As death toll climbs from Indonesia quake, Catholic agency takes action

August 10, 2018 CNA Daily News News Briefs 0 Print

Mataram, Indonesia, Aug 10, 2018 / 03:18 am (CNA/EWTN News).- With hundreds dead and thousands left homeless by a major earthquake in Indonesia last weekend, Catholic Relief Services is working to bring shelter and necessities to survivors.

“Our priority now is to get as much information from the field as possible for us to make decisions on what support we can provide to the affected population,” said Yenni Suryani, who is leading Catholic Relief Services' emergency response in the country.

On Sunday, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake tore through the north of the country. Estimated death tolls have ranged from 250 with 350, with officials stressing that the numbers may continue to climb.

In addition, more than 1,400 were injured and some 270,000 were displaced, according to government officials.

A Red Cross representative told CNN that aid workers are having trouble reaching those in need of assistance in mountainous areas, due to landslides and debris blocking roads.

A search and relief official told state-run Antara news agency that survivors are dealing with trauma, and some are scared to be indoors following the earthquake.

Caroline Brennan, emergency communications director for Catholic Relief Services, told CNA that the agency’s humanitarian response efforts are already underway.

“CRS and its local Church partners are currently carrying out initial assessments in North Lombok District,” the area most affected by the earthquake, she explained.

So far, assessments into three villages in the region show that nearly 90 percent of houses are either severely damaged or totally destroyed, and more than 90 percent of the population is displaced or sleeping outside in tents, she said.

In addition, electricity and communications systems remain down.

“From the initial assessment in these three villages, the CRS team identified immediate needs that include food items, shelter kits, clean water,” Brennan said.

“The team also reported that people in these three villages are resorting to ready-to-eat and instant foods as they are not yet able to get fresh food from the markets, which are still closed.”

Suryani, who is based in Jakarta, said that as Catholic Relief Services continues conducting its initial assessments, it is reporting its findings to the local government.

The agency will then work with local partners to address the greatest needs, especially for those who have lost their homes and are sleeping out in the open.  

“CRS plans to support partners to provide emergency shelter kits,” which include tarps, blankets, and sleeping mats, for the affected population, she told CNA.

But while immediate relief efforts are already underway, full recovery for the people affected by the earthquake will be a slower process, Suryani said.

“Given the scale of the impacts of the disaster, the recovery will take time,” she said, and this will require not only rebuilding physical infrastructure, but “most importantly psychological recovery because people lost their loved ones, assets and livelihood.”

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Are the Rohingya returning to Burma? All is not as it seems.

August 3, 2018 CNA Daily News 1

Naypyitaw, Burma, Aug 3, 2018 / 03:49 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Rohingya, a long-suffering Muslim minority in Burma, are allegedly peacefully returning to their country from Bangladesh, where thousands fled last year after a surge of violence against them last year that the United Nations said might qualify as genocide.

At least, that is the story that the Burmese government would like the world to believe.

But a recent government-sponsored trip to Burma by New York Times journalist Hannah Beech and photographer Adam Dean revealed numerous holes in the official narrative of the Burmese government.

Burma is also known as Myanmar, a name which the U.S. government and many democracy activists oppose, because they say it was illegally imposed on the country by its military dictatorship.

While the Burmese government told journalists on the trip that the groups of people they were seeing were Rohingya peacefully returning to Burma after their exodus, hushed conversations with locals revealed that that was not the case.

“The men at one of the country’s three repatriation centers shook their heads when asked if they had peacefully come back to Myanmar from Bangladesh,” Beech wrote.

“They said they had not been repatriated at all. In fact, they said, they had never even left this waterlogged stretch of marsh and mountain in Myanmar, and had been swept up in the government’s broad repression of the Rohingya minority.”

“One day, last year, three of the men said, soldiers had arrested them in their village in northern Rakhine State. Five and a half months later, they were released and charged with illegal immigration,” Beech reported.

Until they were driven out by violence and the burning of their villages, the Rohingya had mostly occupied Burma’s Rakhine state. Conversations with locals in the area revealed more cracks in the government’s storyline, which maintains that the Rohingya are terrorists who burned their own villages to create a ruse.

“…a girl, who would be in danger if her name were revealed, said she missed a Muslim friend who had lived a few houses down. ‘The Rakhine burned their houses down,’ she said, referring to civilians from the Buddhist ethnic group that gives Rakhine State its name. ‘My friend is gone forever,’” Beech reported.

“A man corrected her quickly. ‘You’re supposed to say the reverse,’ he admonished. ‘You should say they burned their own houses down.’”

Another boy confirmed to the Times journalists that he had seen government forces burning Rohingya villages.

“Who would burn down their own houses?” the boy told the journalists. ‘That’s stupid.”

Despite widespread use of the word Rohingya in the international community, the term is controversial within Burma. The Burmese government refuses to use the term, and considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They have been denied citizenship and numerous other rights since a controversial law was enacted in 1982.

Last year the Rohingya faced a sharp increase in state-sponsored violence in their homeland, which reached levels that led the United Nations to declare the crisis “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled across the border to Bangladesh, and are living in refugee camps, many of which are located in a swampy sort of “buffer zone” along the border between the two countries.

When asked, government officials were not able to provide the New York Times journalists an official death count, broken down by ethnicity, from the surges of violence last year.

In a 2017 trip to Bangladesh, Pope Francis met with a group of Rohingya and offered them his prayers and condolences for what they had endured.

“In the name of all who have persecuted you and persecute you, that have done you harm, above all, the world’s indifference, I ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness,” the Pope said in a Dec. 1, 2017 meeting with Rohingya.

After greeting them individually and hearing brief explanations of their stories, Pope Francis told them that “we are very close to you.”

Although there’s “little we can do because your tragedy is very hard and great,” he told them “we give you space in the heart.”

He explained that according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created man in his image and likeness.

“All of us are in this image, also these brothers and sisters, they too are in the image of God,” he said.

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