UN failed to coordinate tsunami relief, Red Cross report says

By Tom Wright 
October 6, 2005
International Herald Tribune 
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/05/news/relief.php

GENEVA Rivalry between international aid agencies hampered relief efforts after the Indian Ocean tsunami, highlighting the failure of the United Nations to coordinate the rescue operation effectively, the International Federation of the Red Cross said in a report published Wednesday. 
 
About a quarter of a million people died from natural disasters in 2004, about three times the annual average for the past decade, the organization said in the World Disaster Report, an annual assessment of the global responses to natural catastrophes. The tsunami, triggered by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26, 2004, accounted for about 230,000 deaths. 
 
While aid for areas struck by the tsunami prevented the deaths of many people from hunger or disease, the report said competition between aid workers to spend huge private donations quickly led to a misallocation of resources. More than $11 billion has been donated to the Indian Ocean region for emergency relief and long-term reconstruction, the UN estimates. 
 
It's a myth that any aid is helpful, said Jonathan Walter, editor of the report, which was commissioned by the Red Cross but written by independent experts. 
 
The report comes amid a growing debate over the UN's role in disaster relief. 
 
In the Aceh region of Indonesia, the report said, the UN lacked authority to do its job in the chaotic early weeks, when the Indonesian military, local Islamic organizations and hundreds of local and foreign aid groups were competing for space. Of more than 200 aid agencies in the province at the start of 2005, only a quarter informed the UN about their operations, the report said. 
 
Margereta Wahlstrom, UN deputy emergency relief coordinator, said most of the funding for tsunami relief was from nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, unlike other large relief efforts, and this made it harder for the UN to know what everyone was doing. 
 
NGOs got all this money, Wahlstrom said in a telephone interview from New York. It did indeed create a competitive situation. That sometimes gets in the way of doing the best possible. 
 
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, a UN agency based in New York that is responsible for leading humanitarian efforts, has a $100 million annual budget, and a global staff of 860 people. By comparison, a single international nongovernmental organization, which the report did not name, was cited as having a budget of $40 million to spend in Aceh this year. 
 
Nearly everyone could hire a helicopter or boats, make their own needs assessments and distribution arrangements and fly the flag, the report said. 
 
But without coordination, relief was often misdirected, the report said. 
 
For example, the World Health Organization, a UN agency, sent measles vaccinations to a village near Banda Aceh, the provincial capital of the Indonesian province most severely affected by the tsunami, only to find that an unnamed organization had already vaccinated some children without leaving proper records.