[Kabar-indonesia] Indo News - 11/7/05 (Part 2 of 2)

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- The Situation In Ambon / Moluccas – Report No. 491
- East Timor: Truth and Reconciliation Commission closes as security worsens
- The Mass Killings in Indonesia After 40 Years
- Indonesia Stretched to the Limit In Battle Against Two Diseases
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Crisis Centre Diocese Of Amboina
Jalan Pattimura 32 - Ambon 97124 - Indonesia
Tel 0062 (0)911 342195   Fax 0062 (0)911 355337
E-mail crisiscentre01 at hotmail.com

Ambon, November 4, 2005
The Situation In Ambon / Moluccas – Report No. 491

1. Security Measures – In the wake of the recent nefarious killing and
beheading of three 16-years-old christian schoolgirls in the troubled Poso
area, Central Celebes, the police, enforced by military forces, have
stepped up safety measures in Ambon. On October 31, all vehicles entering
and leaving the city of Ambon were halted and searched on any weaponry,
whereas every driver or passenger was demanded to show his or her identity
card. Police Precinct Chief Leonidas Braksan declared that these measures
were taken because of rumours being spread that Ambon was to be the next
target of terrorist activity. During the razzia, several sharp weapons and
one fire weapon were confiscated.

2. Seven Christian Teachers Appointed At Muslim School – In the context of
further abandoning of any barriers between christians and muslims, the
government has made a start with appointing christian teachers at muslim
schools and vice versa. Thus recently seven christian teachers were
assigned to a Muhammadiah School in Ambon.

3. Bomb Explosion – A bomb exploded near a protestant church on the Jalan
Diponegoro, Ambon, at 3.30 a.m. last Thursday, 3 November. However the
blast did not result in any casualties. Although it left only a small hole
in the road, the blast could be heard two kilometers away.

4. Joyful Idul Fitri Celebration – Apart from this bomb explosion the
whole celebration ending the month of Ramadhan, went smoothly and
joyfully. The takbir parade went undisturbed through islam and christian
neighbourhoods alike.

C.J. Böhm msc
Crisis Centre Diocese of Amboina
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Welcome to CIIR E-News
7 November 2005
East Timor: Truth and Reconciliation Commission closes as security worsens

A detailed report looking into human rights violations committed during
the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1974 to 1999 has been
submitted to Timorese President Xanana Gusmão and will be made public
later this month.

East Timor's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR)
wrapped up its three-and-half years' work on 31 October and officially
submitted its final report to the president. The long-awaited report will
be made public when delivered by President Xanana at a special sitting of
the National Parliament on 28 November.

The CAVR report, totalling around 2,000 pages, sets out detailed accounts
by victims of violations from the civil disturbances prior to Indonesian
invasion in 1975 up to Indonesian withdrawal in 1999. CIIR, as part of its
women's advocacy programme, also supported efforts to also include the
testimony of women victims in the commission's investigations.

The CAVR process to reveal the truth and establish accountability for
rights abuses has been vitally important in helping victims to come to
terms with their losses, rebuild their lives and, in some cases, reconcile
with those who caused their suffering. The process has also been an
important component of the nation-building process by helping to deepen
and strengthen the prospects for peace, democracy, the rule of law and
human rights in the new nation of East Timor.

CAVR will make recommendations for future action to protect and promote
human rights and reconciliation in its report - recommendations that are
eagerly awaited, given that justice for past rights violations has yet to
be completed. The East Timor government is now pressing ahead with a
bilateral Commission on Truth and Friendship with Indonesia as a means to
address human rights violations during the occupation. But this bilateral
commission has been opposed by Timorese churches and much of civil society
who fear it will not bring about legal accountability. There are concerns
that this bilateral commission will never bring justice for victims of
rights abuses.

The consequences of failing to bring to account militia and the military
backers responsible for the wave of violence following the referendum in
1999 has been highlighted by recent security incidents along East Timor's
land borders with Indonesia. Ex-militia members have crossed into East
Timorese territory and in one instance there were violent clashes between
Indonesian and Timorese border police. Militia members roam free in West
Timor and their backers in the Indonesian military remain in active
service due to a lack of any real process of justice to bring these
offenders to book and to prevent them from repeating the same crimes.

