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30th
May, 2005
DAVID
ADAMS
In the Bantul district, south of Yogyakarta, aid workers
have reported that as many as 90 per cent of homes and buildings
have been destroyed.
Families are sleeping out in the open - in streets, fields
and rice paddies - while hospitals have been overwhelmed by
the number of injured.
More than 5,000 people are now believed to have died after
the 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck in the Indian Ocean south
of the ancient Indonesian city of Yogyakarta on Saturday.
EAST
TIMOR IN CRISIS
While
authorities - including Australian troops - struggle
to restore order in East Timor, attention is already
turning to the humanitarian crisis created in the
wake of the violence which has rocked the fledging
nation for the past week.
Reports suggest that more than 50,000 people have
been displaced from their homes as a result of the
unrest in the East Timorese capital of Dili and are
now living in temporary camps.
World Vision Australia’s Paul Ronalds, who visited
East Timor a couple of weeks before the violence broke
out, says the conflict will only exacerbate the ongoing
problems the nation already faces.
“You’ve got widespread poverty to begin
with...you’ve got very low levels of infrastructure
and capacity...” he says. “I was surprised
at how little economic activity you had going on in
Dili before this. What little economic activity that
was going on has been really hindered by this - certainly
any fledgling tourism operations are going to be destroyed
by this sort of activity.
“This has definitely put East Timor’s
rehabilitation back a number of years and it’s
very sad because East Timor is probably one of the
poorest, if not the poorest, country in our region.”
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DAVID ADAMS
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The
United Nations have estimated some 20,000 more people were
injured and 200,000 have been left homeless after the quake
with 40 per cent of them children.
Australia announced it would be more than doubling its contribution
to the relief operation to $7.5 million. Foreign Minister
Alexander Downer said the nation would be sending more than
80 “disaster experts” to Yogyakarta, including
a 27 member medical team of surgeons, anaesthetists, operating
staff, disaster medicine specialists and logisticians.
The latter will take 12 tonnes of medical equipment to the
disaster zone.
Paul Ronalds, World Vision Australia’s director of policy
and programs, says the most immediate need in Indonesia is
medical assistance.
“In a situation like this you have various stages but
the most urgent thing at the moment is medical assistance,”
he says.
“As well as somewhere around 5,000 dead, you’ve
got many times that with fairly significant injuries so the
first thing you want to do, obviously, is save as many people
as you can. Indonesia, particularly that part of Java, would
have limited medical facilities at the best of times. They
certainly can’t cope with something of this magnitude...”
Ronalds says providing temporary shelter and safe water for
drinking would also be urgent needs.
“It’s starting to, I guess, allow people (to have)
the basic things of life. They might be small things like
cooking sets...They might have food but they might not be
able to cook it, so (it’s providing) small stoves and
that sort of thing.”
Ronalds says that coming in the wake of recent disasters such
as the tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004, and last year’s
earthquake in Kashmir, the latest disaster will stretch the
capacity of aid organisations.
“We’re feeling incredibly stretched...”
he says. “It certainly will be stretching the UN, it
will be stretching Indonesian authorities. I think we will
all soon be feeling the pinch on this one.”
World Vision has had staff in the affected regions since Sunday
morning.
“Their first job, I suppose, is to help us understand
what sort of shipments they’ll need and again, not surprisingly,
the first thing they said was stretcher beds for hospitals
and medical supplies. We’re starting to think about
how we maintain clean water (as well as) cooking sets, tarpaulins
for temporary shelter.”
Ronalds says that given the scale of the destruction, aid
agencies will already be looking at a three year time frame
for immediate aid and rebuilding.
He says that, as has been shown in the aftermath of the tsunami,
the process of consulting with local communities and government
means rebuilding can take time.
The following agencies are running earthquake appeals. To
donate, contact them as below:
AUSTCARE - 1300 66 66 72 or www.austcare.org.au
CARE Australia - 1800 020 046 or www.careaustralia.org.au
Caritas Australia - 1800 024 413 or www.caritas.org.au
Save the Children - 1800 76 00 11 or www.savethechildren.org.au
UNICEF - 1300 884 233 or www.unicef.org.au
World Vision Australia - 13 32 40 or www.worldvision.org.au
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