A media report has it that the international donors are chary of funneling their assistance through the Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Authority and want the government to identify for them projects which they would execute through their own agencies and NGOs. Ostensibly, their excuse is that this authority has become controversial. But, in reality, this is the current practice of the donors. They employ their own organisations or NGOs, their own expertise and, in cases, their own material for the spending of their assistance. And this practice is palpably proving more a liability than an asset for the recipients. The donors plough back the bulk of their assistance by way of exorbitant pays, perks and upkeep of their personnel they depute for executing their aided projects and high prices of their material which a recipient can buy at much lower rates from elsewhere, if not locally available. And to press for this dispensation, they invent all sorts of excuses, including corruption and lack of transparency or capacity in the recipient country.
That is why when the top echelons came out singing and dancing from the Islamabad donors conference that it had drawn aid pledges exceeding the set target, we had pleaded to them to tamper their exuberance. We forewarned them that the donors would insist on this mode of their aid’s disbursement here, too. So the inevitable has begun happening. And we, too, would be left with returning the sums whose major chunk would have been eaten up by the donors themselves, with only some crumbs spent on our own people. If nothing else, the bitter experience of next-door neighbour Afghanistan on this account should have made our top echelons wiser, especially when it is so widely known. No less a person than the Afghan president himself has given vent to this bitterness not once but many a time publicly. And knowledgeable people contend that although the donors have funneled some $13 billion into the ravaged country, only 20 percent of it has gone into Afghanistan’s state treasury. The rest 80 percent has gone out to the NGOs, overwhelmingly foreign.
And what reconstruction has this huge money brought to Afghanistan is also no secret. Not even the staunch apologist of this mode of dispensing foreign funding can honestly claim if it has done any remarkable good to the Afghans. Even as four years have passed since the Taliban’s ouster, the country stands as ruined and dilapidated as it was under their puritanical rule. In fact, many a time has President Hamid Karzai publicly called upon the donors to send their money to his government, but his pleas have invariably fallen on their deaf ears. And when a minister in his interim government made an issue of it, the NGOs in the country teamed up against him. He had to leave his job after the president of this cash-strapped nation couldn’t sustain the pressure of their home governments.
No effort is visible to economies even on the state expenditure. Official extravaganza continues in all its pristine glory. Massive misuse of official transport remains as brazen as before. Rather, this luxury is being extended to more senior officials. And if grapevine is to be believed, even new staff cars may be purchased. Soon after the catastrophe, we also heard that the government was reviewing the development projects to suspend work on slow-moving and not urgently needed ones. What came of that drill is not known; now nobody in the official quarters talks about it. The government’s visible inaction on the front of conserving local resources for carrying out rehabilitation and reconstruction tasks is indeed chillingly stunning. Nonetheless, time is still not lost. Even now, the government may reconsider its strategy and endeavour to raise as much funding nationally as possible. After all, what is the fun in taking loans whose major chunk the lenders are to take back in one form or the other and spend just princely sums on our grief-stricken people, and we have to return it in full, even though after many years?

One year on

The world today remembers the tsunami, when the sea rose up that Sunday morning one year ago and after just eight minutes had swallowed hundreds of thousands of lives in one of the worst natural disasters in memory. Fatality tolls in this age of news saturated with figures of death and wounded often fail to move a desensitized world public, but even they were taken aback by the astounding statistics. At least 216,000 people were killed, according to an assessment of government and relief agency figures. The United Nations puts the number at 223,000 or more. The true toll probably will never be known. Many bodies were lost at sea and in some cases the populations of places struck were not accurately recorded.
As the world watched on TV, the images looked surreal but in fact they were horribly real, of course mainly to the people directly in the tsunami’s path. Entire villages were swept away by one surging wall of water after another. According to the UN, Almost 400,000 houses were reduced to rubble and more than two million people left homeless. The livelihoods of 1.5 million people disappeared. Ironically, the tsunami did have a few positive effects. For one, it brought many of the world’s ordinary people together in a huge, largely spontaneous act of help. Within hours, and in the weeks to come, the international aid community came together to respond with donor pledges of an astounding $13.6 billion. Where did all this money go? Toward a huge relief operation in one of the biggest emergency-assistance programs in history. Concerns linger about the pace of rebuilding. In many places the landscape is still one of devastation. Many refugee camps are still full and residents relying on aid handouts to survive. But there is no doubt that tremendous progress has been made to return the hardest-hit regions and the lives of their people to normalcy. One year later, the tsunami is testament to the successes that can come from billions of dollars in aid money.
And from this calamity of epic proportions emerged opportunities for political peace, some taken and some lost. The devastation wrought by the tsunami resulted in a cease-fire between the Indonesian government and guerillas that ended a decades-old separatist conflict in Aceh. No such progress has been seen in Sri Lanka, though, where disputes over aid delivery and a recent upsurge in violence blamed on separatist Tamil Tiger rebels dashed whatever hopes there were that the tsunami would end a long-running civil conflict. Amid the mourning across the region, there is also some relief that early warning systems are now either in place or are being perfected so that this enormous disaster can be avoided should land beneath water rumble once more. There have been many natural disasters this year other than the tsunami: namely the Pakistan earthquake and the US Gulf Coast’s Hurricane Katrina. They serve as harsh reminders of the fragility of people in the face of nature’s wrath, in both East and East.

—Arab News