Indonesias white-flag shame in flood-ravaged Sumatra

As the waters begin to recede across Sumatra, what lingers is something far colder than the floods that swept through Aceh, darker than the landslides in North Sumatra and more unsettling than the rubble left behind in West Sumatra at the close of 2025.

It is the chill of bureaucratic silence and the paralysis of fiscal capacity, what many have come to describe with growing clarity as the state’s absence in Sumatra.

At a moment when thousands of lives are imperiled and millions more see their futures erased, the country is confronted with a grim spectacle: a state that appears formidable on paper yet falters when its citizens raise white flags atop homes nearly submerged.

The narrative of state absence in this disaster is not emotional exaggeration. It is a sociological reality and a stark fiscal fact, worsened, whether acknowledged or not, by sweeping austerity measures that have strangled regional governments since the beginning of the year.

It must be said plainly: as more than a thousand lives were buried or carried away by floodwaters, the central government remained preoccupied with administrative procedures for declaring a national disaster, as though human life in Sumatra carries a different weight on Jakarta’s political scales.

The refusal to confer national disaster status is not a matter of semantics. It is a symbolic declaration that the central government is unwilling to assume full responsibility, instead leaving already devastated regions, economically battered and fiscally depleted, to claw their way out of the mud alone.

This comes after nearly a year in which those regions were forced into a fiscal fast by an aggressively imposed efficiency drive from the center.

Fiscal discipline illusion

The fiscal logic currently guiding policy has moved beyond conservatism into a realm of systematic neglect. Consider this: estimated economic losses across Sumatra have reached roughly 60 trillion rupiah, yet the fiscal response amounts to little more than a few billion rupiah in relief. Can this be reconciled with any notion of reason?

Take West Sumatra as one example. Losses there are estimated at 13.52 trillion rupiah (US$805.7 million), nearly double the province’s annual budget, yet the region is expected to cope with emergency funds that evaporate within days.

The central government’s efficiency policy, implemented since early 2025, has become a double-edged sword. It may stabilize figures in Jakarta’s ledgers, serving Jakarta’s priorities and political-economic ambitions, but it simultaneously strips away the safety net for citizens in the regions.

The much-touted concept of fiscal slack celebrated in Jakarta has proven to be little more than a mirage. By year’s end, regional coffers are, in practical terms, bone dry. The austerity imposed from the center left local governments without meaningful reserves to confront disasters of this magnitude.

Asking district governments in remote parts of Sumatra to reallocate budgets while their bridges lie in ruins and markets have been flattened is a bitter irony. On the ground, contingency spending balances in many areas amount to only a few hundred million rupiah, enough perhaps to provide basic meals for a subdistrict for a day or two, but utterly insufficient to repair collapsed embankments or rebuild schools swept away by floods.

The state, it seems, is present only as an observer issuing instructions from air-conditioned offices in Jakarta. Meanwhile, local officials, out of fuel and supplies, can do little more than stare helplessly at displaced families who are beginning to go hungry and succumb to disease.

Yes, the central government eventually released 268 billion rupiah in emergency cash assistance for all affected regions. But let us examine this figure with human logic. Divided evenly, it amounts to roughly 4 billion rupiah per district, a token sum for areas grappling with losses in the trillions.

What this ultimately reveals is a deeply troubling fiscal disparity, a gap measured in thousands of times between real devastation and the constrained generosity of a bureaucracy shackled by austerity rules.

When procedure overrides humanity

The mismatch between the scale of the disaster and allocations through the National Disaster Management Agency further exposes misplaced priorities.

Indonesia’s disaster budget resembles a small umbrella forced to withstand an open-sea storm. While infrastructure recovery needs exceed 51.82 trillion rupiah, the government remains bogged down in verification processes for emergency-ready funds.

Every second of budgetary delay carries a human cost: another life lost, another child permanently cut off from education or health care. Reluctance to disburse emergency funds swiftly during the critical response phase, in the name of rigid fiscal discipline, amounts to humanitarian neglect cloaked in tidy financial administration.

