God's Punishment

By Bill Nicol

This is a story of inspired leadership in response to the world's greatest recorded natural disaster, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Centred on Aceh, Indonesia's hard-hit western province, “God's Punishment” tells of the global leadership that responded to this tragedy, military leadership that brought peace to a land in conflict, national leadership that led the great humanitarian response and individual leadership that laid the foundations for recovery despite dark opposing forces. This is the first of six books in “Tsunami Chronicles: Adventures in Disaster Management”. It begins an epic journey into the dangerous and difficult world of emergency response. A practical study, “God’s Punishment” demonstrates the power of positive political leadership in delivering breakthrough results when confronting man-made and natural disasters. The lessons are as relevant today with global warming and climate change as they were when the tsunami struck.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483503028

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Series Foreword:

A LEFT LITTLE TOE

A MEN’S REST ROOM may seem a strange place to begin a book on one of the world’s great disaster recovery programs. But that is where this series began. It is fitting that it did so, a symbolic reference point for the story to follow.

It was March 2005. I was in Jakarta with Dr Kuntoro Mangkusubroto. He would shortly lead Indonesia’s response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami. This had devastated Indonesia's westernmost province, Aceh, two months earlier.

Dr Kuntoro and I had been meeting with several others at the Four Seasons Hotel. We were planning the Indonesian Government’s response and had taken a short pit stop.

Before leaving the rest room, Dr Kuntoro turned to me and said: We must write a book on what we are doing. It is important. It was. But the we meant you. I was his handmaiden. To me fell the grunt work.

So began what you are about to read, the story of the world’s greatest recorded natural disaster that also became one of the world’s most successful recovery efforts. The outcomes were magnificent, the leadership and management dauntingly impressive, the many contributions from players large and small for the most part exemplary, even extraordinary.

Nothing about the story I will tell should detract from this, not even the mindless mistakes, searing stupidity, competitive nastiness, confounding confusion, classic corruption, bureaucratic bungling, political bullying and pathetic pettiness that beset the recovery program. If anything, the many sideshows enhanced rather than detracted from the overall achievements. They were the inevitable grit and gruel of sullied human endeavor with which one must contend on the path to success. Each nefarious element played its part in the unfolding story. Each deserves its place in the sun as a counterpoint that helps the achievements stand out more sharply than they otherwise would.

The tsunami recovery program in Indonesia took over four years to complete. This book would take close on another four to write.

I have three interests in writing it. One is to fulfill the commitment I gave to Dr Kuntoro that day in the men’s rest room at Jakarta’s Four Seasons Hotel. Another is to give a more genuine idea of what happens in disaster recovery, a flavor of events beyond the whitewash of official reports. The final one is to make sense of everything for my own sake, to record and analyze what I saw and did if only to see if it was worthwhile.

Writing a story like this is not easy when you are as close to it as I was. I was centre stage as senior adviser to the Indonesian Government for the entire tsunami recovery. Such was my position that I was often introduced to people as Dr Kuntoro’s right-hand man. This did not sit well with me, however, and I would often correct those who used the phrase by saying I was really more like his left little toe—a toe frequently stubbed, often bruised and occasionally broken. Injury, perhaps, was to be expected, as there were times I was called on to be Dr Kuntoro’s minder, mender and muscle when things got a little tough or knees a bit wobbly. Such roles are not a pathway to popularity but do bring you close to the action; and I was as close as anyone could get. This gave me unique insights into the political and operational dynamics of disaster recovery and a level of accidental expertise I did not expect and I suspect few could match.

My partnership with Dr Kuntoro had its ups and downs but nonetheless formed bedrock upon which the recovery program was built. Dr Kuntoro led from the front. I followed behind taking care of business. Together, we delivered some terrific results in seriously challenging circumstances.

The author with Dr Kuntoro Mangkusubroto during one of our many international visits, this one to Canberra

The recovery program was in all respects a team effort and one much wider than Dr Kuntoro and myself. So great was the scale and complexity of the task that no single nation could manage the job on its own. It was with some considerable gratitude, therefore, that Indonesia publicly greeted the generous international support it received although, in the beginning, and behind the scenes, Jakarta hard-heads objected to foreign intrusions on Indonesian sovereign territory, worried about a possible influx of military and political support for the Aceh rebel movement, GAM, and feared what military misdeeds international critics might find in Aceh to tongue-lash Jakarta—phobias that all proved misplaced.

