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Asia Society Briefing: Tsunami Disaster Relief Efforts
Jan Egeland
United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs
and Emergency Relief Coordinator
Presided By
Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke
Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Asia Society
New York and Washington DC (via videoconference), January 13, 2005
Welcome by Richard Holbrooke
I am enormously pleased to convene this special emergency meeting of Asia Society and our videoconference link with Washington today to hear a report from the man who is leading the worldwide effort to deal with the tsunami. Before I introduce Jan Egeland, I want to outline to you why we are here and what Asia Society is going to attempt to do to assist in the relief effort.
First I want to make a general point about Asia Society. We are not a relief organization and in the 49-year history of this organization we’ve never been involved in a relief effort. But because of the nature of this tragedy and the area it covers, we wish to assist.
We are doing this through several different areas: a website, which is more detailed in terms of where aid and assistance can go than the ones available through the New York Times and other websites and the US government. For example, we have already identified an NGO in Sri Lanka that wants to help the Grameen (Bank) small borrowers whose homes, thousands of them, were just wiped out. There is a specific fund but Americans couldn’t contribute to it and get a tax deduction so we are going to work out a way so if somebody wants to help in Sri Lanka, they can do it through us and get a legal tax deduction and move forward. We are going to be working in that area especially. In addition the United Nations Foundation, the foundation that Tim Worth runs, founded by Ted Turner with his billion dollars, has issued a challenge grant that any money given through us, up to a certain limit, will be matched by them. So there will be an opportunity to multiply your gifts.
But I want to stress our concept: we will not be an important factor in the emergency relief phase, which Jan Egeland is now spearheading. But every single crisis of this sort, without exception, after the world press turns away from the crisis, the crisis continues, the funding is ending and it goes on without a lot of the pledges being filled. That has happened in Hurricane Mitch in Central America, in the earthquake in Iran a year ago where according to the statistics only about $19 million of a pledged $1 billion arrived. And yet the reconstruction phase is going to be critical so we intend to be an ongoing effort to keep attention focused on this after it leaves the front pages of the newspapers. And in fact today by coincidence is the first day since the tsunami hit that it is not on the front page of the New York Times. This is inevitable. Press attention will recede just as the waters of the Indian Ocean receded. But the damage will go on and there will be an enormous amount of work to do and we will be part of it.
Our speaker today needs an introduction. That is to say everybody has seen him on television since December 27 but not all of you know Jan Egeland, at least not the way I do. Jan and I have been friends for a decade. We have worked together all over the world. I have even had the honor of visiting his grass-thatched hut in central Norway where he said I would find elves and dwarves. But on that, and only on that issue, he misled me. And by the way I say grass and not straw, a very important distinction to Norwegians.
Jan is the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordination at the United Nations, a big title for a big job. He spent the last 25 years of his life in humanitarian work, human rights work and peace work. He has really devoted his life to doing good that is so characteristic of his fellow countrymen and countrywomen. His wife was Minister of Overseas Development in Norway and now works at the United Nations Development Program and used to work at Statoil and lives here in New York. He was Special Advisor to the United Nations on Colombia where he worked very hard on settling that terrible war torn country. He was Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry in the late and mid 1990s, that’s where he was when we first met.
He has worked on emergency preparedness systems. He holds numerous awards. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and a Truman Fellow at the Institute for the Advancement of Peace in Jerusalem. He was chair of Amnesty International. He has been an active participant in many peace processes including one of the co-founders of what became known in shorthand as the Oslo Accords. He has been a negotiator in Guatemala between the government and the rebels. He was one of the hosts of the Ottawa Conference that led to the Landmine Treaties. And he has been continuously engaged in these issues. He is a great friend of mine. I think he is a great international public servant and we are very honored today, Jan, that you could take time out of your enormously busy schedule, I know you just flew in last night from Geneva, to join us today. Jan will speak for a few minutes and then answer questions. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to present to you, Under-Secretary-General of the UN, Jan Egeland.
Jan Egeland: Thank you, thank you very much, friends and colleagues. Thank you for coming here and thanks to the Asia Society for hosting us in the United Nations in this moment of truth for us as humanity, for international compassion and solidarity and also for the United Nations as the united nations. We have to prove ourselves now as a dozen of our member countries are living through times of utter crisis.
