INDONESIA A NEWS

Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare, Aburizal Bakrie, and the World Food Program (WFP) signed a Memorandum of Understanding for food assistance yesterday. The agreement is aimed to help and rehabilitate the nutrition in Indonesia by extending the assistance and restoration program. The agreement will be ongoing for three years until December 2010 with total funding of US$ 98 billion, including US$ 56 million for food and US$ 42 million for operational costs.The funding will be to improve nutrition for ages 24-60 months; pregnant women; breast-feeding mothers, and children aged 6-13 years old, and provide additional food for tuberculosis patients and poor families. The funding is also aimed at and sanitation and government assistance for natural disasters. "There is total of 845 million people that will benefit from this program," said Aburizal, accompanied by WFP Director for Indonesia, Angela van Rynbach.The effort to overcome starvation and malnutrition is one p...

In a letter dated March 5, 2008 to Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Congressman Eni Faleomavaega, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs' Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment, and Congressman Donald Payne, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, joined forces in calling upon Indonesia to end unreasonable restrictions on international access to West Papua. The complete text of their letter is included below: Dear Mr. President: In 2005, at your request, we suspended our support for West Papua's right to self-determination in order to give you time to implement the Special Autonomy legislation passed by the Indonesian Parliament in 2001. We welcomed the promise of this legislation and your personal assurances that your government would finally accord the Papuan people a fair share of the great wealth derived from Papuan resources. However, after three years, we note that the people of Papua, through the voices of Papuan...

Confusion over the role of the National Agency for the Placement and Protection of Overseas Labor (BNP2TKI) has kept up to 7,000 citizens from working abroad, a minister says. Manpower and Transmigration Minister Erman Soeparno said in an interview last week the BNP2TKI had meddled with his ministry's authority in conducting the required medical check-up for migrant workers. Speaking to The Jakarta Post, he said it was the authority of his ministry to choose the hospitals for the medical testing as recommended by the Health Ministry under a signed agreement. "But what has happened is that the BNP2TKI made its own regulation and uses health institutions which are not recommended by us. "They use GAMCA and HIPTEK instead; who are they?" Erman said, referring to the Gulf Country Committee Approved Medical Centres' Association (GAMCA) and the Association of Medical Clinics for Indonesian Overseas Migrant Workers (HIPTEK). He added that for this activity, the BNP2TKI...

Indonesia needs more help to rein in the bird flu virus, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has said. The human death toll from bird flu in the country rose to 100 earlier this year - almost half of the total worldwide fatalities. The FAO's chief veterinary expressed concerns that failure to tackle the disease could lead the virus to mutate and cause a "human influenza pandemic". Most of those infected are thought to have caught the disease from poultry. "The human mortality rate from bird flu in Indonesia is the highest in the world and there will be more human cases if we do not focus more on containing the disease at source in animals," said FAO Chief Veterinary Officer Joseph Domenech in a statement on Tuesday. "The avian influenza situation in Indonesia is grave - all international partners and national authorities need to step up their efforts for halting the spread of the disease in animals and making the fight against the virus a top pri...

Indonesia, one of Asia's largest fuel exporters, now faces dire power shortages, threatening to hold back an economic recovery which at 6.3 % reached its fastest pace in a decade last year. Chronic underinvestment and fast-rising industrial and consumer power demand means Indonesia is facing undercapacity constraints, which the government warns could reach crisis levels by next year. The government is pinning its hopes on a "crash program" to add 10,000 megawatts (MW) of coal-fired power, mostly financed and built by Chinese companies, in a bid to rapidly expand capacity by over one-third. If the crash program fails to meet its goals, energy policy could become a major campaign issue as Indonesia gears up for general elections next year. So far Indonesia's 26,500MW power grid has not yet suffered the drastic shortages seen throughout the 1990s in China, India and the Philippines, where frequent blackouts dragged severely on economic growth. But Indonesia's many de...

Like dozens of others at the streetside ceramics market in north Jakarta, Neslon had been selling dishes out of a small kiosk in the shadow of a highway for more than 30 years.Then, early one recent morning, the police moved in with wrecking equipment and within hours reduced the market to a pile of collapsed shops and shattered plates. And then they set it on fire."We didn't get to talk to anyone about this, to find a solution or a place for us to go," Neslon said, surveying the site the next day, looking for anything he could salvage from the smoldering ruins. "Now I have no idea what I will do."Similar scenes have played out all over Jakarta in recent months as the city's new governor, Fauzi Bowo, has moved ahead with a plan to increase the amount of open green space in Jakarta - a change many residents have been demanding for years. The plan would expand green space from 9.6 percent of the city to 13.9 percent by 2010.The markets are considered an eye-so...

Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari has said that the Government should prioritize for HIV and AIDS eradication in Papua. "Geographically, Papua is difficult. But there should be a system that can cover all of the people there", said Siti on her speech for Workshop on National Planning and Organizing for HIV and AIDS eradication at the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas) office yesterday. The workshop was attended by Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Aburizal Bakrie, Bapepam Head Paskah Suzettaand Secretary of the National AIDS Commission Nafsiah Mboi, as well as representatives from the Home Affairs and Finance ministries, plus representatives from 33 provinces.The Health Minister said that she has been preparing the setting up of a mobile clinic, complete with specialist physicians, nurses, and health equipment needed for Papua. This mobile clinic will carry out tests on residents to detect HIV as well as contagious diseases like Malaria and Tubercul...

Indonesia's former president Suharto took many secrets with him to his final resting place on his death in late January. But none were arguably as important as the unanswered questions about his role in the attempted 1965 coup d'etat - portrayed at the time as being masterminded by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) - and how he leveraged those events to maneuver into power, replacing the left-leaning president Sukarno. The official version of those events, which later underpinned the legitimacy of his rule, was that Suharto saved the day for the country after six of the country's top generals were horribly murdered early in the morning of October 1 by communist plotters. Then the head of the military's Jakarta-based strategic reserve, Kostrad, and second in line to army minister and commander, Ahmad Yani, who was among those killed that fateful morning, Suharto moved quickly through the day to neutralize the supposed threat. By uniting the military behind him, he ens...

Indonesia needs to keep closer tabs on a flourishing publishing network linked to the militant group Jemaah Islamiyah, which reflects a debate on tactics among Islamic extremists, an International Crisis Group report said Friday. It said the profitable book business had been growing at a time when Jemaah Islamiyah, a regional network blamed for a string of deadly attacks in Indonesia including the 2002 Bali bombings, had been weakened and appeared to be rebuilding.The increase in publications, which indicate a debate within Jemaah Islamiyah over the desirability of using Qaeda tactics, could be a sign that the organization was trying to rebuild by focusing on religious outreach and recruitment, the report said."These publishers are disseminating a radical message, but they also may be playing a positive role by channeling JI energies into jihad through the printed word rather than through acts of violence," said Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group, a prominent Jaka...