JAKARTA - Minister of Home Affairs (Mendagri) Tito Karnavian has clarified the controversy over his statement which was considered to underestimate Malaysia's assistance for disaster victims in Aceh.
According to Tito, his words were not meant to reject or downplay the assistance from Malaysia, but to emphasize that the Indonesian government still has a large capacity to handle disasters independently.
"If anyone misunderstands, I apologize. I absolutely do not mean to belittle the assistance of the Malaysian people to Aceh," said Tito when met at the Halim Perdanakusuma Air Base Integrated Post, Jakarta, Friday, December 19.
Tito emphasized that the relationship between Indonesia and Malaysia has been long and good. He said that the relationship had been built for a long time, including with high officials in Malaysia, and was supported by the kinship of the Acehnese diaspora in Malaysia.
According to Tito, the context of his statement is the number of central and local government work since the first day of the disaster, which is not entirely exposed to the media. He admitted that he went directly to Aceh since the beginning of the disaster, visited Banda Aceh, Pidie, Pidie Jaya to Lhokseumawe, and coordinated the TNI, Polri, BNPB, Basarnas, and local governments.
He gave an example, mobilizing hundreds of tons of Bulog rice from domestic warehouses, coordinating emergency budgets, and deploying state forces which he considered much larger than the aid that had been widely reported.
In a podcast with Helmy Yahya, Tito said that the public exposure of the value of the drug assistance from Malaysia was less than IDR 1 billion and came from entrepreneurs, not the Malaysian government. According to him, with the budget capacity and resources owned, Indonesia is able to deploy assistance on a much larger scale.
"It doesn't mean that it is not accepted. If foreign aid is large and significant, it can certainly be accepted through the mechanism of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs," he said.
However, Tito reminded the public narrative not to build the impression that disaster handling in Aceh depends on foreign aid, while the work of the central government, local government, volunteers, and domestic donors, whose number is large, is not given attention.
"What I mean is that the efforts of the government and the people of the country also need to be appreciated," said Tito.
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