The CAVR report will be published on the CAVR website simultaneously with
the President's delivery of it to the National Parliament
http://www.cavr-timorleste.org.
-- CIIR E-News is provided by the Catholic Institute for International
Relations (CIIR), a development agency that works for the eradication of
poverty and an end to injustice. CIIR is known in some countries as
International Cooperation for Development (ICD)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
www.dissidentvoice.org
The Mass Killings in Indonesia After 40 Years
by John Roosa and Joseph Nevins
October 31, 2005

“One of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.” That was how a
CIA publication described the killings that began forty years ago this
month in Indonesia. It was one of the few statements in the text that was
correct. The 300-page text was devoted to blaming the victims of the
killings -- the supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) --
for their own deaths. The PKI had supposedly attempted a coup d’état and a
nationwide uprising called the September 30th Movement (which, for some
unknown reason, began on October 1). The mass murder of hundreds of
thousands of the party’s supporters over subsequent months was thus a
natural, inevitable, and justifiable reaction on the part of those
non-communists who felt threatened by the party’s violent bid for state
power. The killings were part of the “backfire” referred to in the title:
Indonesia -- 1965: The Coup that Backfired. The author of this 1968
report, later revealed to be Helen Louise Hunter, acknowledged the massive
scale of the killings only to dismiss the necessity for any detailed
consideration of them. She concentrated on proving that the PKI was
responsible for the September 30th Movement while consigning the major
issue, the anti-PKI atrocities, to a brief, offhanded comment. [1]

Hunter’s CIA report accurately expressed the narrative told by the
Indonesian army commanders as they organized the slaughter. That narrative
rendered the September 30th Movement -- a disorganized, small-scale affair
that lasted about 48 hours and resulted in a grand total of 12 deaths,
among them six army generals -- into the greatest evil ever to befall
Indonesia. [2] The commander of the army, Major General Suharto, justified
his acquisition of emergency powers in late 1965 and early 1966 by
insisting that the September 30th Movement was a devious conspiracy by the
PKI to seize state power and murder all of its enemies. Suharto’s martial
law regime detained some 1.5 million people as political prisoners (for
varying lengths of time), and accused them of being “directly or
indirectly involved in the September 30th Movement.” The hundreds of
thousands of people shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, or starved to death were
labeled perpetrators, or would-be perpetrators of atrocities, just as
culpable for the murder of the army generals as the handful of people who
were truly guilty.

The September 30th Movement was Suharto’s Reichstag fire: a pretext for
destroying the communist party and seizing state power. As with the
February 1933 fire in the German parliament that Hitler used to create a
hysterical, crisis-filled atmosphere, the September 30th Movement was
exaggerated by Suharto’s clique of officers until it assumed the
proportions of a wild, vicious, supernatural monster. The army whipped up
an anti-communist propaganda campaign from the early days of October 1965:
“the PKI” had castrated and tortured the seven army officers it had
abducted in Jakarta, danced naked and slit the bodies of the army officers
with a hundred razor blades, drawn up hit lists, dug thousands of ditches
around the country to hold countless corpses, stockpiled guns imported
from China, and so on. The army banned many newspapers and put the rest
under army censorship. It was precisely this work of the army’s
psychological warfare specialists that created the conditions in which the
mass murder of “the PKI” seemed justified.

The question as to whether or not the PKI actually organized the September
30th Movement is important only because the Suharto regime made it
important. Otherwise, it is irrelevant. Even if the PKI had nothing
whatsoever to do with the movement, the army generals would have blamed
the party for it. As it was, they made their case against the PKI largely
on the basis of the transcripts of the interrogations of those movement
participants who hadn’t already been summarily executed. Given that the
army used torture as standard operating procedure for interrogations, the
statements of the suspects cannot be trusted. Hunter’s CIA report,
primarily based on those transcripts, is as reliable as an Inquisition
text on witchcraft.

