Nearly a third of the $977-million urgently requested by the United Nations for the Asian tsunami relief effort has now been received, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator said on Tuesday.
Jan Egeland told the leading aid donors at a conference in Geneva that he had urged the speedy release of their government’s unprecedented $4-billion pledges. Together with private donations, the total amount expected now stood at $7-billion, he added.
Egeland, the head of the UN office for coordination of humanitarian affairs, praised what he called a ”new level of compassion, solidarity and generosity”.
But attention should remain focused on other disasters such as the ”Aids tsunami” and the ”war tsunami” which claimed large numbers of lives each year.
”Today we may see that, for the first time in history, we will have a flash appeal covered fully — 2005 has started better than any other year in recorded history in terms of human generosity.
I hope this is the new standard and the bad past is behind us.”
He added: ”Hunger doesn’t wait, disease doesn’t wait. We need to be quicker.”
The flash appeal for funds to be spent up to the end of June was made by the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, six days ago at the donor conference in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Many previous appeals, such as that for the December 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, drew generous pledges but much of the money did not materialise.
Aid agencies also expressed concern about broken promises and about the diversion of aid from other projects. Oxfam said giving failed to match pledges even for such prominent disasters as Hurricane Mitch’s destruction in central America in 1998, when less than a third of the promised $9-billlion materialised.
”In Afghanistan in 2004 the United States delivered only $200-million of the $450-million it promised,” its statement said.
Its spokesperson in Geneva, Amy Barry, said on average countries paid only half what they had promised.
Many countries claimed to be giving to one crisis by taking money from other disasters.
”The good news today is that France, the Netherlands and Canada have all said their donations will be new money and the European commission has promised that it would not divert aid from other crises,” Barry said. ”Significantly absent from that list are the US and the UK.”
Before travelling to Geneva on Tuesday the international development secretary, Hilary Benn, said £40-million of the £75-million pledged by the British government would be committed to the UN’s immediate relief effort.
But aid agencies have criticised the fact that two-thirds of the total is being drawn from Benn’s departmental reserves.
”They will need to be urgently replenished,” a senior aid official said.
The US, which initially tried to pre-empt the UN’s leading role by announcing its own core group of aid states, sent a delegation headed by Andrew Natsios, the administrator of its international development agency.
”We need to focus our efforts on coordination, on the logistical systems and on rapidly moving into the rehabilitation and reconstruction phases,” he said.
The UN has announced that the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has been engaged to track the flow of aid money, partly to reassure individual and state donors but also to investigate allegations of fraud or waste.
UN officials remain acutely aware of the criticism of the alleged mismanagement of the oil-for-food programme in Iraq.
Among the UN’s proposals are a way to let the public track every aid dollar on a website and the drafting of new rules to protect UN staff whistle-blowers.
”We want to be held accountable as agencies working on the ground and we want also our friends the donors to be held accountable for what they promised and what they actually delivered,” Egeland said. – Guardian Unlimited Â