VIEWPOINT: U.S. block on tsunami funds cynical and shameful
30 Dec 2004 Source: AlertNet
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A Thai woman is comforted while cremating a family member at a mass cremation site in Ban Muan, north of the Thai resort island of Phuket.
Photo by ADREES LATIF
Consultant and writer Nick Cater warns that undermining U.N. relief coordination efforts will be both costly and shortsighted.
The peak of a massive disaster is no time to deliberately undermine the one body charged with coordinating a global response to such a crisis.
In its warped response to the Asian tsunami catastrophe, the United States is seeking not to support and foster the United Nations but to damage its political credibility and destroy its vital capacities in disaster management.
U.S. President George W. Bush and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, have decided to set up a regional coordination group distinct from the United Nations, involving India, Japan, Australia and the United States.
This will have its own assessment teams, funding channels and, one suspects, political priorities, given the United States’ position as a superpower that desperately needs to find new friends, especially among the area's Islamic populations.
But the move, which amounts to an effective block on funding for the United Nations, is a vindictive decision, designed to punish the world body and, by its exclusion, the EU, for their stance over Iraq. It will be both costly - just wait for the duplication and waste, especially when military forces get involved - and shortsighted.
For this may be a massive disaster, at least in its geographic spread, but it is an ideal one to hold the U.N. to its mandates and make its systems work, not least the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), so all future disasters are better handled.
Why? Most of the area involved is free of conflict; in each country the affected percentage of population is usually small; overall regional communications and logistics remain fairly good; international attention is very high; and many countries have economies and local government structures that - with some support - should be able to cope after this initial crisis.
True, Jan Egland, the U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, should not have taken this moment to accuse various Western donors of being "stingy" with aid, although the initial U.S. response to his remarks appears to have been a welcome hike in its cash commitment to $35 million from $20 million.
Of course, Egland's criticism was overdue, entirely accurate and mild by comparison with the wholesale failure of the United States and most donors to miss by a mile the globally agreed target for overseas assistance of 0.7 percent of gross domestic product.
If such a target had been met, we might have seen serious and sustained investment in disaster preparedness in the region over recent decades, including the Pacific-style tsunami warning system that is now being demanded.
It will be interesting to see if January's World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan, has any view on the generosity or otherwise of donors when it comes to cost-effective commitments to preparedness, rather than the scramble of today's relief efforts.
Ahead of that, British Development Secretary Hilary Benn recently warned in a speech at the Overseas Development Institute in London that OCHA needed reform if its work was to improve.
His most important point was that OCHA lacked both the power and resources to coordinate relief efforts effectively, a judgement shamefully and cynically confirmed when the United States denied OCHA both funding and legitimacy to tackle this crisis.
(c) Copyright Nick Cater/Words & Pictures 2004
Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of
Reuters.
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