Hangga Brata, Dessy Sagita & Nurfika Osman, Solo, Central Java – Despite several deadly incidents during the distribution of Ramadan donations in recent years, charity programs continued to be held by individuals and organizations in various regions.
On Sunday morning, thousands of people packed the Kota Barat field in Solo, Central Java, to receive free food packages. At least 11 people, including elderly and pregnant women, fainted in the crush.
"I couldn't stand anymore. I was in the middle and they pushed me from the back and I could not breathe," said Sarjiyem, 63. Medical personnel were in place, and she was immediately evacuated and given an oxygen mask to assist with breathing.
The crowd came to the area to exchange coupons for the packages, each worth Rp 75,000 ($8.80). Police had secured the area but were badly outnumbered and could not keep the situation under control.
"In the middle of crowd, some people fell down. Most were woman and children. There was a pregnant woman, but someone rescued her," said Wardinem, who also struggled to get out of the crowd while carrying her 8-year-old daughter.
A Red Cross (PMI) official confirmed two pregnant women were taken to the association's medical vehicle for assistance.
The event was organized by more than 60 organizations in the city that collected around Rp 1 billion to provide the packages for 12,000 people in stages. Sunday's distribution was the seventh during this Ramadan.
Earlier on Saturday, a Medan mosque's distribution of rice, cooking oil, wheat and Rp 50,000 bills also turned chaotic, prompting the police to stop the event after a participants fainted in the middle of the crowd. The event resumed once law enforcement regained control of the situation, television station Q TV reported.
The phenomenon that small gift packages could attract such a huge crowd was not solely a poverty issue, said Henny Warsilah, a sociology expert from the Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI).
She said it was because the would-be recipients who were not necessarily poor were willing to queue for hours for what amounted to a few rupiah. "It goes beyond poverty. It has become cultural. Begging is a habit now. It's even a profession for some people," she said.
Henny said Indonesia's "begging culture" has worsened in the past five years, and that a growing number of beggars were not even poor. She said many wealthy people now opted to coordinate their own charity distribution because of trust issues.
"Our alms collecting body has not reached the whole country, and there has been no transparent financial report on how the donations were distributed. Maybe this is partly the reason why people decided to give away their money directly," she said.
"We have certainly had enough people trampled to death while queuing for two kilograms of rice and a few thousand rupiah that it should never happen again," she added.
Ichwan Sam, the secretary general of Indonesia's Ulema Council (MUI), said the chaos could be avoided if the givers could identify the asnaf [eligible recipients] and divide them into smaller groups.
"The asnaf could be divided into several groups and each group was given the alms on different days," he said. "This is a religious activity, and we need to perform it in a good way without any chaos."
In the worst incident in recent years, 21 people died as they were trampled trying to get gifts distributed at the home of a philanthropist in Pasuruan, East Java, in September 2008.