The PKI as a whole was clearly not responsible for the September 30th
Movement. The party’s three million members did not participate in it. If
they had, it would not have been such a small-scale affair. The party
chairman, D.N. Aidit, however, does seem to have played a key role. He was
summarily and secretly executed in late 1965, as were two of the three
other core Politburo leaders (Lukman and Njoto), before they could provide
their accounts. The one among them who survived the initial terror, the
general secretary of the party, Sudisman, admitted in the military’s
kangaroo court in 1967 that the PKI as an institution knew nothing of the
September 30th Movement but that certain leaders were involved in a
personal capacity. If the movement’s leaders had been treated as the
leaders of previous revolts against the postcolonial government, they
would have been arrested, put on trial, and sentenced. All the members of
their organizations would not have been imprisoned or massacred.

With so little public discussion and so little scholarly research about
the 1965-66 mass killings, they remain poorly understood. Many people
outside of Indonesia believe that the victims were primarily Indonesian
Chinese. While some Indonesian Chinese were among the victims, they were
by no means the majority. The violence targeted members of the PKI and the
various organizations either allied to the party or sympathetic to it,
whatever ethnicity they happened to be: Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese,
etc. It was not a case of ethnic cleansing. Many people imagine that the
killings were committed by frenzied mobs rampaging through villages and
urban neighborhoods. But recent oral history research suggests that most
of the killings were executions of detainees. [3] Much more research is
needed before one can arrive at definitive conclusions.

President Sukarno, the target of the PKI’s alleged coup attempt, compared
the army’s murderous violence against those labeled PKI to a case of
someone “burning down the house to kill a rat.” He routinely protested the
army’s exaggerations of the September 30th Movement. It was, he said,
nothing more than “a ripple in the wide ocean.” His inability or
unwillingness to muster anything more than rhetorical protests, however,
ultimately doomed his rule. In March 1966, Suharto grabbed the authority
to dismiss, appoint, and arrest cabinet ministers, even while maintaining
Sukarno as figurehead president until March 1967. The great orator who had
led the nationalist struggle against the Dutch, the cosmopolitan visionary
of the Non-Aligned Movement, was outmaneuvered by a taciturn, uneducated,
thuggish, corrupt army general from a Javanese village.

Suharto, a relative nobody in Indonesian politics, moved against the PKI
and Sukarno with the full support of the U.S. government. Marshall Green,
American ambassador to Indonesia at the time, wrote that the embassy had
“made clear” to the army that Washington was “generally sympathetic with
and admiring” of its actions. [4] U.S. officials went so far as to express
concern in the days following the September 30th Movement that the army
might not do enough to annihilate the PKI. [5] The U.S. embassy supplied
radio equipment, walkie-talkies, and small arms to Suharto so that his
troops could conduct the nationwide assault on civilians. [6] A diligent
embassy official with a penchant for data collection did his part by
handing the army a list of thousands of names of PKI members. [7] Such
moral and material support was much appreciated in the Indonesian army. As
an aide to the army’s chief of staff informed U.S. embassy officials in
October 1965, “This was just what was needed by way of assurances that we
weren’t going to be hit from all angles as we moved to straighten things
out here.” [8]

This collaboration between the U.S. and the top army brass in 1965 was
rooted in Washington’s longstanding wish to have privileged and enhanced
access to Southeast Asia’s resource wealth. Many in Washington saw
Indonesia as the region’s centerpiece. Richard Nixon characterized the
country as “containing the region’s richest hoard of natural resources”
and “by far the greatest prize in the South East Asian area.” [9] Two
years earlier, in a 1965 speech in Asia, Nixon had argued in favor of
bombing North Vietnam to protect Indonesia’s “immense mineral potential.”
[10] But obstacles to the realization of Washington’s
geopolitical-economic vision arose when the Sukarno government emerged
upon independence in Indonesia. Sukarno’s domestic and foreign policy was
nationalist, nonaligned, and explicitly anti-imperialist. Moreover, his
government had a working relationship with the powerful PKI, which
Washington feared would eventually win national elections.

