Indonesian govt did not send tsunami warning to its people

As the death toll in the recent Indonesian tsunami rises to 531, the Indonesia government said that it did not send a tsunami warning to people in Java because it did not want to alarm them. WTF! From The Age:

The government yesterday acknowledged it received international warnings about the impending disaster but did not pass them on to threatened communities along Java island's southern coast.

Science and Technology Minister Kusmayanto Kadiman said Indonesia received the bulletins 45 minutes before the tsunami struck but "did not announce them" because they did not want to cause unnecessary alarm.

"If it (the tsunami) did not occur, what would have happened," he said in the capital, Jakarta, without elaborating.

Answering reporters' questions as to why no warning was issued, Vice-President Jusuf Kalla claimed there was no need because most people had fled inland after the earthquake that created the tsunami.

"After the quake occurred, people ran to the hills ... so in actual fact there was a kind of natural early warning system," he said in Jakarta.

Natural early warning system, my ass! The Indonesian government is made up of fools and they should be blamed for the deaths.