I was woken up early morning on the second day of Christmas the 26 th of December by a phone call from my colleagues in Geneva. And the first message was that a tsunami has hit the Maldives and Sri Lanka and probably a number of other countries. And already an appeal has come from the Maldives and Sri Lanka and we are sending people there as we speak, they said. Geneva is the center of operations for my office, for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Then I got phone calls, of course, every half an hour after that and it started to evolve. More and more countries were hard-hit. Certainly we knew where the epicenter was. The way the world now works, it is a better world in so many ways because we have technology. The seismic people of all of the seismic surveillance stations had woken up my people in Geneva even before we had heard from the countries effected and said a 9-grade on the Richter scale earthquake had been registered at the sea bed outside of Indonesia and a tsunami is probable. So the whole international alarm system started but of course it was not in time to alert any countries and we come back to that. There should be ‘the’ international alarm system and I think we should all end up this session by perhaps talking about how it can be and how it should never ever happen again as it is.
Let me try to very quickly go through the scope and the status of the crisis.
There are 12 affected countries: some of them very severely, some of them more lightly. There are over 150,000 dead. There are probably 500,000 wounded, very many of them very severely. The number of casualties will increase because as you will see there are also 24,000 missing persons registered. In Indonesia, Aceh, there are many not accounted for in addition to those officially missing. I expect the number to be in the end much much higher than the present 150,000-plus.
More than one million people lost everything, their homes, their community, everything. Five million people are in dire needs, they have no safe drinking water source, and they have no health services. They have no food. They need everything from local, national and international relief. The area includes three conflict zones: Aceh, on northern Sumatra; northern Sri Lanka; and Somalia. Five thousand miles of coastline are affected. And I think it is one of the points here that on those five thousand miles of coastline, this is not the first tsunami ever. There was one in the 1930s and there was a huge one in the 1830s. But the population must be 10, 20, 30 times higher since that time. So millions and millions were affected. Millions have their hopes destroyed. Millions wait for us to give them their hopes and their livelihoods back.
It is also important to note that this is an inter-continental catastrophe. I know you in the Asia Society would not mind me saying that Somalia was hard hit. We don’t have many images from Somalia. It is an active conflict zone. But our people, the UN people and the non-governmental organization people are helping fishing communities, in Puntlandin Somalia. A hundred fishing vessels were destroyed and a number of villages just washed away.
The tsunami was 50, 60 centimeters high as it went in open sea and the way it hit the Maldives was that it became a few meters high and it was not the crushing wall of water. Many people in the Maldives saved their lives because they started swimming. Their island disappeared, they swam for half an hour and it came back.
In Sri Lanka, in India, in Thailand, but also parts of Myanmar and Malaysia, it was a crushing wall of water because as the tsunami comes inland, it grows to be seven, eight ten, twelve meters high. Its crushing wall of water then caused many billions of dollars of damage.
In Indonesia, it was an explosion. I think there is no other word for it. It is like a thousand enormous bombs went off on the Aceh coast especially but also the northern Sumatra province coast. Whereas villages in other places are severely damaged, all of them, there are many villages along the Aceh province (where) you cannot even find them. They are totally gone. There are no people nearly, along the coastline, because those that lived there either fled inland where we are now desperately finding them and helping them and caring for them with Indonesian authorities. Or they have been washed away. And countless thousands of people are not accounted for; probably tens of thousands and many of them may perhaps never be accounted for because whole communities are lost.
There are very many actors here: 12 governments. And I would like to pay tribute to the governments, the local communities because it is not really the international community who are the first line of defense. It is the local communities themselves. It is what the mayor can do, the Elders can do, the civil defense people, the Red Crescent, the Red Cross people can do locally. It is 150,000-plus international NGOs, registered in the field already. That number will grow exponentially and in the end become a problem because we become too many partners. But the NGOs have done phenomenally well. They are our partners in the UN.
We have military assets from 15 countries. There are 13,000 UN soldiers. There are 100 helicopters from the US, saving lives every day. If we had not had the military assets we would not have been able to reach the roadless areas of Indonesia or of Sri Lanka so early. Now we have 5,000 international staff in Banda Aceh alone. Banda Aceh is a small place. It was a place where we had a very tiny international community of 8 workers before. It is in a conflict zone with restricted movement from outside Banda Aceh, until the tsunami hit. Now it is one of the busiest places on earth. The accessibility is, of course, our greatest problem, not because of political restrictions, at least not as of yet, but because there are no roads.
