Indonesians See Disasters as God's Will

BANTUL, Indonesia (AP) - Battered by one calamity after another, Indonesians have found a resilience that has amazed even foreign aid workers. It's rooted in a widely held belief that the troubles were sent by God, either as a test of their love for him or as punishment for straying from his teachings.

"Human beings are greedy, selfish and too arrogant," said Prapto Warsito, a villager who lost his father and house to the country's latest disaster, Saturday's earthquake on Java Island that killed more than 5,800 people.

"The almighty one has decided to teach us a lesson," he said.

Similar sentiments were expressed by survivors of the tsunami that laid waste to the northern tip of Sumatra island in late 2004 and struck 11 other countries around the Indian Ocean's rim, leaving at least 216,000 dead or missing, more than half in Indonesia.

This vast nation has always been prone to disaster, both natural and manmade.

Its 220 million people live on more than 13,000 islands that straddle the world's most seismically active area and are home to scores of active volcanoes. Extreme weather events are common, and more than half its population is jammed onto a single island — Java, where Saturday's earthquake struck and where the Mount Merapi volcano has been spewing lava and gas for weeks.

Regular bouts of communal bloodshed have also plagued the ethnically diverse nation, and it has been hit by a string of terrorist attacks blamed on al-Qaida-linked militants.

But disasters seem to have struck even more often since President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono took office in 2004, inspiring a new phrase to characterize the times: "Selalu bencana yah," or "There's always a disaster happening, isn't there?"

It's a tongue-in-cheek poke at the president, widely known by his initials, SBY. It's also a sign of the dry humor that helps Indonesians cope with hardships in their poverty-stricken archipelago.

A month after Yudhoyono took office, six people were killed in a car crash when police stopped traffic suddenly ahead of his motorcade on a toll road in the capital, an event many people saw as an inauspicious start to his leadership.

In December 2004, a quake struck far-eastern Papua province, killing 30 people.

Days later, a massive temblor at the other end of the archipelago spawned the tsunami, sending massive waves speeding across the Indian Ocean.

In March 2005, 1,000 people died on Nias island when another earthquake struck off Sumatra.

In July, the country confirmed its first cases of bird flu and the threat rapidly escalated. There have since been 36 confirmed fatalities in Indonesia, most of them this year.

The list goes on. In August, a plane crash in the Sumatran city of Medan killed more than 150 people. Then, in October, Islamic militants bombed three restaurants on the resort island of Bali, killing 20 people. The blasts came three years after 202 people were killed in another bombing on the same island.

Earlier this month, Mount Merapi began sending massive clouds of hot ash and gas into the air, triggering the evacuation of the volcano's hillsides.

Foreign aid workers say they are impressed with the strength of the victims of the disasters, especially after the tsunami.

"The resourcefulness most Indonesians have demonstrated is heartening," said Daniel Ziv, a U.N. aid worker who was in Sumatra immediately after the tsunami. "Everyone's busy getting things done."

Yudhoyono has won praise by some for his reaction to the disasters, but rival politicians have been quick to capitalize on what they say has been a sluggish response to this weekend's quake.

Analysts say the earthquake has more potential to hurt Yudhoyono politically because it occurred on densely populated Java, not in remote regions where most of the other disasters have occurred.

"His enemies are trying to capitalize on this," said Riza Syichbudi, a political analyst at the Indonesian Science Institute. "If there is no improvement in the government's performance over the next few days, he could see his popularity dip significantly."

Yudhoyono, a former military general whose election ironically ushered in relative political and economic calm after years of instability, left Jakarta on Saturday for the quake zone, moving the seat of government to the nearby historic city of Yogyakarta.

He, too, saw God's hand in the suffering.

"These (disasters) all come from Allah," he said Monday. "We must be grateful and tests like this should be met with resolve and humbleness."

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