John Aglionby – The bird flu ravaging Asia has thrown up many surprises in the last week and many experts are expecting more in the next few days. Perhaps the hardest to explain is that of the contrasting fortunes of the governments in Bangkok and Jakarta, which both withheld information for months about the extent and duration of the crisis.
One – Thailand – is coming under withering public criticism while the other, Indonesia, appears to be escaping virtually scot free.
Indonesia announced today that it would, after days of saying it would not, comply with international recommendations and cull all birds on farms infected with bird flu in order to stamp out the disease.
How many birds this will involve remains to be seen, but an estimated 400 farms across the archipelago are thought to have been infected, some since last August. Almost five million birds have already succumbed to the disease.
When making the announcement, the country's senior social welfare minister, Jusuf Kalla, did not say whether fowl on neighbouring farms would also be culled or whether transport restrictions would be imposed on the movement of birds in infected areas.
The government's commitment to eradicating the virus remains questionable after the agriculture minister, Bungaran Saragih, came out with a classic piece of unfathomable Indonesian government logic. He told a parliamentary hearing today that the government had not announced the presence of bird flu earlier than a few days ago because "we did not want to cause unnecessary losses through a hasty decision".
The fact that birds had been dying by the million for months and people had started falling ill in Vietnam and Thailand seemed immaterial.
The ostrich-like attitude is now likely to haunt ministers, because they have now had to set aside 13.9 million Pounds to cull chickens and vaccinate healthy ones while the chamber of commerce estimates the bird flu crisis could cost the country some 500 million Pounds.
Amazingly, the government appears to be getting away with the cover-up, even though thousands of people have lost their livelihoods and will struggle for months to make ends meet. According to Mr Bungaran, it will take six months to completely cleanse the country of the disease.
Luck has certainly played a part, as far as the Indonesian government is concerned. No humans have become infected, let alone died, or at least no such cases have been reported so far. Moreover the World Health Organisation representatives in Jakarta have been much less aggressive and vocal than their counterparts in Thailand, thus alleviating pressure on ministers either to act with more rapidity or explain their five months of silence.
Demonstrations usually occur for the mildest of reasons in Indonesia but no one has taken to the streets over bird flu. Similarly, there has been little enthusiasm in the media to call the government to account for its lack of action. And even the normally vocal consumer groups are keeping their powder inexplicably dry.
One consumer activist said she could not get worked up about bird flu. "It's only a few chickens," she said. "We've got bigger battles to fight." This does make some sense. There are only 1.3 billion chickens in Indonesia – not a huge number for a population of 215 million – and the vast majority are bred for internal consumption. This means that, unlike in Thailand, where the export industry alone is worth some 1 billion Pounds a year, there will not be much noticeable economic disruption.
Perhaps this explains why, with the general election only nine weeks away, no one is even attempting to garner political capital out of the crisis. This contrasts very sharply with Thailand, where the opposition Democrats – who currently do not have a chance of unseating the prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, at next year's polls – are planning no confidence motions against the premier, the agriculture minister and his deputy.
The fact that back in Jakarta, opposition parties are hoping to become bedfellows with President Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) perhaps goes some way to explaining the silence. A PDIP coalition is still the most likely result of the election and no one wants to go out on a limb over what is still a relatively minor issue and risk exclusion from a future government.
Incompetence in previous crises has also helped shape public expectations. One meat seller in a south Jakarta market said yesterday that she was not at all surprised by what has happened. "Our government does this all the time," she said. "It would have been surprising if they had acted swiftly and decisively."