Peter Boyle
Jess Melvin, a 20-year-old student of Inonesian studies at Sydney University recently returned from a week in Aceh with the CARE Aceh aid workers, told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly that three months after the tsunami hundreds of thousands of people are still living in make-shift tents around local mosques. Aceh is still a landscape of "total destruction".
"People are still traumatised — not just from the tsunami which killed 200,000 people and made many more homeless and without a livelihood — but from the ongoing war against the Acehnese independence movement", Melvin said.
"Many people are reluctant to go to official and military patrolled relocation camps, which are far from their towns or villages. Most of the official aid can only be accessed there so CARE Aceh and other grassroots NGOs try to help those families survive on a box of instant noodles a week and a few biscuits."
She said that local Acehnese human rights campaigners say that the relocation camps are part of the Indonesian military's strategy in its war against the GAM (Free Aceh Movement) independence fighters and that most of the foreign aid is not getting to the victims of the tsunami.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, March 23, 2005.
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