The president may proudly declare that Indonesia is resilient and does not require foreign assistance. But resilience should not be paid for with the blood of its own people. Rejecting international aid while domestic logistics warehouses stand empty due to cost-cutting is a form of arrogance with lethal consequences.

People in remote parts of Aceh do not need grand narratives about national self-reliance. They need medicine before infections worsen. They need infant formula before their children’s cries fade from exhaustion and hunger.

The white flags now fluttering across flooded villages are not merely symbols of surrender to nature. They are acts of protest directed at Jakarta. They bear witness to a state that failed to appear during the most critical window for saving lives.

Instead, the government became trapped in a bureaucratic maze: who must sign what, which funds may be shifted, who will bear administrative liability before auditors. Fear of procedural violations has eclipsed fear of human loss. This is nothing short of a moral diminishment of governance, born of blind austerity.

The state’s absence is also evident in its neglect of ecological root causes. These floods and landslides are not acts of nature alone; they are the cumulative result of years of unchecked forest and land exploitation along Sumatra’s spine. The state is present when issuing mining and plantation permits, yet conspicuously absent when it comes to enforcing environmental protections and safeguarding watersheds.

When disaster strikes, the government is quick to blame extreme rainfall, as if it were the sole factor. It ignores the fact that the very lands it allowed to be stripped bare in pursuit of growth targets are now burying its citizens.

This absence extends to information and empathy. Had such a disaster struck the heart of political power, national resources would likely have been mobilized within hours. But because it unfolded in Sumatra, far from the country’s economic epicenter, the response has felt distant and technocratic.

Casualty figures become daily statistics on meeting-room tables, not catalysts for nationally organized solidarity. The slow deployment of heavy equipment and search-and-rescue teams to remote areas underscores how centralized and discriminatory the current emergency response system remains.

There are promises from the Ministry of Finance to allocate 60 trillion rupiah in the 2026 state budget for rehabilitation. For now, however, this figure is little more than a string of zeros on planning documents.

For those shivering in evacuation shelters today, next year’s budget cannot buy blankets or rebuild collapsed walls. The deadly time lag between present suffering and future funding has laid bare how this austerity policy has stripped citizens of their right to responsive emergency protection.

This crisis must serve as a turning point. Indonesia cannot continue managing disasters with a firefighting mentality while rationing water. A fundamental shift in fiscal risk allocation is required. Forcing regions to shoulder disasters of national scale is a form of acute spatial injustice.

Contingency funds must no longer be residual budget items but robust, immediately accessible instruments of citizen protection. Efficiency that comes at the expense of human life is not efficiency; it is moral failure.

The central government must also stop hiding behind the rhetoric of regional capacity. When a province can no longer perform its basic functions due to disaster, that is precisely when the constitutional mandate of the central government must operate in full.

Protecting the entire Indonesian people and territory is not decorative language in the Constitution; it is an operational directive. Failure to provide assistance commensurate with the scale of loss is a constitutional failure.

Rebuilding trust

Sumatra today is a portrait of a nation suffering from structural illness. Indonesia has resources, technology and fiscal space, if only it were willing to divert funds from less urgent prestige projects.

The problem is not a lack of money but a lack of political will to place citizen safety above all else. The state’s absence in this disaster is a wound that will linger, a betrayal of the social contract between the people and those meant to stand at the front line in moments of greatest need.

Do not let those white flags fly for too long. Each strip of cloth tied to shattered fences is a searing indictment of officials who sleep soundly while their citizens cry out. Rebuilding Sumatra is not only about restoring bridges and roads; it is about restoring trust, trust that has been washed away by floods of neglect.

The state must act now, with its full strength, not with fiscal scraps grossly disproportionate to total losses of 68.67 trillion rupiah. Stop calculating cost-benefit ratios atop the graves of victims. Fiscal bureaucracy must be the first to bow to humanity, not the barrier that stands between citizens and survival.

Dr Jannus TH Siahaan is public policy analyst and doctor of sociology from Universitas Padjadjaran, Bandung, Indonesia.