STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT. Last week, an earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Java, leaving at least 321 people dead and roughly 2,000 others injured. The disaster damaged over 62,000 homes and displaced more than 73,000 people, per the Agence France-Presse.
But all this catastrophic damage occurred despite the disaster only registering at a magnitude of 5.6—which, “in the scheme of things, is just not a huge earthquake,” Susan Hough, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey, tells the Washington Post’s Carolyn Y. Johnson. “There’s lots of faults that can produce an earthquake that big.”
One reason why the recent earthquake was so damaging has to do with its location. Its epicenter was just over 6 miles from the surface, writes CNN’s Masrur Jamaluddin and Rhea Mogul. “Even though the earthquake was medium-sized, it [was] close to the surface… and located inland, close to where people live,” Gayatri Marliyani, a geologist at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Indonesia, tells the AP. “The energy was still large enough to cause significant shaking that led to damage.”
The Bank of China Jakarta branch donated IDR200 million on Monday to victims of the Cianjur earthquake in West Java, where BOC provided assistance through the Indonesian Red Cross (PMI).
Authorities in Indonesia are urging religious tolerance, after a conservative Islamist group tore off labels from tents that were donated by a church for survivors of the Cianjur earthquake.
In a Twitter video that went viral on Saturday, a group of people, later identified as members of the conservative Islamic Reformist Movement, were seen removing labels emblazoned with the words “The Reformed Evangelical Church of Indonesia” from the blue tents donated by the church to support survivors of the disaster.
In the video, a man is heard saying “let’s destroy it”, referring to the tents. Another man, wearing a long robe and white cap, can be seen recording while smiling. The removal of the tags underlines the lingering fear of Christianisation in the world’s most populous Muslim majority nation.