Eisenhower’s administration attempted to break up Indonesia and sabotage
Sukarno’s presidency by supporting secessionist revolts in 1958. [11] When
that criminal escapade of the Dulles brothers failed, the strategists in
Washington reversed course and began backing the army officers of the
central government. The new strategy was to cultivate anti-communist
officers who could gradually build up the army as a shadow government
capable of replacing President Sukarno and eliminating the PKI at some
future date. The top army generals in Jakarta bided their time and waited
for the opportune moment for what U.S. strategists called a final
“showdown” with the PKI. [12] That moment came on October 1, 1965.

The destruction of the PKI and Sukarno’s ouster resulted in a dramatic
shift in the regional power equation, leading Time magazine to hail
Suharto's bloody takeover as “The West's best news for years in Asia.”
[13] Several years later, the U.S. Navy League's publication gushed over
Indonesia's new role in Southeast Asia as “that strategic area's
unaggressive, but stern, monitor,” while characterizing the country as
“one of Asia’s most highly developed nations and endowed by chance with
what is probably the most strategically authoritative geographic location
on earth.” [14] Among other things, the euphoria reflected just how
lucrative the changing of the guard in Indonesia would prove to be for
Western business interests.

Suharto’s clique of army officers took power with a long-term economic
strategy in mind. They expected the legitimacy of their new regime would
derive from economic growth and that growth would derive from bringing in
Western investment, exporting natural resources to Western markets, and
begging for Western aid. Suharto’s vision for the army was not in terms of
defending the nation against foreign aggression but defending foreign
capital against Indonesians. He personally intervened in a meeting of
cabinet ministers in December 1965 that was discussing the nationalization
of the oil companies Caltex and Stanvac. Soon after the meeting began, he
suddenly arrived by helicopter, entered the chamber, and declared, as the
gleeful U.S. embassy account has it, that the military “would not stand
for precipitous moves against oil companies.” Faced with such a threat,
the cabinet indefinitely postponed the discussion. [15] At the same time,
Suharto’s army was jailing and killing union leaders at the facilities of
U.S. oil companies and rubber plantations. [16]

Once Suharto decisively sidelined Sukarno in March 1966, the floodgates of
foreign aid opened up. The U.S. shipped large quantities of rice and cloth
for the explicit political purpose of shoring up his regime. Falling
prices were meant to convince Indonesians that Suharto’s rule was an
improvement over Sukarno’s. The regime’s ability over the following years
to sustain economic growth via integration with Western capital provided
whatever legitimacy it had. Once that pattern of growth ended with the
capital flight of the 1997 Asian economic crisis, the regime’s legitimacy
quickly vanished. Middle class university students, the fruits of economic
growth, played a particularly important role in forcing Suharto from
office. The Suharto regime lived by foreign capital and died by foreign
capital.

By now it is clear that the much ballyhooed economic growth of the Suharto
years was severely detrimental to the national interest. The country has
little to show for all the natural resources sold on the world market.
Payments on the foreign and domestic debt, part of it being the odious
debt from the Suharto years, swallow up much of the government’s budget.
With health care spending at a minimum, epidemic and preventable diseases
are rampant. There is little domestic industrial production. The forests
from which military officers and Suharto cronies continue to make fortunes
are being cut down and burned up at an alarming rate. The country imports
huge quantities of staple commodities that could be easily produced on a
larger scale in Indonesia, such as sugar, rice, and soybeans. The main
products of the villages now are migrant laborers, or “the heroes of
foreign exchange,” to quote from a lighted sign at the Jakarta airport.

Apart from the pillaging of Indonesia’s resource base, the Suharto regime
caused an astounding level of unnecessary suffering. At his command, the
Indonesian military invaded neighboring East Timor in 1975 after receiving
a green light from President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry
Kissinger. The result was an occupation that lasted for almost 24 years
and left a death toll of tens of thousands of East Timorese. Within
Indonesia proper, the TNI committed widespread atrocities during
counterinsurgency campaigns in the resource-rich provinces of West Papua
and Aceh, resulting in tens of thousands of additional fatalities.

