We have never done this before. What the United Nations, the governments of the world and the myriad aid agencies are attempting is unprecedented — more aid is going to more people in more countries more quickly than at any point in human history. And that’s lesson one: let’s not pretend that this disaster is like all the others on a slightly bigger scale.
After Boxing Day, for those of us not in Sumatra, Thailand or Sri Lanka, the realisation of how big a catastrophe this was came slowly. Since then it has been an exercise in passive disaster tourism, starting with resorts familiar to many in the West, and then gradually encompassing pictures from unknown cities on little-known islands.
And it isn’t just the magnitude of the events — it’s the scope. Five thousand tourists from the Scandinavian countries are still missing, nearly 3 000 from Sweden alone, making this the worst disaster to be suffered by that country for many years — and all of it happening a continent away.
You could argue that it is precisely this (albeit very uneven) globalisation of suffering that has led to so much money being raised by popular appeal.
Later on the same day that we learned of the tsunami, my oldest daughter received an SMS from a friend who was with her family in the Indian Ocean saying that they were safe. But that ability to communicate across absurd distances doesn’t make physical relief that much easier. In China, more houses now have DVD players than hot and cold running water: the electricity is easier to install.
The logistics are extraordinary. This week saw a number of flights by the Royal Air Force into Sri Lanka. Three of them were part of a joint operation between the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Think about the coordination needed to agree the cooperation, settle on the cargo, acquire it, get clearance, fly in, unload and deliver.
Meanwhile, 40 tonnes of water and jerry cans, donated by Scottish Water and Strathmore Water, were being flown from Glasgow to the Maldives on Monday, just as a Save the Children charter flight from Stansted airport arrived in Colombo with three million litres of water on board.
In Aceh, the regional airport is 400km from the flattened city of Banda Aceh, where half the population perished last week. Flights have to unload there and the cargoes are transferred to smaller planes, which fly closer but, in turn, have to transfer their loads to helicopters.
On Monday, a spokesperson for the UN’s World Food Programme revealed that in some coastal villages near Banda Aceh, the press of people requiring aid was preventing some of the helicopters from landing. And one of Oxfam’s organisers in Indonesia said that a plane carrying enough water equipment for 60 000 people had been stuck in an air-traffic jam at Medan airport for two days, waiting to take off.
Also on Monday, the UN calculated that there were 175 000 small ”camps” of survivors in clusters along the shore of Aceh, all of them needing urgent help. Yet it is hard to get the helicopters to them, not least because Aceh has been the scene of a fierce insurgency. The UN and other agencies have been more or less excluded for the past year, and the local authorities are chary about permitting foreign air forces to operate there.
Then there’s the problem of aid proliferation. A BBC reporter in Sri Lanka reports that the town of Galle has volunteers and agencies from every country and with disparate talents. Italian doctors and Canadian refugee experts rub well-meaning shoulders with Austrian Samaritans.
The Sri Lankan government, in seeking to coordinate all this effort, is then accused by the agencies of slowing things down. One local businessman was quoted by the BBC as complaining: ”You have the government, the UN, the private donors, the foreign aid workers — but they all seem to be doing their own thing.”
So, though no one doubts the ability to raise money for aid, the issue right now is its effective distribution. And beyond that, of course, the longer-term question of rebuilding entire cities and regions.
Unwelcome politicking
An unwelcome distraction in all this has been the politicking. It’s hard to admire the weaselly suggestions by opponents of British Prime Minister Tony Blair that, had they been prime minister, they would have been wandering around various British airports, personally checking on the Asia-bound cargoes and inspiring everyone to greater effort.
This criticism, however, is as nothing compared to the pasting that the UN is getting from some quarters. The UN oil-for-food scandal has been under-covered in Britain, but massively over-covered by sections of the United States media, and key Republican figures in Congress are now calling on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to resign.
It was revealed on Monday that things have become so bad that last month a special gathering of Annan and some colleagues and friends met to discuss the organisation’s immediate future.
And in Britain there have been two big articles in The Times in the past week slamming the UN as a failed organisation, unfit to lead the aid effort in Asia, or indeed anything else.
As one columnist wrote on Monday: ”The blunt truth is that on international crises ranging from war in Iraq to the waters of the Indian Ocean, the UN is philosophically redundant, structurally irrelevant and bureaucratically ossified.”
The author, Tim Hames, felt that an enlarged G8, operating under a looser structure, would do a better job.
It is hard to feel ecstatic about the UN when you consider what hasn’t happened over Darfur, and what appears to have happened over oil-for-food. But it is also impossible to see what could usefully replace it.
As Barbara Stocking, the director of Oxfam, said this week: ”If something is vital and yet not working well enough, it might be better to fix it rather than abandon it.”
Oxfam’s strong feeling is that the UN offers a legitimate, coordinative effort that — if it were to disappear — would only be replaced by confusion. If there is to be an International Rescue, then this is it.
To me, the Indian Ocean tsunami, as with Darfur and the aftermath in Iraq, proves the need for a better UN, not a dead UN. A retreat to an organisation of 10 members, as Hames suggests, simply means closing the door on 130 nations and telling them that you don’t care what they say or what they think.
That would be a disastrous moral retreat and an intolerable political message. No, the task is to work at creating the super-UN, with accountable, permanent agencies, based on its existing expertise, ready to intervene and help where necessary — and to stay helping. — Guardian Unlimited Â