Some states may renege on pledged aid: UN

Some states may renege on pledged aid: UN

John Vidal and Jamie Wilson, The Guardian, London

The United Nations warns that huge promises of aid from rich countries to the Asia tsunami crisis might not be fulfilled as some countries use dubious methods to appear more generous than they really are.

Charities and international bodies say they fear that much of the money pledged so far to help the emergency in southern Asia may not materialize because governments traditionally renege on their humanitarian pledges.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which is leading the response to the disaster, the amount promised stood on Sunday at just under US$2 billion after a verbal pledge at the weekend of $500 million by Japan and $530 million from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

But UN OCHA spokesman, Robert Smith, said: "Large-scale disasters tend to result in mammoth pledges ... What will end up on the ground will be much less."

Rudolf Muller, also of UN OCHA, said: "There is definitely double accounting going on. A lot of the money will be swallowed up by the military or will have been diverted from existing loans."

A spokesman for the Overseas Development Institute, Britain's leading aid analysts, said: "The research evidence is that the immediate response to natural disasters involves some new money, but that rehabilitation needs are often met by switching aid money between uses rather than increasing total aid to the countries affected."

The disparity between government promises and the delivery of emergency and rehabilitation aid can be extreme. Iranian government officials working to rebuild Bam, destroyed by an earthquake exactly a year before the Asian tsunami, last week said that of $1.1billion aid promised by foreign countries and organizations only $17.5 million had been sent.

The worst example was Hurricane Mitch, which in 1998 swept through Honduras and Nicaragua, killing more than 9,000 people and making 3 million homeless. Governments pledged more than $3.5 billion and the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the EU promised a further $5.2 billion, but less than a third of the money was ever raised.

Emergencies in Gujarat, Bangladesh and central America in the past three years have mostly not received all the money promised. The humanitarian emergency in Afghanistan attracted more than $700 million of pledges, but less than half that has been sent.

A spokesman for the U.S. Agency for International Development could give no breakdown between civilian and military expenditures. But the U.S. secretary of state, Colin Powell, indicated that the cost of military logistics were not included in the $350 million pledge.

There was also concern that the Asia crisis would inevitably draw money from other emergencies.

Jasmine Whitbread, international director at the Oxfam aid organization said: "We are concerned that humanitarian aid could be sucked from other crises such as Sudan and Congo where the needs are just as great. Pledges to the tsunami victims must be new money and not taken from the people in other crises."