No national disaster?
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