This country has been swarmed with natural and transport disasters. An earthquake/tsumani seems to be a monthly occurrence for that poor island. And these transport disasters seem to occur every 2 weeks or so!
“Indonesia seems to be the most disaster-prone nation on earth. Whenever the word “Indonesia” appears on the list of headlines on the news, chances are that another enormous — and often unnecessary — tragedy has occurred on one of the islands of this sprawling archipelago.
Airplanes are disappearing or sliding off the runways, ferries are sinking or simply decomposing on the high seas, and trains crash or get derailed at average rate of one per week. Illegal garbage dumps bury desperate communities of scavengers under their stinking contents. Landslides are taking carton-like houses into the ravines; earthquakes and tidal waves are destroying coastal cities and villages. Forest fires from Sumatra are choking huge areas of Southeast Asia.
The scope of disasters is unprecedented, and it absurd to discount them simply as the nation’s bad luck, or to blame the wrath of the gods or nature. Corruption, incompetence and simple indifference by the ruling elites and government officials are mostly to blame. It is poverty, and a lack of public projects that kill hundreds of thousands of desperate Indonesian men, women and children.
Some of these disasters are man-made; almost all of them are preventable. With closer scrutiny, it becomes obvious that people die due to almost non-existent prevention, lack of education (Indonesia spends the third least amount on education as percentage of its GDP, after Equatorial Guinea and Ecuador) and a savage pro-market economic system which allows enrichment of very few at the expense of the majority — who live on under 2 dollars a day. Ugly conclusions can be drawn, which casts an unflattering light on the way the present-day Indonesian society functions. However, continuing to avoid exposure would doubtlessly lead to further loss of many precious lives.
Indonesia is profit-driven to the extreme. It is also one of the most corrupt nations on the face of the earth, and there seems to be no immediate profit to be made from implementing preventive measures. Dams and anti-tsunami walls are considered as public works almost everywhere else. It seems that the word “public” has almost disappeared from the lexicon of those who make decisions in Indonesia. Short-term profits for a particular group of individuals are given much higher priority than long-term gains for the entire nation. The moral collapse of the nation is reflected in the scale of values — corrupt, but rich, individuals command incomparably higher respect than those who are honest but poor.
Ferries are sinking not because of high winds and waves, but due to overcrowding and poor maintenance. More precisely, they are allowed to be overcrowded and badly maintained. Everything is for sale, even the safety of thousands of passengers. Companies care only about their profits, while government inspectors are mainly interested in bribes. The recent well-publicized sinking of a ferry, Senopati Nusantara, killed more than 400 people, but it was just one of hundreds of maritime disasters that occur in Indonesia each year. While there are no exact statistics available (for predictable reasons, the Indonesian government makes sure to avoid publishing comprehensive comparative data), some maritime routes lose three or more vessels a year.
On average, there is one deadly train accident every six days in Indonesia, many caused by the lack of gates at its approximately 8,000 crossings. By comparison, Malaysia suffered no fatal train accidents for the 13 years up to and including 2005 (the last year for which statistics are available).
Earthquakes alone do not kill people. Poor construction of houses and buildings are the main culprits, together with the lack of preventive measures and education. It is a well-known fact that Indonesia is prone to natural disasters; that it is located on the Pacific Ocean’s “ring of fire” of volcanoes and earthquakes. But the poor can count on no massive public housing projects (like those in neighboring Malaysia), which could withstand earthquakes. Almost every family is on its own; members have to design and build their own dwelling. Major earthquakes kill hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. At least 5,800 people died and 36,000 injured on May 27, 2006 during a 6.3-magnitute earthquake, which hit central Java near the historic city of Yogyakarta. Primitive infrastructure, inadequate medical facilities and corruption in distribution of aid are to blame for the unacceptably high number of casualties after each major tremor.
Indonesia is poor, but it is still in the position to protect some of its most vulnerable citizens. The main problem is that there is no political will. There is plenty of concrete and bricks to build dams and walls against tsunamis, and to reinforce the hills around towns that are in danger of being buried by landslides. One just has to look around Jakarta where dozens of unnecessary new shopping malls are growing in several locations, and where kitschy palaces of corrupt officials cover acres of land.
The unwillingness to deal with the problems is rooted mostly in corruption. Local companies and officials have developed a unique ability to make profits from everything, even from disasters and the suffering of millions of fellow citizens. In simple terms, corruption is stealing from the public. But when the overall toll has to be calculated in hundreds of thousands of lost human lives, it becomes mass murder.”
Partial snippets of Worldpress.org article @ http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/2637.cfm