The coordination of all of this is done through the UN in terms of international relief and assistance. We are leading the coordination efforts on the ground. We work closely with the local governments and the national governments, the UN agencies—there are half a dozen of them – and there are bilateral donors now, 60 of them. There are local and international NGOs and the Red Cross movement.
What we focus on, what my life has been since that 26th of December, is focusing on logistics, more than anything. It is not the big words of describing it that is the important thing. It is to get enough assets in place because when we needed them the most, the roads and the airstrips were gone. And many of these areas had few roads and airstrips to start with.
We also have asked for funds from Day One. We have produced a global Indian Ocean Flash Appeal, which is a booklet of one hundred pages through sending teams on Day Two of the disaster, and within 7 days of work, we had the book ready. It is assessments of all the affected countries and several hundred projects with 40 partner organizations. We sought $977 million in this plan of action and I think we are getting it.
This (slide 3) shows the Joint Logistic Center; this is the military civilian hub -- two of the things we started with in the first place. Of course the affected countries and governments are really in charge. The Secretary General, me, as the Emergency Relief Coordinator and Special Representative, is trying to now be in the center of the coordination itself.
The donor nations are now 60 to 65. It is the biggest international aid effort and it is the widest ever. Nigeria has given money; Macedonia is going to give money. Trinidad and Tobago have given $2.5 million to the affected countries. We have an Inter-Agency Standing Committee, which I am chairing, which (includes) the principals of all the UN agencies, the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement and of the 3 large global NGO alliances: one based in the United States, one in Europe and one sort of the biggest and most global ones. We have a special coordinator in the field, which is my deputy. She left immediately, Margareta Wahlstrom.
OCHA in Geneva, doing global coordination with Rome and with Bangkok, is in charge of the appeal, resource tracking and the operation locally through humanitarian coordinators in each of the countries: Maldives, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Somalia, but also the others severely affected: India, Thailand, etc.
Maybe I can mention Indonesia in particular, how do we work. The country team of the UN and the NGOs is led by our humanitarian coordinator, Bo Asplung. They meet every morning and every night. We have a Sumatra/Aceh leader we sent from Geneva. He makes sure that it works in the field, locally, that the Banda Aceh coordinator really have all of the NGO and partner meetings, that we have sectoral coordination teams, so we have the health people meeting, the food people meeting, the logistics people meeting, the water people meeting, the sanitation people meeting, those who work to bury with dignity, but also with speed, the bodies, meeting etc. They all meet.
Then we have military humanitarian coordination, which is both with Indonesian authorities and with the 13 countries including the US presence. At the airport we have coordination of joint logistics. Banda Aceh airport and Medan airport, those two, had 2, 3 flights per day before this. Now they have 20, 30 flights per day. Already we have had accidents because it is too congested. We are also setting up another operations center. Meulobah is the most devastated of all the cities in the whole tsunami. There we now have a center. We got a real convoy through yesterday to Meulobah for the first time and it is a big achievement. We have back up airports in Kuala Lumpur and also in Singapore.
There is an unprecedented global response. More than $5 billion is pledged. In addition, (there is) the private funding, which may end up being as big as the public one. In the United States, certainly it already is. In Germany, it is. In Sweden, it is. We have never ever seen humanity respond in this way.
Among the new donors we have China, in a substantial cash way: $60 million altogether and $20 million of those is cash. We are doing now a public tracking system. We have gotten pro bono work from PricewaterhouseCoopers, here present. On Friday we established contact. On Saturday and Sunday we worked with them in New York and on Monday in Geneva and we believe we can now have a real time financial tracking system on the Internet so that everybody can see that their money from ‘X country’ went to that organization at this time, for those projects that are now being implemented, reported on at this point and accounted for by whom at which point.
Transparency, accountability will be key in this because it is so much money, there is so much interest and because there will also be challenges in the countries where we are active.
