New disaster builds in Indonesia

LAMNO, Indonesia — Cut Anita peered from the open flap of her sunbaked tent one recent day. She watched as a carpenter hammered a wood plank less than five feet away. Another sawed a board in two, freeing the sweet fragrance of forest hardwood. Her new home was taking shape, and she dared not leave.

"Someone else might take it," she said from the Red Cross tent erected on the concrete foundation of her former home, which was destroyed by the Dec. 26 quake and resulting tsunami.

On a forsaken stretch of land on the west coast of Sumatra island, a private relief organization is undertaking one of the first post-tsunami reconstruction efforts. The Turkish group, the Istanbul International Brotherhood and Solidarity Association (IBS), is building 800 houses for tsunami survivors, acting months ahead of government authorities.

"Why should we wait? If we wait for the government, these people will die of heat exhaustion," said Bahrul, housing program manager for IBS, referring to hundreds of villagers who, like Cut Anita (pronounced Choot Anita), have flocked back to the debris-littered plain. Bahrul, like many in Indonesia, uses one name.

The group's effort is laudable, environmentalists said, but for one problem: The timber for the new houses is being logged illegally in the mist-shrouded mountains rising in the distance.

Home to monkeys, orangutans, tigers, elephants and thousands of species of insects and plants, the forests of Sumatra form one of the richest and most sensitive ecosystems on Earth.

Environmentalists fear that in the well-intentioned rush to help the victims of one massive disaster, groups such as IBS are courting another. Deforestation increases the risk of landslides and flooding and damages the habitat of animals and plants, they said. The dilemma is typical of the difficult choices involved in rebuilding after a natural disaster.

"A new natural catastrophe caused by the reconstruction would be tragic," said Frank Momberg, the director for program development with Fauna & Flora International, a London conservation group with offices in Lamno and Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. "This is not helping the people. It is extremely shortsighted."

Indonesia's tropical rain forests are the third-largest in the world, after Congo's and the Amazon. They are being depleted by illegal logging, forest fires and conversion to palm-oil plantations at a rate of 3.8 million to 6.3 million acres a year.

In 2002, the Indonesian government banned the issuance of licenses for small-scale logging in Indonesia's forests, but some local authorities have nonetheless been granting them. In March, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ordered the licenses revoked after government officials said some had been used for illegal logging. Now environmentalists said they fear the licenses will be abused in Aceh by logging interests hoping to profit by the tsunami.

According to the World Wildlife Fund and Greenomics, an Indonesian research organization, at least 1.15 million, and possibly up to 4 million, cubic meters of logs will be needed in the next five years to rebuild houses, schools, offices and fishing boats in Aceh.

More than 500,000 people in the province were left homeless by the earthquake-driven tsunami, which killed more than 220,000 in 11 countries. National government officials said they would follow guidelines about using only timber that had been legally logged or encouraging the building of houses using a minimum of wood. But procurement can be slow, and villagers are eager for the wood and for the jobs logging brings.

"Aceh has practically the only large remaining area of intact forest in Sumatra," said David Kaimowitz, director general of the Center for International Forestry Research in Indonesia. "But with so many people out of work and so much demand for timber for reconstruction, the temptation to enter the forest and cut down trees will be extremely strong."

Faced with the choice of waiting for guidance or acting, groups such as IBS have opted to act. Doctors Without Borders has almost finished building 140 fishing boats in Lamno. An hour's drive up the coast, Mamamia, an Indonesian group funded by the German and Austrian Caritas organizations, has begun work on 300 houses, though Caritas has stopped buying local wood until its legality can be determined.

In the village of Jangut, local carpenters hired by IBS have almost finished 96 houses. IBS is building hundreds more in seven other nearby villages.

To save the forests, the World Wildlife Fund and Greenomics have developed a plan to import timber from the United States and Australia, and some organizations are moving forward with plans to build houses of bricks.

"Whoever comes fastest, that's what we want," said Bukhari Nur, 35, the Jangut village head. He said he would prefer homes made of brick, like his former house. But, he said, his old house cost $14,000, while IBS is spending $2,700 a house. So he and his villagers will settle for wood.

A local sawmill manager, Baharuddin, said lumber supply is not a problem. The wood comes "from up there," he said, gesturing toward the mountains, "and in the next subdistrict over," indicating another set of mountains.

At the Doctors Without Borders office in Lamno, field coordinator Philippe Aruna said the group now knows the timber for the boats it is building was illegally logged. But when group members began the project in March, they had no idea. At this point, he said, it makes no sense to stop. The boats are almost finished.

Doctors Without Borders is not in the boat-making business, but it wants to ease psychological distress. A major source of depression among the fishermen is a lack of work. "One way to support them [fishermen] is to get them back to the sea."

Special correspondent Yayu Yuniar contributed to this report.