SURAT kabar Inggris, The Guardian, memberitakan aksi kumpul koin yang dilakukan masyarakat Aceh untuk Australia. Media terkenal di Eropa ini memberikan judul untuk artikelnya dengan: "Aceh residents use #KoinUntukAustralia campaign to offer to repay Australian aid"

Media tersebut turut mengungkapkan latar belakang aksi ini disebabkan pernyataan provokatif Perdana Menteri Australia, Tony Abbott.

Berikut petikan lengkap artikel The Guardian yang dirilis hari ini terkait aksi #KoinUntukAustralia:

Aceh residents use #KoinUntukAustralia campaign to offer to repay Australian aid

Province reacts in outrage to Australian PM Tony Abbott linking the gift of $1bn in aid after 2005 tsunami to a clemency bid for Australians on death row.

Enraged citizens from the tsunami-ravaged province of Aceh, Indonesia, have started a movement to collect coins to “pay back Australia” in a backlash against provocative statements by the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott.

Venting their anger on Twitter under the hashtag #KoinUntukAustralia, or Coins for Australia, Acehnese have taken to the social network in droves to lambast the Australian leader.

Posting a photo of a 1,000 rupiah coin (worth less than 10 cents in Australia) stuck to a piece of paper with six zeros cheekily added next to it, one Twitter user Nikita Paradisa asked: “Is it enough? Ur bank account please, Mr Tony Abbott.”

As diplomatic efforts have ramped up to save Australians Andrew Chan, 31, and Myuran Sukumaran, 33, from imminently facing an Indonesian firing squad, Abbott controversially suggested that Indonesia should “reciprocate” for the $1bn pledged in tsunami aid by sparing the lives of the two Australians.

A notoriously proud people, the Acehnese say the Australian prime minister should be ashamed of his comments and they will gladly return the money.

“We never asked for their aid, they offered it to us as courtesy,” Dina Handayani, 27, a Banda Aceh resident and civil servant told the Guardian.

Conceived initially between friends during a heated discussion at an Aceh coffee shop, postgraduate student Burhanuddin Alkhairy, 26, told the Guardian his friends started the Twitter hashtag as a way to get their message across to the Australia PM.

“We regret the link the Australian prime minister made between tsunami aid and the execution of the drug dealers, they are two very different things,” Alkhairy said. “This is our moral protest to his statement.”

The Acehnese, he said, were angry that Abbott would suggest that aid pledged after the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami – a disaster that killed more than 170,000 people in their province alone – would be offered conditionally and retroactively.

Alkhairy says his group never intended to take to streets and actually collect coins but the movement has inspired others to do just that. (Baca selengkapnya dengan mengklik tautan ini).[]