Given the dismal history of many other post-disaster reconstruction programs and Indonesia’s reputation for broken bureaucracy and rampant corruption, those of us closely involved worried about the great potential for failure. The odds against success were worryingly high. But, against those odds, Indonesia’s post-tsunami reconstruction program did succeed. What is more, it did so fabulously.

The catch phrase of the reconstruction was to build back better—one I worried about because of the high performance bar it set. But, thankfully, for the most part we did leave things better than they were before the tsunami, and certainly better than when we arrived to clean up after it.

The key figures were impressive. The reconstruction program met or exceeded almost every target by building over 140,000 new houses, almost 4,000 kilometers of road, around 270 bridges, 23 seaports, 13 airports and runways, just short of 2,000 new school facilities, over 1,100 new health facilities and almost 1,000 government buildings. And it did all this in only four short years. Anyone who thinks this was easy is either ignorant or stupid. No turnkey solutions were available. Nothing just fell off the back of a truck. Everything came as a result of blisteringly hard work by some of the most energetic and dedicated people it has been my pleasure to work with.

As impressive as the various figures are, however, they still only tell part of the story. It is when you look beyond the raw numbers to the outcomes that you begin to see how well the program delivered on its promise to build back better.

Take the housing program, the single most important political success measure. We built more than mere houses. We also empowered women as property holders. Before the tsunami the property rights of women and orphans, especially in Aceh, were insecure. Wives were dispossessed when their husbands died. Inheritance passed to the husband’s family. We changed that by giving women joint property title with their husbands. We also extended property ownership to renters and squatters thereby creating a new propertied class with a chance to break free from the poverty cycle.

In other areas, the rehabilitated rice fields were producing more than they did before the tsunami and fishing communities were hauling record catches. The new roads and ports we built enabled higher coffee exports. The new schools were better equipped and the teachers better trained, lifting the quality of education. Access to primary health care jumped from one of the worst to one of the best in Indonesia, although sustaining this may be a problem when recurring operating costs bite into local government budgets.

Along the way, we also managed to contain the losses from corruption. While the losses can never be measured with accuracy, the money that trickled away due to corruption must have been relatively small because we could never have delivered such clear, measurable outputs if it were otherwise. I have seen some guesstimates that put the losses from corruption at no more than 5% of the total spend. This is still sizeable given almost US$7 billion flowed through the program but relatively minor when compared with some other disaster contexts where as much as 95% of the available funds disappeared down the corruption plughole or were withdrawn because of it.

Working up close to the action, I smelt and suspected several cases of individual corruption but at no stage did I witness systemic corruption putting its ugly tentacles deep into the program. That it did not was helped in part by the great contributions of the world community. The large number of international contributors spread the load of financial accountability and program responsiveness.

We in the government reconstruction agency needed every bit of help we could get. Much was at stake, not least of all the shaky cease-fire that brought the armed conflict in Aceh to a halt after three decades of violence. Had the reconstruction program failed, so too the peace process may well too have failed. That the program succeeded provided a cornerstone for sustaining the Helsinki peace agreement that was to follow late in 2005.

This was perhaps the finest deliverable of all. Working up close beside him, I am in no doubt that Dr Kuntoro Mangkusubroto’s leadership contributed mightily to the breathing space peace needed to take hold in Aceh. While Dr Kuntoro was never responsible for consolidating the peace initiatives himself, working actively behind the scenes he did more than anyone to rebuild trust while maintaining the slender fabric of hope between the Acehnese and Jakarta political elites upon which peace depended.

Nothing about Aceh’s recovery was straightforward. A disaster response like ours does not run smoothly let alone in a straight line or effortless sequence. Neither does the larger story I am about to tell. There was no obvious chronological pathway, no discrete series of events easily linked and explained. Everything overlapped and intertwined. Making sense of it was not easy. I did not set out to write a long account let alone spend almost four years on the labor. It just happened that way. Blocked in finding an appropriate structure, I chose instead to write a series of independent essays on various aspects. I wrote hundreds. Some were short, others long. When I brought them together, the result surprised and satisfied. The material shaped itself into six