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.