World struggling with details of tsunami response

World struggling with details of tsunami response

Peter Mackler, Agence France-Presse/Colombo

Two weeks after the world's worst tsunami wreaked havoc in South Asia, the international community is still struggling with its response to a crisis that broke with biblical spread and ferocity.

Despite massive pledges of aid for victims of the earthquake and tidal wave that killed over 150,000 people, questions of distribution, logistical coordination and even politics hang over recovery efforts expected to last years.

Officials acknowledge they had no ready blueprint for dealing with an enormous disaster erupting on several fronts as did the Dec. 26 tsunami that pounded nearly a dozen countries across the Indian Ocean.

The United Nations said it was the worst natural calamity it had ever faced. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia, the worst-hit country, called it an unprecedented catastrophe requiring an unprecedented response.

"Right now we are trying to get control of this," said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). "I think there will be a lot of case studies done and a few lessons drawn."

Nations and multilateral institutions have committed nearly US$4 billion in aid for victims of the tsunami that wrecked coastlines and shattered the lives of an estimated five million people.

But while countries have jockeyed to top one another in public displays of generosity, there was no guarantee the total assistance actually forthcoming would match up with the sums pledged.

Past disasters suggest it may fall well short. Some officials also called for an oversight system to make sure the aid got to its intended destination and was not diverted by local politicians.

Perhaps more daunting was the challenge of coordinating the dozens of humanitarian groups and military contingents pouring into the region to provide food, water, medical and sanitation facilities.

Lt. Gen. Robert Blackman, who was commanding a massive U.S. military relief effort involving some 90 aircraft, 18 ships and nearly 13,000 personnel, admitted they were feeling their way through.

"This has been a unique military operation ... in that we have been planning, assessing, deploying and executing concurrently," he said. "We learn more and more every day, and I suspect that we will for some time now.

After some early confusion created by a U.S. move to establish a "core group" of countries for tsunami relief efforts, the United Nations has re-emerged as the lead agency to coordinate the world's response.

But the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), which is tasked with playing traffic cop for various aid groups in disasters, has often lacked the resources and clout to do the job.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who toured some of the worst-hit areas last week and attended last week's ASEAN tsunami conference in Jakarta, agreed efforts were needed to boost cooperation.

He said he expected the U.S. military contingent based in Thailand to help coordinate other countries' forces coming into the region. But more UN staffers were needed in areas such as Indonesia's ravaged province of Aceh.

"There are a lot of people in need, so there should be a flood of organizations coming in and we have to make sure that we rationalize what we are doing in each of these countries," Powell told CNN.

Politics and local insurgencies were also serious complications in efforts to help Indonesia and Sri Lanka, where most of the people died in the tsunami.

Rights groups have warned that Jakarta's military campaign to crush a long-running rebellion in Aceh and restrictions on aid groups were hindering relief efforts.

In Sri Lanka, a bitter row has erupted over aid distribution, with Tamil rebels accusing government soldiers of diverting relief away from the north and eastern areas they control. The government denies the charge.