The latest development is of course that I think we have turned the corner in many countries. On the third day of the emergency, we felt overwhelmed because the full scale of what happened in Indonesia, especially, became known to us. Frighteningly enough, we all thought-- the government in Indonesia but also we in the UN thought—that maybe, surprisingly, Aceh and Sumatra was not so badly hit because we had no reports: no reports of casualties, no reports of damage. But of course in that 3 rd day it became known that there was nobody to make the call. There was nobody to report. Our own UN people had lost all satellite phones, all vehicles, all communication links. So it took until the third day to really understand how big it was. Of course, relief was already on its way. We had sent people there but we didn’t know how big it was.
We have turned the corner, however, I would say in all other places. And this second wave of death and disease that we had to predict on that third day is not taking place: there is no cholera; there are no uncontrollable epidemics. We seem to be able to treat the outbreaks of measles and diarrhea and so on, that are happening, because the world responded.
We have also now joint disaster management centers established by many governments and the UN. We are solving the logistics problems. We have procedures for use of bilateral military assets, which always is difficult. Generals do not want to be ordered by civilians, usually. In this case they have to take the guidance from the civilians, because it is the local, national and the international civilians who know where the needs are the greatest and how to meet these needs. It is going very well in this case. We have had for the first time access to the west coast by road, although it remains difficult.
We have however, security problems. We may discuss those and we have a dialogue now with the Indonesian government of how to overcome security problems without limiting access.
These (slide 5) are just some of the logistics routes that we have. This one is a good map. It just shows Sri Lanka. All of the coastal provinces were affected, all of them, except Mannar, the one that was shielded. And all of these have coastal roads destroyed. These are the various ways we try, with boat, with helicopter, with road, to reach people and it is going better and better by the day. Maybe in a day or two we can also say we turned the corner in Sumatra.
That concludes my statement. Thank you very much for hearing me and I look forward to the questions.
Holbrooke: I am going to ask the first question and Joe, (Joseph Snyder, Executive Director of Asia Society’s Washington Center), I would like you to direct one from Washington and then we will alternate.
Jan, thank you very much. Again thank you for carving a little time out of your busy schedule. I want to just start with two headlines in today’s New York Times and ask you to comment on them. First, Indonesia orders foreign troops providing aid to leave by March 26. We all know the epicenter happened also to be the epicenter of a long rebellion in Aceh and there is a lot of concern about how the two issues intersect. And secondly, same page, again from Jakarta, corruption in Indonesia worrying aid groups. You have already addressed the transparency issue but could you comment on those two issues. And before you do, for the benefit of the audience, Jan’s job has always supposed to have been non-political. But as he and I have taught, many times, there is no way to separate politics and humanitarian assistance –- they always get mixed up. So within the limits of your mandate, can you explain what is going on up there today with the US carriers beginning to pull back. The US military said they are going to start pulling out well ahead of this deadline. What is going on and how is it going to affect your efforts?
Egeland: We will have important meetings in Indonesia today to clarify both the issue of when the military assets would have to leave, if at all, and also the question of possible reporting and restrictions outside Banda Aceh and Milabou, which are the two main towns affected in Sumatra and Aceh.
The military assets are always for the first phase, really. We have now five helicopter carriers active. Usually we have helicopters active in a relief effort. Now we have five carriers. Two of those from the United States, we have one from Singapore, from India, from Australia and one coming in from France. It is for the early phase. I do not think that this deadline will pose a problem because before the end of March the roads will be cleared and we will use the cheaper and more effective alternative, which are civilian road convoys rather than helicopter and military air transport. However I am sure the Indonesian government will agree with me that the most important thing is to save lives and not have deadlines. And we may need certain military assets throughout the period.
The US’s biggest carrier leaving was always expected. We are very grateful it came so early and it made a real difference in these first weeks. We are making now a matrix, filling in gaps as some leave and some come. And we are doing that with the European Union countries. Javier Solana (Secretary-General of the Council of the EU) called me and offered that so we have people working in Brussels and Geneva to fill in gaps. So as one US carrier leaves, a French one should come. If an Australian leaves, we could have another one from Singapore. I am not so worried about that.
I am worried about insecurity and possible movement restrictions either by insecurity or by political restrictions on our movement. In Aceh, we did not have movement outside of Banda Aceh city until the tsunami hit. We have to have a very good dialogue, as I am sure we will, with Indonesian authorities on that.
