The main bug in my bear at the moment is that the UN's security wonks decided to order everyone out of their homes and offices a few days ago in reaction to Sunday's 5.6 magnitude quake. It was a solid hit, almost knocked me out of bed, but was over before you could get your act together.
Seems they want us to live in and work in tents for... well forever I suppose.
Which would be okay maybe if there was some rational reason for it and if we'd sugested to the powers that be that maybe the ACHENESE should follow suit. I mean, if we're so damn concerned about them shouldn't we let them know as well? Aside from the absurdity of building houses for internally displaced people to move into, even as we move out of million dollar palaces, has anyone considered how the news is going to be greeted? Let me tell you:
Q "Mr. Humanitarian Aid Person, why are you living in the mud and not in your $6,000/month home with a swimming pool?"
A: Because, little fellow, we are worried about earthquakes and want to protect our staff.
Q: So, there is going to be another earthquake and tsunami?
A: I didn't say that, what I said is that we are protecting our staff.
Q: So should my family move outside also?
A: We are only advising that UN staff move out of their houses.
Q: So you do have information about a new earthquake but you don't want to tell me?
A: Again, there is no information about another earthquake.
Q: I don't believe you. You are lying to me just the same way the Indonesian government lies to me.
Seems like the TNI and police are back to their old games. Even the most reserved, desk-bound of foreigners here is slowly starting to glom to the reality of dealing with these jerks. The newspapers here are full of stories about contact between TNI and Free Aceh Movement, but thes emust be taken with the requisite grain of salt as the army is the chief reporting line for the info and it is still prohibited for local journos to even speak to GAM.
Down the coast access is increasingly restricted, dusk to dawn curfews are in effect in some areas and armed soldiers are now checking baggage of UN staffers boarding UN aircraft. Some of the agencies are now prohibiting their local and national staff from driving around without a foreigner present because of all the threats and shakedowns. Anyone whose been here knows this is a fact of life for folks in Aceh. More distrubing are the discovery of bodies trussed up and shot in the bakc of the head, and the roll clal of disappeared. This too is starting to happen again after severla months of relative quiet.
Anecdotally, as I returned from a meeting the other day my marked agency vehicle was pulled over by police at a motorcycle-registration check-point and our driver questioned. In addition to asking for numerous pieces of identification and vehicle registration, the officer repeatedly asked the driver where the organization's office is, who the head of the office is, and who is “responsible for the Indonesian staff." My sense, and that of the driver is that he was looking for a payoff. That is a routine event, a small matter, but I am quite surprised that he approached this with a foreign national in the car.
One other item of note is the heavy rotation of senior UN and I-NGO staff in coming weeks as we approach the six-month anniversary. The meeting centered around turning the IASC into a decision-making body. I asked how many heads of agencies will be around six weeks from now. The tally is as follows:
UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sumatra leaves after the Clinton visit and no replacement has been named. OCHA Head of Office leaves July 3; the job is posted. In addition, the heads of CARE, UNFPA, IOM, WHO and several others are all leaving by the end of June.
In addition, it has been noted that international staffing in most of the agencies are well below required levels. In OCHA’s case they are running at about 50 per cent capacity. The rest are between 60-80 per cent.
Explanations very but much comes down to the fact that there area finite number of qualified people prepared to commit to a place like Aceh for a year's minimum. We've fallen off the UN's hiring hit parade, its taking extra days for important phone calls to be returned, Dafur is blowing up again and Afghanistan is, well, Afghanistan. All very disappointing and inevitably going to impact the way we do things here.