NEW YORK - Widely publicized tsunami
recovery efforts undertaken by relief agencies and
governments in five disaster-affected countries -
Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and the
Maldives - remain hampered by incompetence,
corruption, discrimination and lack of public
accountability, according to a new report.
"Tsunami survivors, like many victims of
Hurricane Katrina [in the United States], are
angry and frustrated," said Laurel Fletcher,
co-author of the study titled "After the Tsunami:
Human Rights of Vulnerable Populations", released
by the University of California's Berkeley Human
Rights Center.
"Months have passed and
they are still living in displacement camps where
they have virtually no say in how their communities
will be rebuilt,"
said Fletcher, a clinical law professor at
Berkeley's School of Law.
The December 26
Asian tsunami, which mostly hit five countries in
the Indian Ocean region last December, killed a
staggering 224,495 people.
Meanwhile, last
week's South Asian earthquake, which killed more
than 79,000 in Pakistan, is the latest in a year
of some of the worst disasters ever seen, "yet
governments have failed to respond adequately and
lives have been lost as a result," Oxfam
International says in a second report.
The
thrust of the Oxfam report, titled "2005: Year of
Disasters", is that the number of people affected
by natural disasters has climbed dramatically over
the last decade, with tens of millions of people
affected in the past year alone.
The
report says the response to these emergencies has
been characterized by an uneven, often-late and
sometimes-inefficient international humanitarian
performance that has been undermined by inadequate
funding for the UN's vital appeals.
The UN
estimates more than $11 billion was donated for
tsunami emergency relief and long-term
reconstruction in the Indian Ocean region, the
International Herald Tribune reported this month.
The International Red Cross said while aid
prevented death due to hunger and disease,
resources were misallocated due to aid workers
competing to spend huge private donations quickly,
the newspaper reported.
In its briefing
paper, Oxfam says humanitarian assistance still
does not cover all needs, often arrives too late
and is too often determined more by media profile
or political criteria than humanitarian need. It
concludes that these failings are condemning
thousands of people to unnecessary suffering and
death.
The Berkeley study, produced in
collaboration with the East-West Center at the
University of Hawaii, says governments in all five
tsunami-affected countries failed to establish
effective mechanisms to respond to complaints of
abuses, and international humanitarian agencies
often failed to report abuses.
"A lack of
coordination on the part of aid agencies, coupled
with a lack of oversight, also led to inequities
in aid distribution," the joint study added.
The study also says government agencies
and aid organizations often failed to consult
people in affected communities about aid
distribution and reconstruction. "Without that
consensus, charges of cronyism and corruption
flourished," it notes.
At a World Bank
meeting of the "Global Consortium on Tsunami
Recovery", chaired by UN Special Envoy Bill
Clinton, Sri Lankan President Chandrika
Kumaratunga said last month that humanitarian
organizations and relief agencies that came in
large numbers received "vast amounts of funds for
reconstruction from concerned citizens throughout
the world".
But she regretted that the
procurement procedures in place among some of the
donor agencies and non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) were delaying the reconstruction process,
"while others are yet to channel funds to Sri
Lanka".
Kumaratunga appealed to these
organizations to complete the projects they had
undertaken because "the people of Sri Lanka were
questioning what had happened to the contributions
made by the caring people of the world, who
channeled large quantities of money to help
tsunami victims".
Fletcher told IPS, "Our
study found that some NGO representatives on the
ground as well as survivors complained that there
was an apparent disparity between the amount of
funds some groups had raised and how much aid was
delivered."
There is a lack of
transparency and accountability in relief efforts,
which compounds misperceptions and feeds rumors,
she said.
"With no mechanism to resolve
complaints of misappropriation of funds, inequity
in benefits distributed or inappropriate or
substandard goods or services provided, individual
survivors are left without recourse," Fletcher
added.
Similarly, many survivors
complained that government-sponsored aid programs
were not administered equitably, she pointed out.
"The Sri Lankan president's remark is
similar to complaints of tsunami survivors
throughout the region who asserted that public
authorities did not ensure fair distribution of
aid, either because of incompetence,
mismanagement, corruption or discrimination," she
noted.
To address these concerns and to
strengthen public confidence, "we recommend that a
survey of aid distribution be conducted to
determine whether there are inequities and to take
appropriate steps to remedy any irregularities,"
Fletcher noted.
Responding to
Kumaratunga's complaints, Paulette Song, tsunami
media officer at Oxfam America, told IPS, "Oxfam
is highly committed to accounting for how we're
spending the money we raised for our tsunami
response and to ensuring that the money we spend
reaches people on the ground."
Oxfam
International reported in a quarterly report to
March 31 that it expected its tsunami fund to
exceed $250,000,000, which it expects to spend
over the next five years.
Oxfam's deputy
director of humanitarian response, Emilie Parry,
returned recently from Sri Lanka and reported that
Oxfam projects are playing a crucial role in
rebuilding the lives of people there.
"Coordination is bound to be a problem
initially with any disaster on this huge scale
that hits without warning," Song said. "Those
issues have now largely been resolved, however,
and it's important to remember that despite the
challenges the aid effort succeeded in its
most-important goal of saving lives."
The
fact that following the tsunami there was not a
second spate of deaths from dehydration, disease
and lack of sanitation is testament to how much
Oxfam's tsunami aid did achieve, she added.
Meanwhile, the Oxfam study also said that
while governments responded generously to the
tsunami and look set to do so following the Asian
earthquake, they virtually ignored less visible
crises in places such as the Democratic Republic
of Congo, Malawi and Niger.
As a first
step, Oxfam proposed, governments must commit an
additional US$1 billion to a UN emergency fund on
top of existing humanitarian-aid levels to ensure
an immediate response to crises.
This
would be a rapid-response emergency fund that
would help end the delays that have cost so many
lives, and make sure all crises get funding, not
just the most newsworthy.
Reforming the
existing UN Central Emergency Revolving Fund is a
vital first step that governments must agree on
when they meet to review humanitarian action at
the UN General Assembly in November, the study
said.
