Archives for October 2018

The lawyer of a prominent Sri Lankan student who was accused of plotting to assassinate Australian politicians said he will sue police after prosecutors dropped terrorism charges on Friday.

Mohamed Kamer Nizamdeen, 25, was arrested in August and accused of writing in a notebook plans to kill then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and then-Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.

Police also alleged the PhD student possessed plans to carry out a “lone wolf” attack on several public places, including the Sydney Opera House, and he appeared to have links to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

Nizamdeen, a respected business student at the University of New South Wales, spent four weeks in jail after being charged with making documents to facilitate terrorist acts.

He was kept in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison along with convicted murderers.

Prosecutors withdrew the charges in Sydney’s Central Local Court on Friday. He had been released on bail in September after police admitted an expert concluded it could not be proved the plot was in his handwriting.

‘Unforgivable circumstances’
Nizamdeen’s lawyer, Moustafa Keir, told reporters outside court his client would apply for legal costs and sue the police.

“What authorities have done to this young man is absolutely unforgivable,” Kheir said.

“We will be seeking justice for him in the NSW Supreme Court. It’s a terrible experience, as a young man who has done everything right in life, he has gone through supermax jail in unforgivable circumstances.”

After Nizamdeen’s arrest, family members and hundreds of supporters in Sri Lanka held protests urging a swift and fair investigation.

Nizamdeen comes from a prominent Sri Lankan family. His uncle Faiszer Musthapha, the country’s sports minister, insisted his nephew was innocent.

Aljazeera

The seven-storey Roa Roa Hotel, with its clean lines and bright blue decor, was one of the few high-rises in the small Indonesian city of Palu, on Sulawesi Island, offering a dash of style to visitors on a budget.

Just under half the hotel’s 50 rooms were booked on the last Friday of September, many of them by athletes competing in a gliding championship that was taking place nearby. As evening fell, some guests headed out for dinner. Others chose to stay behind and relax.

Then the ground began to rumble. Staff and guests rushed to escape as the magnitude 7.5 quake cracked the hotel’s concrete columns, reducing the building to a pile of twisted steel and rubble.

The Roa Roa, which was completed in 2014, wasn’t the only major building that failed in the quake and the tsunami that followed. The Mercure hotel overlooking the city’s distinctively shaped bay, the Ramayana shopping centre, hospitals, schools and the airport’s control tower were all badly damaged in the disaster, which left more than 2,100 people dead and hundreds missing.

Indonesia is one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries, experiencing seismic activity on an almost daily basis and an earthquake of magnitude 5 about once a week on average. Just two months before the Sulawesi disaster, two earthquakes rocked the island of Lombok, killing 500.

‘Wake-up call’
“I see that these earthquakes are our wake-up call,” Raditya Jati, director of disaster risk reduction at Indonesia’s National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB), told Al Jazeera.

“This is the right moment for us [to have] structural mitigation and non-structural mitigation. There’s got to be an effort to manage risk.”

It’s not only earthquakes that put Indonesians at risk. The archipelago is vulnerable to a range of other natural disasters including landslides, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, which make it even more complicated to build structures that can survive the impact.

Palu also saw widespread soil liquefaction with entire communities disappearing into the resulting mud.

“[Sulawesi] was a complex disaster,” said Elizabeth Hausler, founder and CEO of Build Change, which works in developing countries, including Indonesia, to help local communities build homes that can better withstand natural disasters.

“We should be able to design a control tower to withstand that, but this is complex science, complex research, and complex engineering. The US, Japan and maybe a few other countries are state of the art on this, but it has not spread throughout the world.”

Over the past 30 years, Indonesia has reported an average of 289 significant natural disasters each year with an average annual death toll of about 8,000 people, according to the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. While falling masonry and collapsed buildings are the main cause of injury and death in an earthquake, it is only recently that Indonesia began to tighten its construction regulations.

Seismic resistance
The first building codes were issued in 1998 and it was only in 2002 that a national building law was passed (it had been a draft since 1964). A national standard on seismic design was established in 2012, along with a revised manual on improving seismic resistance in larger buildings. Indonesia’s earthquake risk map, meanwhile, was updated last year, identifying the areas of the archipelago most at risk of seismic activity.

“An appropriately designed earthquake-resistant building should perform satisfactorily during an earthquake,” said Wael Hassan, an associate professor in structural and earthquake engineering at the University of Alaska.

Like other developing nations in earthquake-prone regions, Hassan said that, in Indonesia, there is a large gap between design practices, construction itself and the enforcement of building regulations. “A good seismic design with poor construction and quality control won’t help resist the earthquake.”

An earthquake prediction map prepared by Indonesia’s BNPB [National Agency for Disaster Management]
Architects admit there is pressure to reduce costs, and changes are made as a result. But they insist there is no compromising safety.

“In my experience, the client asks for the cheapest possible,” said Brahmastyo Puji Pamadyo, who is head of the professional registration department at the Institute of Architects Indonesia in Jakarta.

“But every time we discuss this with the client, the architect, the structural expert and others, safety standards are something that are non-negotiable. So if they want to reduce the budget, what could be bargained over is something like the facade or interior materials – but not like, ‘let’s reduce one column’.”

