Jakarta - One year ago, Indonesia's cultural heart, the ancient Javanese city of Yogyakarta, was rocked to its core - quite literally.
Shortly before sunrise on May 27, 2006, a magnitude-6.2 earthquake struck the city and Klaten district in nearby Central Java province, killing more than 5,800 people and leaving the region in ruins.
'I just ran out of the house after the quake hit and immediately saw so many houses heavily damaged or collapsed,' said Imam Purwadi, 53, one of the lucky survivors. 'This was the most powerful earthquake in my life.'
The tremblor destroyed or severely damaged more than 350,000 homes and displaced 1.5 million people. Those figures would be astonishing except for the fact that the earthquake was anything but an isolated event for the country.
Since Boxing Day 2004, Indonesia has experienced no less than eight major disasters that read off like a laundry list of horror: the Asian tsunami of December 26, 2004; a magnitude-8.7 earthquake on Nais Island in March 2005; the Yogyakarta earthquake; a mud volcano in East Java in May 2006; a magnitude-7.7 quake and tsunami along the southern coast of Java in 2006; flooding and mudslides in North Sumatra and Aceh provinces in December; flooding in Jakarta in February; and a magnitude-6.3 earthquake and magnitude-6.1 aftershock in West Sumatra in March.
The tally is sobering: nearly 186,000 dead and around 3 million displaced.
In many of the disasters, sturdily built mosques, churches and other religious sites, such as the famed eighth-century Borobudur Temple emerged unscathed, leading the religious to profess that God was angry with perceived immorality and decadence in Indonesia.
Others have taken a more scientific view, based on the fact that Indonesia lies within the so-called Pacific 'Ring of Fire,' which is among the most seismically active places on earth.
'Some will say, 'God is angry,' and that's normal,' said Budi Adiputro, chief of staff of the National Disaster Coordinating Agency. 'But science can answer those questions.
'Indonesia is an archipelago island with locations on an earthquake [fault] line. Everywhere we have disasters. It's the most disaster-prone area in the world, I think.'
But one would have to go back pretty far to recall so many calamities in such a short period of time. And the disasters have come as Indonesia is simultaneously making the painful transition to democracy after decades of harsh authoritarian rule.
Several years ago, the country was on the verge of disintegration amid the collapse of central government control, ethnic and sectarian violence, separatist movements, and the rise of radical Islam and terrorism. A succession of natural disasters just as Indonesia was returning to social and economic stability led many to wonder: 'Can't this country get a break?'
The disasters have tested Indonesia's will and painfully exposed the shortcomings of some of its institutions, most notably the armed forces, but today, the country, with international assistance, is far more capable of facing its next crisis.
'There's been a 'seismic shift' in the way people are looking at this,' said Oliver Lacey-Hall, head of the United Nations Development Programme's Crisis Prevention and Recovery Unit in Indonesia.
'Local governments are looking at their planning,' he said, 'and it's also resulted in the new natural disaster-management law passed in March.'
The law creates a new disaster-management agency that reports directly to the president and will specifically focus on preparedness and risk reduction, both of which were previously lacking.
The Asian tsunami, which hit 12 nations and killed 226,000 people - 177,000 of them in Indonesia's Aceh province alone - brutally exposed the limitations of the Jakarta government, military and civilian relief agencies.
Without the immediate intervention of the armed forces of several Western and Asian nations and international aid organizations, countless more people would have perished. Officials have acknowledged that Aceh's reconstruction has been a 'mixed bag,' including more than 40,000 people still living in tents two years after the disaster.
Yogyakarta, on the other hand, has been touted as a success. As the one-year anniversary of the earthquake approaches on Sunday, 99 per cent of the displaced population is living in permanent housing or at least semi-permanent shelters, aid officials said.
'There's a psychological impact,' said Manfred Profazi, head of the office for the International Organization for Migration in Yogyakarta. 'The families and communities see that the aid is reaching them. I think it creates hope.'
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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