H. Drake, Honolulu, Hawaii – This Sunday May 29, 2011, marks the fifth anniversary of the eruption of the Lapindo mudflow. While recent reports by the BPLS – the agency charged by the president to handle the disaster – indicate significant reductions in the daily amount of mud output, the area is far from safe.

In addition to the mudflow, land subsidence and toxic gases continue to dramatically impact residents' health, homes and livelihoods. As the embankment walls continue to regularly fail, as mud continues to contaminate local water and irrigation systems and as local infrastructure and roads collapse, the scene is far from improving. More than a mere mud volcano, the Lapindo mudflow represents an event with a long, complex history. What follows is a list of one researcher's greatest hits.

The trigger debate: Who can forget the debates over what triggered the mudflow? According to a consensus of Indonesian and international experts, drilling at a gas exploration mine operated by Lapindo Brantas caused the mudflow.

Yet, instead of following overwhelming evidence and analysis, various interested parties transformed a scientific dispute into a political spectacle by circulating disinformation through a range of questionable sources.

The perpetrator-less crime: The proliferation of erroneous and incomplete information precludes both any possible satisfactory resolution of the trigger debate and the establishment of culpability.

A House of Representatives taskforce formally absolved Lapindo Brantas of any wrongdoing in causing the mudflow, but, in a surreal turn, it lost several pages of its speech right before publicly delivering its formal recommendations, leaving most of its findings off the record.

Wrong priorities: Thus far, mudflow response policies have prioritized the minimization of political and financial impacts over the delivery of assistance.

The slow and inconsistent delivery of assistance that has fractured and disempowered communities and coalitions of victims attests to these failed priorities.

Other than ornamental and oblique statements to the media, the government has displayed no commitment to either pressure Lapindo Brantas to take responsibility or take meaningful control of the relief effort.

How much is your hardship worth? Instead of delivering a formal compensation scheme, Lapindo Brantas and the BPLS devised a sale-purchase program to deliver assistance in the form of land purchases. Since most of the land in the area is either submerged under mud or uninhabitable, this seems like a great idea – money for useless property.

The problems, however, are too many to note. The major ones are: What about victims who don't own land, job losses, harvest losses, etc.? If you don't possess a national certificate proving ownership, how do you measure and prove ownership if the land is submerged?

How do you prove ownership of land without being exploited by a flood of middlemen – formal and informal officials and surveyors – who have profited by false measurements and the misclassification of land?

Have your subsidiary talk to mine: No business, institution or government office is truly powerful until it has its own subsidiary company. Lapindo Brantas – itself a subsidiary of the Bakrie Group – established subsidiary Minarak Lapindo Jaya to administer the delivery of the sale-purchase payments.

The central government has the BPLS to manage the disaster relief effort. Although currently the BPLS is receiving funding from the national budget, Lapindo Brantas funded it before.

This reminds me of a joke: what happens when one subsidiary funds another subsidiary that funds another subsidiary? You get muddy politics.

Muddy politics: While a lack of transparency characterizes the participation and operations of a range of public and private workers and officials in the area, most frustrating is the lack of transparency in the relationship between Lapindo Brantas and the government.

Despite comments by representatives on both sides, the harmony of their actions suggests cooperation. While it is common for nations inspired by neoliberal economic ideologies to blur the lines between corporations and governments, it is irresponsible to do this in a political environment not yet capable of protecting the rights and interests of the ordinary masses.

It's never good to be a victim, but this is ridiculous: The best-case assistance scenario for the average displaced family is qualifying for the sale-purchase payment and receiving the first 20 percent of the total value; the final 80 percent has yet to be delivered (it's about three years late now).

For those opting to relocate to Kahuripan Nirwana Village, a Bakrie-owned property development made available for victims, in addition to outstanding payments, it took over a year for most victims to receive water and electricity in their homes, and few have received the promised titles to these new homes.

Then there are the victims in places like Besuki and Mindi, who live just outside the designated area to be eligible for the sale-purchase plan. Many have neighbors just across the street whose homes happened to fall in the designated area.

On both sides of the street there are the same crumbling houses and same gaseous air, and no clear rationale for the establishment of this "impact zone" has been delivered. Let me make this clear: this may look like an arbitrary bureaucratic irregularity, but this exclusion (this policy that excludes) endangers the lives of those who have no options.

A sickening reality: Let us not forget the submerged communities, the 50,000 displaced residents, the 13 deaths caused by an explosion from an underground gas pipeline and the rapid spread of illness, including favorites such as malnutrition, burns, skin infections, diarrhea, typhoid fever, respiratory illnesses and nerve damage.

We cannot possibly imagine living in this environment, facing both geological threats and human predators who arrive with official credentials. Five years. We cannot imagine.

[The writer is studying the Lapindo mudflow on a Fulbright fellowship. He is a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Hawaii, where he studies environmental criticism and cultural production.]