The whole issue of corruption is an ultra important one. We need to know in the UN in the wake of the oil for food investigations and so on, that we can account for every dime of money spent. We even have to account for a lot of what is being spent through the NGOs and through other channels, working with us. That is why we are setting up these kind of systems and another thing we are discussing with Pricewaterhouse and others is also a flying squad of auditors who can go, not when we have evidence of fraud, but when we have a rumor or an allegation of mishandling of funds, even. We go, and we kill the mishandling and we clarify the question immediately. (Laughter)
Holbrooke: On the first part of this, are the Indonesians preventing aid workers from traveling unescorted into the rebel areas in Aceh, as has been reported?
Egeland: No. This is very important. We have had no movement restrictions so far. What we have been told is that there has to be a system where we notify about our movements the evening before. What we have to make sure is that we can then have an answer early the next morning when we say what we are going to do the evening before. In terms of military escort, which is being offered and I believe in some cases will be a requirement, humanitarians do not like military export. In exceptional cases we accept it and even we ask for it when it is too dangerous. There have been several cases of looting and of violent episodes in Aceh. The place is full of small arms and various groups. But neither the government nor the GAM, the guerilla movement, has restricted any of our movements so far.
Holbrooke : One last follow up. On both Sri Lanka and Aceh, the two hardest hit areas, are two of the longest running rebellions in the world. You, your own experience in Colombia and Guatemala and so on, have been in that field. Is the tsunami going to make it more likely that there will be efforts at reconciliation? There have been some reports to that effect in Sri Lanka but none in Indonesia that I have seen. Or will it make it more difficult? After the world goes away will these guerilla wars resume?
Egeland: The jury is out on that. And I think we, and even you, can help on this. We all need to tell the parties that they now have an historic opportunity to put the conflict behind them and rebuild society together. There will be resources for rebuilding. The resources will be equally distributed. I think the international community can help make sure that it is going to be equally distributed. In the beginning, there were very moving tales that we could witness ourselves in the field of Tamil Tigers and government army working together to retrieve bodies. They exchanged the wounded and the dead they were finding. In Indonesia, Aceh, the same kind of reaching out happened.
At the moment we are having a more and more difficult phase because already the question is, is assistance going more to one side than the other? Is information being distorted? It has already started. However I am confident that we will be able to use humanitarian assistance as a confidence building measure. Still we are working very hard on that.
Holbrooke: Joe, do you have a question in Washington?
Snyder: Yes, Richard. If I could first I would like to thank Mr. Egeland on behalf of our Washington audience and our colleagues at the Asia Society in New York for making this available. And also to thank our collaborators down here in Washington, CSIS and Bridging Nations. Now let’s take our first question.
Question: I am from Amnesty International. Ambassador, you are dealing with independent countries where you cannot dictate what those countries should do with their development assistance, especially long-term development assistance. How are you going to deal with that? It looks like the UN is only toeing the line that the independence of those countries should be respected when (U.N. Secretary-General) Kofi Annan accepted restrictions on its movements.
Egeland: It was not a good thing that Kofi Annan did not have an opportunity to visit the Tamil northern areas. However, Carol Bellamy, my colleague head of UNICEF, did. Our special coordinator for the whole relief effort visited, extensively the Tamil areas and the Tamil Tiger controlled areas of Sri Lanka. The reconstruction phase will perhaps be, as I think also Richard alluded to, even more difficult than the emergency phase. We have the eyes of the world on what is happening. I think we are all behaving at our best at the moment because we all want to show that we are saving lives. And ‘we’ are the governments, the local governments, the politicians, the military, the generals, the civilians, the aid workers. As the multi-billion dollar reconstruction effort starts, it will be more difficult. And then the procedures really have to work. What is foreseen at the moment, and this was clear at the large Geneva meeting, with 18 nations that I chaired the day before yesterday, is that there will be consultative groups for each of these countries, with the World Bank, the Asia Bank, the UN Development group, where the governments of the countries themselves will be sitting. And those consultative groups will be overseeing the whole effort and it has to be carefully monitored accountability-wise but also politically to make it a good effort.
Holbrooke: Any questions here in New York?
Question: You said you would comment on the needs for communications and networking.
Question: We have heard very little about what is going on in Myanmar. What is the UN doing there and the effect of the tsunami there?
Question: Not much was said about what happened scientifically and how it could happen again. And what is the psychological effect of the tsunami?