Earthquake-resistant buildings need to be engineered for horizontal forces (tremors) as well as the vertical forces of a conventional building, to have strong connections between their concrete columns and horizontal beams and to incorporate numerous other features to reduce the risk of outright collapse during an earthquake.

“They might be repairable and they might not be repairable, but they won’t kill people and that’s the most important thing,” said Hassan.

Searching for solutions
The World Bank currently estimates the cost of the disaster in Sulawesi at $500m, including damage totalling $185m for commercial and industrial buildings and $165m for infrastructure.

“The high impact on commercial-industrial buildings could affect operations and recovery in the retail and tourism, education and health sectors,” the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance, known as the AHA Centre, wrote in its most recent update on the situation.

Losses could well be higher because World Bank estimate does not include the costs of equipment, social impact, or effects on business.

“We don’t look for someone to blame,” said Jati. “We’re looking for a solution for the future. If we have adopted this map and we’re aware that there’s the risk of an earthquake, there’s got to be monitoring on how to control it. We’re not talking only about the government, but also the developer, private sector, or anyone who is developing within high-risk area.”

Many Indonesians will not resort to professional architects or engineers when building their own homes, instead doing it themselves using bricks, concrete and tiles.

“They think that using [a] steel core is something luxurious,” IAI’s Pamadyo said. “In many houses, they’re just using bricks. They think that strong material is a strong structure when actually [a strong] structure is a system.”

Build Change has been working in Indonesia since 2005 and provides training in bricklaying and other crucial construction skills, as well as simple manuals to help villagers build safer homes.

Rescue workers and a soldier remove a victim of the September 28 earthquake from the Balaroa neighbourhood of Palu
Hausler said construction standards have improved greatly in recent years, especially in Sumatra where a number of serious quakes have underlined the need for safer homes.

“We have seen things change,” she said. “We see an improvement and people building back better… We also see people going back to building in timber, maybe with a masonry skirt wall. It’s actually much better in an earthquake.”

‘Nervous’
In Sulawesi, nearly 68,500 homes were destroyed in the disaster, but houses are actually subject to less stringent regulations on earthquake resistance than buildings that are considered of greater importance to the community – an airport, hospital or other building where large numbers of people gather – or central to disaster response.

With a badly damaged runway and no functional control tower, Palu’s skies were closed at a time when emergency teams were desperate to get into the city and residents eager to get out.

Collapsed hospitals and damaged clinics made it hard to treat the badly injured – more than 4,600 people in Palu and surrounding districts. Some 45 health facilities were destroyed or damaged in and around Palu, according to the AHA Centre.

Working in the hard-hit area of Sigi, which was also affected by soil liquefaction, MERCY Malaysia found patients fearful of stepping inside the district health facility.

MERCY Malaysia field hospital near a damaged clinic in earthquake-hit central Sulawesi [MERCY Malaysia]
“Like all other buildings that are still standing there are cracks on the walls,” said Dr Shalimar Abdullah, a specialist with MERCY Malaysia’s relief team, which helped set up a field hospital outside.

“Even visitors like us were nervous entering the building, what more the patients who have to spend hours waiting in line.”

Indonesian schools, while usually single-storey, tend to have large windows and an unreinforced gable roof that is vulnerable to collapse in an earthquake. More than 2,700 were damaged in the Sulawesi disaster. Experts say revisions to school design standards are necessary to reinforce the masonry around the windows – making them sturdier – and helping strengthen the entire structure.

The Roa Roa’s architects declined to speak to Al Jazeera. But as rescue teams continued to search the rubble for survivors earlier this month, the hotel’s owner, Denny Liem, appeared on local television.

“The hotel was designed to withstand an earthquake as high as 8 on the Richter scale,” he told the reporter as dust billowed in the air.

Aljazeera

Bhutan’s voters have handed an overwhelming victory to a new party headed by a surgeon in only the third democratic election held by the Himalayan kingdom, according to provisional results.

The country of 800,000 people, wedged between giant neighbours China and India and known for its Gross National Happiness index, has now chosen a different party to rule at each election since the end of absolute monarchy in 2008.

The centre-left Druk Nyamrup Tshogpa (DNT), which was only formed in 2013, won 30 of the 47 national assembly seats in Thursday’s vote, according to the provisional results released by Bhutan’s election commision. Official results are to be announced Friday.

Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT) secured the other 17 seats in the runoff contest limited to the two parties who led a first round of voting in September, the AFP news agency reported.

The last ruling party was excluded from the contest.

DNT leader Lotay Tshering, a 50-year-old urology surgeon who trained in Bangladesh and Australia, vowed to work for “nation-building” in the country, which is battling high foreign debt, mainly owed to India, as well as youth employment, rural poverty and criminal gangs.

Both parties had vowed to boost the economy with Tshering’s party using the slogan “Narrowing The Gap”.

The DPT, which won Bhutan’s first election in 2008 but did not get a seat in the 2013 vote, had wanted to accelerate the building of hydropower plants which dominate the economy, with electricity mainly exported to India.

The DNT has been more wary about increasing Bhutan’s debt to pay for more power plants.

Aljazeera