Tomi Soetjipto, Jakarta – Indonesia, criticised for slow reconstruction in tsunami-hit areas, has set up a special trust fund to speed rebuilding as the disaster's anniversary approaches, the agency in charge of rebuilding said on Friday.
The U.N's chief emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, recently expressed concern over the slow pace of reconstruction in Aceh province due to what he called lack of coordination between Jakarta and the donors.
Heru Prasetyo, a director at the Aceh and Nias Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency (BRR), said the scheme would cut red tape in disbursing money for projects in tsunami-hit areas, especially in Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra island.
Around 170,000 people were killed or are missing and feared dead in Aceh province and surrounding areas after a 9.15 magnitude earthquake, the strongest in four decades, unleashed the most devastating tsunami on record on Dec. 26.
Aceh suffered almost all the damage from that disaster, but it struck Nias island off Sumatra as well and Nias was hit hard again by an earthquake three months later.
"We are trying to short cut the process between sources of funds to the implementation on the field without sacrificing accountability and transparency," Prasetyo, who heads donor and international relations at the BRR, told reporters.
The funds are managed by local and international commercial banks, including HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Bank Niaga, said Amin Subekti, BRR Fund Management Director.
He insisted the funds would be managed in the most transparent way to avoid any misuse or corruption. "We will be making public reports every semester and the public would know which donors had given the money and where the money had gone," Subekti said.
Out of $7.1 billion pledged by donor countries and the international community to rebuild Indonesia's tsunami-hit areas, $3.6 billion had already been designated for immediate projects, Prasetyo said.
One major factor that slowed reconstruction was the channelling of some of the money to the country's state budget, requiring a long and bureaucratic process for disbursement. "The paradigm business as usual is still being used... we had really expected that this could have been done in an emergency manner," Prasetyo added.
The quake and tsunami killed or left missing more than 232,000 people across a dozen Indian Ocean nations. In Aceh it effectively destroyed much basic infrastructure in tsunami-hit areas. Up to 120,000 houses were wrecked and hundreds of kilometres of roads were ruined.
Around 17,000 houses have so far been completed and the agency was aiming to build 30,000 by the end of the year, Prasetyo said. "But as long as people live in barracks, even just one person, then there will always be a perception that the BRR is being slow," Prasetyo added.