Egeland: In terms of communications, it has been the key. We keep asking ourselves in the UN, in the leadership of the coordination of this effort, why is it going so well as an international and national relief effort this time? Why did we get $750 million in commitment, and much of it already transferred cash on the 15 th day of the disaster when we usually get a few million dollars way into 6 months of the disaster. I think the answer is communications have really worked. The whole world has seen the suffering, the devastation, how much was destroyed, how many people were affected and they really understood the race against the clock that we always have. If we are too late, more people die from diarrhea and measles than the earthquake or the tsunami or the natural disaster.
The networks are very wide. It now consists of a dozen big international agencies: UN and Red Cross agencies, plus the big NGO umbrella organizations plus the thousands of local groups. There is a network that is working still, imperfectly but better than ever before, and we need to make it happen even better. One of the problems we have is of course, especially in the 3 rd and the 4 th and the 6 th wave of it, you have a lot of what we call Mom and Pop organizations and others who come, sent by their own very local society from Europe or North America or elsewhere and they also want to have their project because their community has really responded and wants to help. And then the coordination effort becomes a very big and difficult one.
We need to keep up communication. We have an humanitarian information center set up with a lot of professional communicators already in Banda Aceh, for example, which means that we will make exact maps for where we are, where the destruction is the biggest, where we are not, where there is disease, where the food is reaching, where it is not reaching. We will even have what we called mortality service, to see whether child mortality is rising or stable. And that will be fed out. I would urge you to go to www.reliefweb.int where you can see everything, really, what is happening and who is doing what as a global effort.
Myanmar, or Burma, was affected. In the beginning we heard nothing from the government at all and it was said that it did not really affect it. Then we heard it was affected a lot and a UN team was sent there. We have seen that yes, there is damage. I think the casualties are 50 or 60. There are of course a number more wounded and a number of villages affected and there will be a relief program. It is part of our Flash Appeal, where we are also describing the problems. And we have a regional portion of the appeal of $300 million, and that will also go to the affected in Myanmar, Burma.
In terms of early warning, we will next week in Japan, it so happened to be scheduled, the World Congress on Prevention of Disaster. I will be chairing that. We will have 2,000 scientists and politicians and aid workers and administrators. We will be discussing prevention, early warning, preparedness, making local societies resilient. What is said initially is that this should never ever have happened like this, really, especially in some of the countries that were at some distance and which are heavily populated. Of course, it is possible to warn and to get people away. The tragedy was, in this case, that many thousands were killed, especially children – half of those killed are children --, because they ran down the beach as the first tidal wave receded. A lot of fish were uncovered on the ground. They ran down to collect the fish and the tsunami came. All the animals fled. There are no dead animals, really, because of their instincts. We don’t have instincts.
We need early warning that we organize ourselves. This will be discussed in many places. UNESCO already says with $30 million we will have an early warning system. $30 million is nothing compared to the damage of a tsunami.
Question: From Refugees International: you have noted the wonderful response. But you were responsible for emergency responses all around the world. And as great a job as you have done here I wonder if you could speculate a little about whether we are going to rob Peter to pay Paul and not have enough money for Darfur, or the Congo or other key emergencies in the world?
Question: Some countries will be forgiving interest payment (on international loans to affected countries). How can you be sure the forgiven money will not go to arms purchases instead of relief. Is anything being done to monitor fraudulent charities responding to the disaster?
Egeland: These are very key questions. I am glad Refugees International referred to the other emergencies because yes, it is very important to say that 2005 started with humanity at its best. And we now say, this is the standard. This is the way it should be from now on. This is what global response should be like. We will for the first time have enough money to give food, to give healthcare, to give the basics so the people do not starve on top of having lost everything. And we even have funding to rebuild livelihoods. This is not the case for Darfur or for the rest of Sudan or for Guinea or Central African Republic.
Holbrooke: Is the relief of tsunami coming at the expense of the other crises?
