Inactivity survivors' new worst enemy

The road to Krueng Raya is paved with death and devastation - and no one in authority appears to care.

A week after an earthquake and tidal waves laid waste to Indonesia's remote Aceh province, bodies still rot into the earth and poison the water supply. Mountains of rubble - all that remains of communities wiped out in five minutes on Boxing Day - have yet to be cleared.

Emergency supplies, meanwhile, are stacked in a hangar at the military airfield in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, while the homeless go hungry and the sick beg for medicine. A strange air of inactivity pervades Aceh, in the far northwest of the Indonesian archipelago, near the epicentre of the earthquake.

After a catastrophe that killed at least 80,000 people in the province and created tens of thousands of refugees, you would expect volunteers and equipment to pour in from a country of 200 million people and a large Army and police force.

But in Krueng Raya, a once-pretty fishing village, locals have been left to excavate bodies from the ruins of their homes with the help of one mechanical digger.

"We need 10," says Jabar bin Yasim, the village head.

More than half the town's 7000 inhabitants lost their lives in the disaster, which flattened Krueng Raya. Survivors are living in three crowded refugee camps, existing on the meagre handouts.

"This is our daily ration," says Norkyalis bin Ibrahim, angrily shaking a blue plastic mug filled with rice. "I'm hungry. The children have no milk. We are short of clean water and medicines. We are using petrol to treat infected wounds."

Norkyalis lost his wife, son and mother. Everyone in Krueng Raya has a similar tale to tell.

Krueng Raya lies just 50km east of Banda Aceh, but the coast road is barely passable, blocked by chunks of concrete, mangled palm trees and telegraph poles. The bitumen is pock-marked by craters and, here and there, it has subsided as if smashed by a giant jackhammer.

Yesterday no efforts were being made to repair the highway, or to shift the towering heaps of debris that line it. Mass graves have been dug, but putrefying corpses - unclaimed and unidentifiable - still sprawl, like flotsam and jetsam, across the blanket of mud.

The coastal plains en route to Krueng Raya, where thousands of impoverished Acehnese built houses on cheap land, are a dismal sight. Nearly every home was destroyed by the twin forces of land and sea.

Outside one mosque, the bodies of the faithful lie entombed in the shattered cars and coaches that had transported them to prayer.

In Krueng Raya, Rasyib was searching for his 8-year-old grand-daughter, Tamara.

"I've already checked the refugee camps," he said. "I'm sure she's dead, but I can't find her body."

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited the ruined west coast yesterday, while in Krueng Raya, survivors shook plastic buckets at passersby, pleading for food or money.

At the military airfield in Banda Aceh, Captain Herwin admitted further-flung communities were yet to even receive aid.

"We have a transport problem," he said. "Not enough helicopters."

- INDEPENDENT