Homes elusive for squatters

Banda Aceh: At 30, Beti has to raise her four young children alone after the 2004 tsunami snatched her husband, and she has no regular job.

Two years after the disaster, she and her children are still cramped in one of the barracks built to house survivors in Indonesia's hardest-hit province of Aceh.

"I wished I had something I could call a house," Beti said. Her partitioned 20-square-metre shack at Lhong Raya in the provincial capital Banda Aceh is furnished with a foam mattress, a television and radio.

"I have heard promises, but up until now I still don't know when I will get a house," she said.

Beti said the households in the barracks, where clean water is scarce, receive nothing other than 10kg of rice, seven ounces of cooking oil and five packs of instant noodle every month.

Odd jobs

She does odd jobs to survive, often cleaning bottles at a nearby water depot for 25,000 rupiah (Dh11) a day.

Beti's family is one of 3,000 which did not own property before the tsunami and have been categorised by the government as former renters or squatters. About 45,000 people still live in the barracks.

Aid groups and the agency charged with Aceh reconstruction, BRR, have built 57,000 houses so far. Another 20,000 houses are still being built and expected to be completed at the end of March 2007.

But Beti's wait for a house may be in vain.

BRR will not give those former renters and squatters houses and will instead give each family 40 per cent of the value of a house built for survivors who are entitled to property, said Heru Prasetyo, the director for donor relations at the agency.

They can use the money to buy land and apply for micro-credit to build a house, he said.

BRR had earlier promised that 78,000 houses of 128,000 required would be finished by the end of the year.