Egeland: I hope not. I was coming to that. Let me say it immediately. We made a campaign before the Geneva pledging conference to say we wanted to know from the donors that there is a tsunami every 100 years. It should be additional. These (pledges) should be additional, extra monies. I would say the monies we got are either additional monies from the traditional donors, at least from 80% of them, or it comes from donors who were not donors before, and therefore it is additional money, donors that we hope now will understand that this is the best investment you can do. It costs $1 to vaccinate a child. It costs $1 to feed a child. And I think now the Eastern European states, the Latin Americans, the Gulf Countries, who have had a big internal debate, bigger than that in the US, on what is real levels of generosity, are responding. They will be responding more, I hope, to other emergencies in the future.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one thousand people die every day from war and preventable disease and neglect. Three million people have died over the last five years of the same reasons. It means it is a tsunami every five months, year in and year out. We have an appeal for Congo of $165 million per year and we get $110 million. The appeal is too small, to start with, and we get 65% of what we ask for. That has to change, really. And what I hope is that we can do advocacy for the forgotten and the neglected emergencies.
And the final question on quality control, yes, there will be a lot of quality control and there is more quality control. The NGOs, for example, are policing each other more than ever before. The national authorities police your using of funds better than ever before. The UN has all sorts of external and internal auditing systems for all relief efforts and we will now have additional financial tracking systems and with additional on the spot monitoring, auditing, controlling. In terms of the debt relief efforts, I think it is a good idea even though the forgiveness money doesn’t go immediately to relief effort, it should release money to the reconstruction effort.
Question: Are there local NGOs in Aceh that are still intact with whom international NGOs or the UN agencies can work? We have also seen reports of the Indonesian government flying in NGOs from Java, including some that are Islamic fundamentalist groups. To what extent is that occurring?
Question: From Russian TV: how adequate was the response from large donors like Russia?
Question: Given the outpouring of public pledges, some private organizations have decided to wait for a bit and monitor the situation and make pledges later. What advice would you have for them?
Egeland: Taking the last question first, I would usually say we are desperate, come with the money. In this case I think it is not unwise to wait a bit now because there is no aid worker who is not working full speed to do all that is possible at the moment. I think there will be pockets of neglect and problems that will be glaring in a few months where there are not television cameras anymore, where we will need additional funding and donors.
On the large donors question, this is the first time ever I have not had any reason to complain of any donor. The Europeans, the US – there was a debate that the US was late and too little and so on. I don’t agree with that. I think the US assessed it every day and we have gotten all the money we needed, we even got the helicopters, the assets, when we needed it. My problem with all of the donors, which includes Russia, is that we do not have predictability in our response around the world. We have no money for Guinea. We have no money for the Central African Republic. We have really too little money for Sudan and Congo and elsewhere. My point is that the world economy is growing enormously: in North America, in Europe, in Eastern Europe, in Russia, in the Gulf Countries. And many countries are as rich or richer than for example my country was when we became a very substantive donor. I would hope that this kind of sense that we are the united nations, we help each other, could translate to all of the 40 or 50 big economies and then we wouldn’t even have any problems footing the bill of feeding, clothing and vaccinating children, for example, which we had today. If we had $10 million more last year, we could have vaccinated 12 million more children. And many tens of thousands of children would not have died. This is my appeal to everyone, and Russia, come up front early on and say, yes, we want to help you foot the bill for all of these countries and not just those on CNN or on Russian television.
On the question of NGOs in Aceh, you don’t have the typical kind of Oxfam or Care NGOs, but you have many community groups with whom we are working. They are the Muslim local community, they are the elders, and there are women’s groups, farmers groups, fishermen groups and so on. Many groups have come from outside and it is very important that they all behave according to our rules of impartial, effective, mutual assistance to those most affected. I am concerned that some of the Islamic groups may have an agenda beyond just helping. But I am also concerned that some of our Western groups also really respect local Muslim traditions. One of the problems is rumors go immediately. And there is a big and consistent rumor that children orphans are now systematically adopted, kidnapped, taken away to be Christianized in the West. And this is a big rumor.
Holbrooke: A front-page story in the Washington Post today describes that as happening.
Egeland: It is happening but in isolated cases. And we have to stop it immediately. If it is on the front page of the Washington Post, imagine how it is on the front pages of papers in Indonesia and the region. That is what is fueling the potential political animosities that will be the climate in which we have to operate. And I really just hope that we can just go on with the job. Those who seem to be orphaned today may not be orphaned, there may be a relative who really wants to help and adopt and all he needs is our money. There could also be those who in the end would want to be adopted out of the country. Maybe. But it should be way down the road and we have international procedures for that that are in harmony with national and local traditions.
