Recovery Amid Chaos

Logistical challenges loom as relief groups seek to aid disaster victims in remote Indonesian region

It’s not easy to be heard over the roar of the helicopters. But the three weak and disheveled men wandering the

Indonesian military airfield are desperate to find anyone who will listen.

A U.S. Navy helicopter picked them up as it was returning from making a food drop along Sumatra’s western coast. It left them here, near the makeshift command center for aid efforts in the region, when it landed to load more supplies. But instead of relief at being rescued, the three men are in a panic. They say the survivors they left behind still need rice and noodles. People have no clean water. When they left their village, the men promised that if they got to safety they would send help.

But send help where?

With hundreds of towns and villages wiped out by the tsunamis, directing pilots to the exact spot presents a huge challenge. No one here has heard of this place that no longer exists.

Eventually Michael Bäk, an employee at the U.S. Agency for International Development — the government arm that is coordinating relief efforts — finds a framed map that once hung in an office. Holding steady against the powerful blasts of air kicked up by the helicopter’s rotors, the men find their village. Mr. Bäk, who speaks Bahasa Indonesian, scribbles the coordinates on a piece of paper and promises help will be sent.

Government Restrictions

Weeks after the tsunamis and an earthquake reduced most of the communities dotted along the coastline here to scrap, relief workers are still struggling to get even the basics of food and water to survivors in many remote areas.

While the United Nations, international aid groups, and military personnel from half a dozen countries have amassed one of the largest aid operations in history, the logistical challenges have proven to be enormous.

Last week, Indonesia’s top military commander strained relief efforts further by announcing that, starting immediately, international workers providing assistance outside of Banda Aceh and Meulaboh must be accompanied by a military escort. The move met resistance from some relief organizations opposed to cooperating with the military and caused other groups to reconsider their long-term role in the recovery process.

“The magnitude of what happened there will dictate how we proceed with such a request,” says Michael D. O’Neill, security director at Save the Children. “But from a security perspective, military escorts are not necessarily a proven deterrent to protecting our people.”

Veteran relief workers say that despite the size of the disaster, and perhaps because of its scale, they are witnessing unprecedented cooperation among the United Nations, nonprofit organizations, and the military — groups that often are at odds with one another.

Before the tsunamis, Aceh, the province in northernmost Sumatra, had been closed to journalists from other countries and most international aid groups. Very few charitable organizations had contacts here or a current working knowledge of the region. Indonesia had imposed a state of emergency last May, after many months of operating under martial law, as the government stepped up efforts to put down a long-running separatist movement.

But as news spread that Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, was directly hit by one of the most powerful tsunamis in the last 100 years, nearly every major relief organization moved in to provide aid. If they are not here already, they will be soon.

Yet even as governments and charities from around the world pledged money to help provide relief, aid workers and others worry that supplies are not moving fast enough and are not always getting to the areas most in need.

Bridges, Roads Disappear

The earthquake knocked out electricity and telephones, and roads disappeared, as if someone had scrubbed them off with a washcloth. More than 40 bridges along the coast are gone. This has meant that relief organizations have been almost solely dependent upon helicopters to deliver supplies to stranded victims on the east and west coasts. Only a few aid groups, however, have managed to get their hands on one. Aid really only started getting into the region outside the provincial capital after the U.S. military arrived in the second week with a fleet of helicopters.

“They do have access to places that we don’t,” says Móna Laczó, the regional advocacy coordinator at Oxfam, which is working on water and sanitation issues.

Doctors Without Borders is one group that says it hopes to avoid collaborating with the military. “If it’s military, it’s contrary to the definition of humanitarian assistance,” says Erwin Van ‘T Land, spokesman for the medical group. The military “has a political agenda even if it is humanitarian,” he says.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has also tended to operate apart from the U.S. military, but it has had to cooperate with the troops here.

For example, Mr. Bäk, the agency’s disaster coordinator, helps transfer relief aid from C-130 transport planes to U.S. anti-submarine helicopters. One minute he is locating a supply of body bags; the next minute he is moving a World Food Program shipment of rice out to CARE officials. If a team of French doctors needs to hitch a ride on a flight south, they come to him.

“My first day I was landing a helicopter,” says Mr. Bäk. “We saw them coming, and we just went running across the muddy fields. That certainly was not in my job description.”

One of the greatest problems facing relief organizations is that much of their aid is funneled through Banda Aceh’s military airport, where civilian and military flights share a single runway. Initially, relief workers say, it was a challenge to coordinate with the Indonesian military to move planes quickly from the tarmac to make room for incoming planes. But most workers here say that difficulty was resolved fairly quickly.

As more planes land in Aceh, however, relief charities are struggling to distribute supplies efficiently and equitably. Refugee camps are still spontaneously sprouting up everywhere. The camps are fluid, say aid workers, as victims of the tsunami move from place to place trying to find their families.

Relief organizations complain that sometimes when they arrive with food and water, they discover that another group has just been there. Other people have yet to receive any aid at all.

“There is a lot of logistics,” says Eileen Burke, a spokeswoman at Save the Children. “You can’t just truck it out and drop it off. You need a warehouse. You need a distribution system. You need to locate who is in need. We are trying to put a system in place so the right people get the food.”

Coordination is improving, says Michael Huggins, the spokesman for the United Nations’ World Food Program, which because of its sheer size is leading the effort. Aid organizations are now being assigned separate regions to ensure efforts are not being duplicated, he says.

“This early in the crisis, to have this level of cooperation, compared to other disasters, it is unprecedented,” Mr. Huggins says.

A major problem, he says, is the humanitarian workers who ignore the distribution and aid networks that are being set up. He mentions a group of nurses from Oregon, for example, who hired a boat and are heading down the coast.

“They could get picked up by the Indonesian military for not having permission to be out there or they could be killed by pirates,” says Mr. Huggins. “They think they are helping, but it’s very irresponsible.”

While many organizations are still delivering emergency aid, some also are preparing to be here for several years. The roads are being cleared, and trucks are starting to move. Water-purification systems are now running in many places. Latrines are being built. Camps are organizing programs to get people back to work. Even schools in some neighborhoods of Banda Aceh have reopened.

Everyone knows that it is a long road ahead.

“Emergencies are always complex,” says Ms. Burke, of Save the Children. “You always come across hiccups that slow your progress. You resolve them and move on.”

Brad Wolverton contributed to this article from Washington.