Clinton urges private firms not to forget about tsunami

Clinton urges private firms not to forget about tsunami

Nick Wadhams, Associated Press/United Nations

The world's response to the tsunami could serve as a blueprint for future disasters, but only if donors don't give up on people in Southeast Asia who still need help, former U.S. President Bill Clinton said.

Clinton, the UN envoy for tsunami recovery, told a conference of U.S. executives on Monday that there is still much to be done to help the region after the Dec. 26 disaster. He said now was the most difficult time - initial relief efforts are over but the region has a long way to go until it fully recovers.

"If you do something that works well, then other people will copy it. We need to leave something here that will be copied," Clinton said. "We have got to prove that we can see this through in an honorable and effective way."

The conference at the United Nations saw UN emergency relief officials meet with the Business Roundtable, an association of 160 leading U.S. chief executives. They discussed coordination among companies that wanted to contribute to relief efforts and the UN agencies and non-governmental organizations doing the work.

Hank McKinnell, CEO of the drug company Pfizer and chief of the roundtable, said the most important thing to learn was speed - how to get companies to respond as fast as possible when disasters happen.

"I can only say that we in the private sector want to do the right thing and in times of crisis we want to do it quickly," McKinnell said.

An undersea earthquake of at least magnitude-9.0 off Indonesia triggered a tsunami that traveled across the Indian Ocean, killing at least 126,000 people in Indonesia, almost all of them in the Aceh province, and another 48,000 in 10 other countries.

So far, the United Nations says, there have been US$6.7 billion in pledges, about US$2 billion of which has been either been guaranteed or distributed, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In Jakarta, Indonesia and foreign donors agreed on Monday to set up a $500 million fund to help finance reconstruction in Indonesian areas hit by the December tsunami and an earthquake last month.

The fund - to be managed by the government, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Commission and up to 20 donor countries - is part of an effort to ensure that aid contributed by donors doesn't get lost to corruption. The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union.

While Clinton and McKinnell focused on continued tsunami relief, UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland urged the private sector to look beyond the disaster toward 25 other UN-designated crises around the world, in places including Congo and Uganda, where UN relief agencies have struggled to raise the money they need.

"In the 25 emergencies around the world, it's only the tsunami area where we have adequate resources to meet the needs; in all another areas we are desperately behind," Egeland said.

McKinnell said the tsunami relief effort had been much easier because there was a concrete plan for how to proceed, whereas no such thing existed for other crises.

"Absent a roadmap to success, I don't think you're going to get the private sector engaged the way you did with the tsunami," McKinnell said.