With Suharto’s forced resignation in 1998, significant democratic space
has opened in Indonesia. There are competitive national and local
elections. Victims of the “New Order” and their families are able to
organize. There is even an official effort to create a national truth
commission to investigate past atrocities. Nevertheless, the military
still looms large over the country’s political system. As such, there has
not been a thorough investigation of any of the countless massacres that
took place in 1965-66. History textbooks still focus on the September 30th
Movement and make no mention of the massacres. Similarly, no military or
political leaders have been held responsible for the Suharto-era crimes
(or those that have taken place since), thus increasing the likelihood of
future atrocities. This impunity is a source of continuing worry for
Indonesia’s civil society and restless regions, as well as
poverty-stricken, now-independent East Timor. It is thus not surprising
that the government of the world’s newest country feels compelled to play
down demands for justice by its citizenry and emphasize an empty
reconciliation process with Indonesia. Meanwhile in the United States,
despite political support and billions of dollars in U.S. weaponry,
military training and economic assistance to Jakarta over the preceding
four decades, Washington’s role in Indonesia’s killing fields of 1965-66
and subsequent brutality has been effectively buried, thus enabling the
Bush administration’s current efforts to further ties with Indonesia’s
military, as part of the global “war on terror.” [17] Suharto’s removal
from office has not led to radical changes in Indonesia’s state and
economy.

Sukarno used to indict Dutch colonialism by saying that Indonesia was “a
nation of coolies and a coolie among nations.” Thanks to the Suharto
years, that description remains true. The principles of economic
self-sufficiency, prosperity, and international recognition for which the
nationalist struggle was fought now seem as remote as ever. It is
encouraging that many Indonesians are now recalling Sukarno’s fight
against Western imperialism (first the Netherlands and then the U.S.)
after experiencing the misery that Suharto’s strategy of collaboration has
wrought. In his “year of living dangerously” speech in August 1964 -- a
phrase remembered in the West as just the title of a 1982 movie with Mel
Gibson and Sigourney Weaver -- Sukarno spoke about the Indonesian ideal of
national independence struggling to stay afloat in “an ocean of subversion
and intervention from the imperialists and colonialists.” Suharto’s
U.S.-assisted takeover of state power forty years ago this month drowned
that ideal in blood, but it might just rise again during the ongoing
economic crisis that is endangering the lives of so many Indonesians.
-- John Roosa is an assistant professor of history at the University of
British Columbia, and is the author of Pretext for Mass Murder: The
September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia (University
of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming in 2006). Joseph Nevins is an assistant
professor of geography at Vassar College, and is the author of A
Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor (Cornell University
Press, 2005).