Question: from Agence France Presse: You mentioned the March deadline given by Indonesian authorities. Can we assume you don’t see major logistical problems with this?
Question: When will initial reconstruction efforts begin? And what can be done now to lay the groundwork for the reconstruction phase and long-term recovery?
Egeland: I don’t think the March deadline will be a big problem. By March, most of the military assets should be gone anyway. I understand the US military assets costs at the moment $6 million per day. By March we shouldn’t be spending $6 million per day on that kind of assets. Today we are in desperate need of them. By March we will be doing civilian road convoys where we do military helicopter today. However I am sure the Indonesians will understand there are certain things that we will also need from the military sector beyond March and I don’t foresee that as a problem. All of these carriers, with 13,000 soldiers and so on, were never going to stay until March anyhow.
It is a very important question on when does reconstruction phase start because it should start in our heads immediately and on the ground as soon as possible. We have had meetings with fishing communities that lost all their boats, all their equipment and it is very interesting that they start immediately to discuss, not how to get fish to eat from us, or how to get food and so on. They ask can I have a new boat, a new fishing net? Can you rebuild my storage place and my house? And the answers of course are yes. And we don’t wait six months to do that, we start immediately because they need to be fed and have emergency assistance but reconstruction has started in India and Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand already. It is going to start very soon in parts of Indonesia and in parts of Somalia. And the reconstruction surveys are being completed as we speak and in February there will be a big assessment finished. And in March I expect some kind of a big reconstruction conference.
Many of these societies are very vibrant. As Asia Society knows, they will rebuild most of it themselves. But they need our help in many areas.
Holbrooke: When is the main reconstruction conference?
Egeland: We are so early on. But the World Bank, the Asia Bank and the UN Development Group are now discussing how to collect all the assessments they are doing in one package, when to present it and when to have the bigger reconstruction conference. It could perhaps be March.
Holbrooke: I should have mentioned in the beginning that Asia Society in conjunction with the US Chamber of Commerce, US-ASEAN Business Council, UN-India Business Council and Asia Foundation will hold a private sector summit in Washington the end of March or in April to work on those same issues. Let’s have a closing set of questions.
Question: In Sri Lanka, for example, there are 14,000 eco-villages or communities developed along sustainable lines. It seems that kind of thinking could be engaged in this reconstruction process.
Question: Despite deaths I see as success that efforts in vaccinations have occurred; why?
Question: Can this aid success become the model for future/ongoing international appeals, like the Millennium Development Goal?
Egeland: It is a very important question, what kinds of things we will reconstruct. It really could be great, what we reconstruct. The governments of course would be in charge of this. But it could be resilient societies, sustainable societies living in harmony with nature. But it could also be that we will have enormous uncoordinated reconstruction and the rain forest in Sumatra cut down, tourist hotels where you should have eco-villages, etc. This really has to be monitored nationally and internationally because you can have bad and good development when you have money and there will be money.
Why have we succeeded in averting the second wave? It is a bit early still but day 8 in the emergency, three-quarters of one million people we were going to assist had gotten assistance. And by today there are few who have not gotten emergency assistance in Sri Lanka thanks to a wonderful local, national network and also the international effort. The reason for all this is the world responded as it should.
And I am glad the Millennium Development Goal becomes the last piece here. Before the aid effort started in a long press conference at the UN, I was asked how was I looking at the way the world had responded in 2004 to disaster prevention, to development, reaching the Millennium Development Goals and that is when I said the rich world is not very generous. I even used another word (laughter) because we have never been richer and we are 50 nations now. Now 50 rich nations. And we are not willing to spend even a fraction of a percentage of our riches, it seems, to help the 30, 40 who are in abject poverty. To foot the bill of reaching the Millennium Development Goal is one or two days of military spending per year. You set that aside and everybody would have health care, everybody would have school, everybody would have a local initiative against the spread of AIDS, and so on. We are not seeing that at the moment. We are only seeing that in tsunami relief. So I share your hope that this is the new standard, this is how we respond to all tsunamis, the tsunami of war, of poverty, of AIDS in all countries.
Thank you.
Holbrooke: Joe, thank you for joining us in Washington. I thank CSIS for giving us the venue. And here in New York, Jan, I think the applause speaks for itself. Thank you so much and God bless you and Asia Society will do whatever it can to help.
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