Ex-U.S. president Clinton urges private companies not to forget

Ex-U.S. president Clinton urges private companies not to forget
about tsunami relief

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.