NOTES
1. A former CIA agent who worked in Southeast Asia, Ralph McGehee, noted
in his memoir that the agency compiled a separate report about the events
of 1965, one that reflected its agents’ honest opinions, for its own
in-house readership. McGehee’s description of it was heavily censored by
the agency when it vetted an account he first published in the April 11,
1981 edition of The Nation. Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New
York: Sheridan Square, 1983), pp. 57-58. Two articles in the agency’s
internal journal Studies in Intelligence have been declassified: John T.
Pizzicaro, “The 30 September Movement in Indonesia,” (Fall 1969); Richard
Cabot Howland, “The Lessons of the September 30 Affair,” (Fall 1970). The
latter is available online:
www.odci.gov/csi/kent_csi/docs/v14i2a02p_0001.htm.
2. In Jakarta, the movement’s troops abducted and killed six army generals
and a lieutenant taken by mistake from the house of the seventh who
avoided capture. In the course of these abductions, a five year-old
daughter of a general, a teenaged nephew of another general, and a
security guard were killed. In Central Java, two army colonels were
abducted and killed.
3. John Roosa, Ayu Ratih, and Hilmar Farid, eds. Tahun yang Tak Pernah
Berakhir: Memahami Pengalaman Korban 65; Esai-Esai Sejarah Lisan [The Year
that Never Ended: Understanding the Experiences of the Victims of 1965;
Oral History Essays] (Jakarta: Elsam, 2004). Also consider the massacre
investigated in Chris Hilton’s very good documentary film Shadowplay
(2002).
4. Telegram from the Embassy in Indonesia to Department of State, November
4, 1965, in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1964-1968, vol. 26, p. 354. This FRUS volume is available
online at the National Security Archive website:
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/#FRUS.
5. Telegram from the Embassy in Jakarta to Department of State, October
14, 1965. Quoted in Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise:
Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p.
283.
6. Frederick Bunnell, “American ‘Low Posture’ Policy Toward Indonesia in
the Months Leading up to the 1965 ‘Coup’,” Indonesia, 50 (October 1990),
p. 59.
7. Kathy Kadane, “Ex-agents say CIA Compiled Death Lists for Indonesians,”
San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990, available online at:
www.pir.org/kadane.html.
8. CIA Report no. 14 to the White House (from Jakarta), October 14, 1965.
Cited in Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise, p. 283.
9. Richard Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs (October 1967),
p. 111.
10. Quoted in Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military-Economic Development:
America and the Overthrow of Sukarno,” in Malcolm Caldwell (ed.), Ten
Years' Military Terror in Indonesia (Nottingham (U.K.): Bertrand Russell
Peace Foundation for Spokesman Books, 1975), p. 241.
11. Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy:
The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York: The New
Press, 1995), p. 1.
12. Bunnell, “American ‘Low Posture’ Policy,” pp. 34, 43, 53-54.
13. Time, July 15, 1966. Also see Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest
Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 123-131.
14. Lawrence Griswold, “Garuda and the Emerald Archipelago: Strategic
Indonesia Forges New Ties with the West,” Sea Power (Navy League of the
United States), vol. 16, no. 2 (1973), pp. 20, 25.
15. Telegram 1787 from Jakarta to State Department, December 16, 1965,
cited in Brad Simpson, “Modernizing Indonesia: U.S.–Indonesian Relations,
1961-1967,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Northwestern
University, 2003), p. 343.
16. Hilmar Farid, “Indonesia’s Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist
Expansion 1965-66,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (March
2005).
17. For information on U.S.-Indonesia military ties, see the website of
the East Timor Indonesia Action Network at: www.etan.org/

[Note: Also see 3-page article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/29/AR2005102901212.html]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Washington Post
Indonesia Stretched to the Limit In Battle Against Two Diseases
-- Campaign to End Polio Complicated by Rise of Bird Flu
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 6, 2005; Page A19

Tanggamus, Indonesia -- When the first human case of bird flu was
discovered on Indonesia's Sumatra island this fall, provincial officials
raced to investigate. But local health officers were unavailable to help
them because they were busy vaccinating thousands of young children
against a polio outbreak.

Within the last six months, Indonesia has moved to the front lines of two
global health crises, seeking to curb the spread of both bird flu and
polio before they spill across the border.

"It has stretched resources and capacity to the limit," said Thomas Moran
of the World Health Organization's office in Jakarta, the Indonesian
capital.

Faced with the fastest growth of new polio cases on Earth, Indonesia
launched a campaign this summer to immunize about 24 million young
children. Then, just as officials were preparing in July for the first of
three nationwide rounds of polio vaccination, Indonesia detected its first
human case of bird flu and since then has registered more cases of the
disease than any other country.

Since January 2004, more than 60 people have died of bird flu in Vietnam,
Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. The virus has also spread through parts
of Russia and to Eastern Europe.

Indonesia's two-front battle is straining the country's sorely underfunded
health system, which had sharply eroded since the 1997 Asian financial
crisis and was already unable to provide basic care across much of the
far-flung archipelago.

"We've become a red zone for bird flu because it's endemic in livestock
and infected humans here," said Ida Fitriati, deputy health director in
Lampung province on Sumatra's eastern tip. "We're overwhelmed by this."

Health experts said the country needs funds to monitor possible cases,
improve laboratories for testing and enhance medical facilities and
supplies to include a larger stockpile of antiviral drugs.

Health officials said they worry that efforts to contain bird flu and
polio could drain funding from other disease control programs that have
begun to make progress in recent years.

