PALU: Indonesia on Tuesday told foreign aid workers their help was not needed in disaster-ravaged Palu and they should go home, frustrating relief efforts after a quake-tsunami killed more than 2,000 people.

Foreign teams on the ground were told new rules barred them from searching for the dead in hard-hit parts of Palu, where thousands are missing since the Sept 28 twin disaster.

Indonesia initially refused international help but President Joko Widodo reluctantly agreed to allow in overseas aid once the picture became clearer on Sulawesi island.

Foreign aid poured into the ravaged city of Palu where authorities believe 5,000 people could be missing and 200,000 survivors desperately need food, water and other life-saving supplies.

But international search and rescue teams were prevented on Tuesday from accessing hard-hit parts of Palu, where thousands are believed to be buried underneath rubble.

Ahmed Bham, from South African charity Gift of the Givers, was told that new rules barred foreign urban search and rescue teams (USAR) from playing any part in retrieving the dead.

They were told “all foreign USAR teams should make their way obviously back to their countries. They don’t need them in Indonesia”, he said.

“We’ve got experienced search and rescue teams here in Indonesia with really specialised equipment. I’d like to use them,” he told AFP in Palu.

Their 27-strong team arrived in Palu three days ago from Johannesburg, but days of delay frustrated their wish to join the search for the dead.

“A lot of days were wasted... where we could have assisted and used our expertise and skill,” Bham said.

“There seemed to be — I won’t say red-tape — but it was just like, ‘you can’t work here, you can’t do this, you can’t do that’. It’s something we haven’t experienced in other major disasters like this.”

Indonesia’s disaster agency issued a set of rules over the weekend instructing international staff to leave Palu, and requiring foreign donations be channelled through local partners.

“The truth is that they have put out a statement saying foreign personnel should be withdrawn,” World Vision Australia chief advocate Tim Costello told Australian broadcaster ABC on Tuesday.

Disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said no foreign aid workers had been asked to leave Palu yet.

“But in Lombok there were many [asked to leave],” he told reporters on Tuesday. A string of earthquakes in Lombok in eastern Indonesia over the summer killed more than 550 people, sparking a major aid response.

“The president said we didn’t need foreign aid anymore but they kept coming.”

Death toll rises past 2,000

The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island has climbed past 2,000, the disaster agency said on Tuesday, as authorities prepared to end the search for thousands of victims feared buried in mud and rubble in the hardest-hit neighborhoods.

Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said the toll from the Sept 28 twin disasters had climbed to 2,010. He said authorities will hold prayers on Thursday to mark the end of the search in the Petobo, Balaroa and Jono Oge areas of Palu city, where the quake caused loose soil to liquefy, swallowing houses and burying the occupants with them.

Efforts to retrieve bodies, many entombed under mud and rubble as deep as 10 feet, will not continue because of the difficult terrain and advanced state of decomposition that made the bodies unrecognizable and could cause contamination, Nugroho said.

While the official search will end, Nugroho said authorities will not stop villagers from continuing to dig through the ruins for their loved ones.

The areas, which now look like vast wastelands, will be turned into memorial parks to remember the victims, and survivors will be relocated to safer locations, he said.

Nugroho said the disaster agency has not yet been able to verify unofficial esti­­mates from village chiefs in Balaroa and Petobo that 5,000 people are missing in the two areas.

He said the region had recorded 508 aftershocks since the magnitude 7.5 earthquake, which caused a giant wall of water that destroyed large swathes of land in Palu and surrounding areas.

The disaster destroyed more than 65,000 homes and buildings, and displaced more than 70,000 people. Thousands are still living in temporary shelters and tents across Palu, but life is beginning to return to normal in some areas, with plans for redevelopment underway, officials said.

Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2018