It has been six months since the tsunami struck, killing more than 200,000 people. Across the globe, tributes are being made to remember the dead while heroic efforts are still being made to help those who survived. Many people, however, are asking why more is not being done. The initial response to the tragedy was unprecedented. About $11 billion in total was pledged by 90 donor nations. There is more money for tsunami victims than for all the other emergencies in the world. There has been no effort like it, and although not all donors have made good on their promises, no other demonstration of compassion on this scale has occurred.
The speed of the response yielded substantial dividends. It provided more than a million people with food, emergency shelter and medical help. Widespread starvation was avoided. There were no epidemics. But that was then.
The world, unfortunately, has a short memory. There is a definite need to rekindle the sense of urgency that was so palpable in the immediate days and weeks after Dec. 26. Bureaucratic inertia, political squabbling, and in some cases, graft and donors’ concerns about corruption, are slowing efforts to rebuild cities, villages, and people’s lives and livelihoods. True, the complexity of the challenge is huge. The sad and not surprising result is that the poorest victims have benefited the least from the massive relief efforts. A survey by the international charity Oxfam found that aid had tended to go to businesses and landowners, exacerbating the divide between rich and poor. The poor, the survey said, were likely to spend much longer periods in refugee camps where it is harder to find work or rebuild lives. Oxfam called for aid to go to the poorest and most marginalized. They must not be left out of reconstruction efforts, the charity pointed out.
All aid agencies, as well as regional governments must share some blame for this failure. Failure to deliver assistance effectively to the poorest or to plan properly for the future has revealed several fundamental weaknesses in the system. These failures would not be tolerated if a fraction of the tsunami disaster had struck the developed world. We are in for a very long haul. The scale of the work ahead remains daunting. Despite the historic amount of relief efforts, it will take as long as 10 years to rebuild what was destroyed in five to 10 seconds.
It means that more has to be done and that future reconstruction must be carried out in a well-thought out and carefully considered manner. For example, haphazard construction which will have to be torn down later because it was built in the wrong place, of the wrong quality, or built without consulting local communities and governments is a waste of money, time and energy. The tsunami disaster was horrific and the scale of its destruction unprecedented. Consequently, there are no standards for gauging how successful the pace of recovery has been. The efforts made have surely been laudable, not least because of the logistics involved, but a great deal more can, and needs, to be done.
