitude of the misfortune, the sorrow and the sufferings of the poor people.

So much for the assessment of the terrible event branded as a deluge that appeared in the Post's editorial, which must be appreciated for the depth of concern and care given by the daily to the terrible lot of the victims, including babies, children and the aged.

Now, the floods have revealed Jakarta, the nation's capital, at its worst, highlighted by the release of a dramatic report on Feb. 5 by the State Minister/Chief of the National Planning Agency, which states that 15 trillion rupiah are needed over a period of 10 years to solve the flooding problem in Jakarta and surrounds -- suddenly the flooding problem has turned into a political football.

The Post of Feb. 5 carried a frontpage article headlined: Recent floods no national disaster. A quote in the report said: "There is no need to declare it a national disaster."

When day by day TV reports eloquently depicted the dreadful sorrow and sufferings of the victims, displaying the spectacles of submerged and washed away homes and of desperate human efforts to seek shelter and survival, then it's regrettable that some politicians chose to play down the magnitude of the misfortune as "just a common disaster."

From the political perspective, it may be understandable for political motives to play a role in disapproving of the idea of declaring the floods in Jakarta a national disaster, perhaps caused by the envisaged appropriation of 15 trillion rupiah over 10 years for Jakarta alone, if it happens at all.

S. SUHAEDI

Jakarta