(Tsunami Aid) - Rampant Corruption in Aceh

[rooboy]

I just got this message from an email bulletin courtesy of crikey.com.au which is a leading whistleblower website in Australia:

Troy McLure, an expat Australian in Jakarta, writes:

My colleague's wife is from Aceh and she lost both her parents and some siblings and the family lost everything. They transferred some money to a friend's bank account and they were able to fly out of there to Jakarta last night (on the national airline which is gouging with 200% fare increases).

The stories of corruption are horrifying yet the Australian media is not reporting on this? I only saw Ray Martin's jingoistic intros which make us all feel good to be Australian while we ignore abuse. John Howard is a winner from this. The Indonesian government is a winner. The economy in general is a winner. Only the poor people in Aceh who lost everything are losers.

That's an unfair distribution of loss and suffering - even people's land is being taken away from them now because they can't prove that they can own it - but someone else with a few hundred bucks can bribe a government official to create new land title documents, because the government land office was swept away too. That's the sort of thing that is rampant right now.

[nascarblue]

1. Check out Democracynow.org for yesterdays webcast.

They have an awesome report on this. They've done quite a few on Aceh the last few years.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/04/160259

[rooboy]

2. Damn... the web stream was down yesterday so I missed the show.

I'll download it now and have a listen. Thanks.