Indonesia ranks third in the world for a high burden of tuberculosis,
according to the WHO. Attempts to improve the detection of new cases
regained momentum two years ago after stalling in the wake of the
financial crisis and political upheaval after the ouster of longtime
dictator Suharto in 1998.

Malaria remains endemic on many Indonesian islands, worsening in the late
1990s before foreign funding for control programs helped reverse the
trend. Dengue and diarrhea-related diseases are epidemic.

"Anyone trying to manage public health, especially with an avian influenza
risk, is faced with an extremely difficult and complex decision about how
to get the maximum good out of limited resources," said Steven Bjorge, the
WHO official in Indonesia responsible for managing bird flu, malaria and
several other diseases.

Fitriati, who oversees communicable diseases for Lampung, a province of
seven million people, said her team of six investigators responds to
reported avian influenza cases one morning and polio the next, often
venturing to isolated hamlets in the island's mountainous interior. Local
health staff, she added, lack the expertise to verify outbreaks
themselves, and communication is so spotty that days can pass before
provincial experts are notified.

Indonesia had been free of polio for a decade when a traveler from the
Middle East carried it to the main island of Java early this year. The
crippling virus quickly reached 10 provinces and infected at least 288
people. After repeated immunization drives, the disease was contained
where it first surfaced in western Java, health officials reported. But
just a short ferry ride away across the Sunda Straits, Lampung province is
now recording the most new infections with more than two-thirds of the 24
cases centered in its district of Tanggamus.

Bird flu also first appeared in Java, infecting at least five people in
and around the capital Jakarta. When the virus spread, it likewise jumped
to Lampung, sickening a man and his young nephew, again in Tanggamus.

Although there have been only a few confirmed cases of bird flu,
international health experts predict the virus could develop into a new
form easily passed among people, potentially devastating Indonesia and the
world beyond.

But at the Pagelaran public clinic in Tanggamus, health officers admitted
they had no program to monitor bird flu or prepare for a wider outbreak.
Their preparations consist of a lone poster on the entrance of their low
white building warning of the danger.

Bird flu remains a concern for agriculture officials, explained Edy
Susanto, 41, a local paramedic.

Susanto, who directs the clinic's immunization program, shuffled into his
tiny, tiled office, apologizing for the rat droppings that litter the
floor. He opened the rusty clasps on the 15-year-old freezer in which he
keeps the vaccines, lifted the cover and motioned to the contents. It was
almost empty.

"For us, it's hard to answer the parents when they ask why the vaccines
have run out," he said, smiling sheepishly and raising his eyebrows. "We
can't answer it. It's not in our hands."

He complained that health workers are forced to scavenge for unused
syringes in other medical offices or scrape together money to buy their
own. The refrigerator with which they usually make ice for transporting
vaccines into the field is broken. He said there is also a shortage of
doctors. The physician who serves as the clinic's director is often absent
during the busy morning hours because he runs his own, better-paying
practice, he said.

"There's been less money and support since the financial crisis," Susanto
concluded. "Money is our unending problem."

At the provincial health department, Fitriati agreed that the Indonesian
health system has slipped. "The function of local health posts has
deteriorated. And since they don't function well, some people don't use
them any more," she said. "It's not only Lampung. This is the picture in
other provinces of Indonesia."

I Nyoman Kandun, Indonesia's national director for communicable disease
control, estimated that half the village health posts in the country no
longer operate. And although the central government has enough money to
buy vaccines for all Indonesian children, officials in the cash-strapped
districts are unable to pick them up from the provincial health office,
according to Kandun.

Now devoting much of his time to soliciting money from foreign governments
and agencies, Kandun said he is finalizing his "shopping list" for bird
flu programs that require financial support.

The emergency polio campaign to immunize the country's children has
already cost the central government more than $12.5 million for the first
two rounds, with foreign donors paying nearly an equal sum, he said. For
the third round, scheduled for Nov. 30, Indonesia can muster only $2.7
million, leaving a shortfall of $10 million.

Kandun said last week his fundraising efforts have whittled that deficit
to $1.4 million.
-- Special correspondent Yayu Yuniar contributed to this report.