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Military

 

11 January 2005

U.S., International Leaders Work to Coordinate Tsunami Relief

Disaster might lead to new plans for disaster mitigation

Leaders from more than 80 nations laid plans at a January 11 meeting in Geneva to support the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the 12 battered Indian Ocean nations struck by an earthquake-triggered tsunami.

The world governments have responded to the catastrophe with pledges of assistance that now exceed $5 billion.  The United Nations has already collected the almost $1 billion that it predicted would be necessary to meet immediate needs. "This has never happened before," U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said, according to published reports.

The United States has spent $78 million of the $350 million it has pledged to the relief effort, according to Administrator Andrew Natsios of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), who spoke to reporters at a briefing in Geneva.  With more than 14,000 military personnel and scores of U.S. aircraft and ships taking part, the daily cost of the U.S. military contribution is estimated to be more than $5 million a day, in addition to the $350 million commitment, Natsios said.

Natsios emphasized the need for the international community to coordinate its efforts to bring swift rehabilitation and reconstruction to the battered communities and to the estimated 5 million people affected. 

He also pointed out the need for long-term planning to restore economic viability in many stricken areas. 

“In some of the smaller Indian islands, for example, and parts of the other coastlines of these countries, the agricultural land has been so salinated it will be unusable for one to two years,” Natsios said,” which means that for farmers, there needs to be some assistance in helping with livelihoods for that time period.” 

The following terms are used in the transcript of the briefing:

ASEAN: Association of Southeast Asian Nations

ICRC:  International Committee of the Red Cross

OCHA:  U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
OECD: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

UNHCR:  U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees

UNICEF:  U.N. Children’s Agency

The transcript follows:

(begin transcript)

Press Briefing by
Andrew Natsios
Administrator
U.S. Agency for International Development
Palais des Nations, United Nations Office at Geneva,

Geneva, Switzerland

January 11, 2005

ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  USAID is currently undertaking one of the largest relief efforts in its history in order to save lives, mitigate human suffering, and reduce the economic impact of the Indian Ocean disaster.  As I said in my statement, I just returned with Secretary Powell and Governor Bush of Florida, who himself had four hurricanes hit Florida in the last year, and so is very familiar with disaster response.  Secretary Powell was also a general and did a number of disaster responses when he was a military commander. 

I’ve been doing this for about fifteen years now.  I’ve never seen sights, particularly in Banda Aceh, of such utter destruction.  People are in shock, they are in disbelief, I think there is terrible psychological trauma from this that must be dealt with.  We are working both with the United States military in an integrated fashion, and with the NGOs, UN agencies, and international organizations like the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, and the International Organization for Migration. 

There is a regional center in Udapao military base in Thailand, which is the regional center for the logistics command for the US military.  We have AID officers posted there, and we validate each of the taskings that are requested of the US military, so that from a relief and development standpoint, there is an ordered response based on need and based on the severity of the individual thing we’re responding to. 

We do see a series of things beginning to happen already.  One is that there is a very different level of response depending on the country.  Even though Sri Lanka is the smallest country, it appears to have one of the most advanced responses, and in fact they are already moving into the reconstruction and rehabilitation phase.  I know there’s been a lot of assistance from India, and from the international community.   UNHCR was already there prior to the tsunami because of the conflict in the country, and that certainly helped. 

There has been an outpouring of support privately in the world, which we very much appreciate, and that is being fed through the NGOs and some of the UN agencies.  I know UNICEF has already begun an immunization campaign. 

Of the $350 million dollars we have already committed or spent, USAID has dispursed $78 million; $35 million of that is to UN agencies, and the rest are to the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Socieites, the IOM, to NGOs, to the direct purchases of commodities by our staff, or to air flights – we’ve rented a couple of helicopters for civilian purposes in our response.  

We are trying to follow several principles in the response.  One is that all of these countries are functioning parliamentary democracies with competent ministries; we need to understand that these are not failed states, this is not a conflict setting, this is not Afghanistan in 2001 where the Taliban were in control, this is not Rwanda after the genocide.  These are functioning states.  This is a natural disaster.  It’s in a different category than the responses we typically make in a conflict zone.  There are functioning governments that we need to respect.

The second principle is that we need to move to the reconstruction and rehabilitation phase as rapidly as possible so that the process of moving people back to self-support moves as quickly as it possibly can; so that dependency doesn’t develop; and so that funds are used for permanent reconstruction purposes.

The next item, I would say, is that we need to look also at the economic consequences of this.  Not only were people’s homes destroyed, and people’s lives lost and infrastructure destroyed; people’s livelihoods were destroyed.  In some of the smaller Indian islands, for example, and parts of the other coastlines of these countries, the agricultural land has been so salinated it will be unusable for one to two years at the earliest, which means that for farmers, there needs to be some assistance in helping with livelihoods for that time period. 

We need to look at whether or not micro-finance programs will be appropriate.  We are beginning to put together with colleagues from aid agencies in Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the EU, micro lines of credit to small businesses so they can recapitalize themselves.

We need to look at the banking system, because many banks located there are now in deep trouble.  We had a micro-finance lending network in Banda Aceh:  thirteen of the fourteen offices were completely destroyed and all the staff killed, so only one of the fourteen offices is still functioning.  I think this is true of other donor efforts as well; some were damaged by the tsunami. 

It’s also important that we understand that the first responders in any disaster are the people themselves, the people who survived, the neighbors of the ones who were there, and very quickly begin to respond to the emergency.  Our job is not to take over their efforts, not to substitute their efforts, but to support their efforts.

It needs to be consistent with our own principle of disaster response, which is what we call a “pull” system, rather than a “push” system.  We don’t want to push resources into the field; we want the people in the field to pull resources from donor governments and central governments as they are needed on the ground. 

This disaster response has for two weeks now looked like it’s driven by donations, as opposed to needs on the ground.  We’ve reversed the normal order in which we’ve done this.  Normally, the United Nations, the NGOs, the Red Cross movement, the donor aid agencies, and the World Bank do rapid assessments; then they produce a plan with a budget; then they make an appeal.  Here, the pledges were made first, and then we did the assessments, and then we did the response.  We need to re-order this now so that what’s on the ground meets the enormous generosity which is being expressed by people around the world.

And finally, there’s an important principle which has been stated at this conference, and that is, that we use this opportunity and the immediate aftermath of this terrible disaster to put in place disaster mitigation and prevention measures to at least mitigate what happens in the future.

Let me tell you a story from the United States.  In California, after our great earthquake in the 1990’s in Los Angeles, our emergency management agency in California was successful in getting raised from 15% to 85% the number of homes that had a switch-off on their gas systems, so if there was an earthquake all the gas in the home automatically turned off.  Many disasters in earthquakes are caused by gas explosions in people’s homes.   They were able to do this by taking advantage of the early shock from the earthquake to focus people’s attention.  There was very little cost involved in this.  People didn’t do it before because they didn’t think they were vulnerable. People know they’re vulnerable now, and we need to take advantage of that. 

But we need to also focus not just on tsunamis, which are rare in the Indian Ocean.  What is not rare, but very often take place every year, are major typhoons.  The typhoon of 1974 in Bangladesh killed 400,000 people, and the typhoon of 1991 in Bangladesh killed 130,000 people.  Bangladesh now has a typhoon early-warning system to evacuate people.  It’s run by the Bangladeshi government, and many of the donor aid agencies helped in constructing this, including AID and the US government.  It’s connected to weather satellites, so when the typhoon approaches, people move off the low-lying areas.

The same system has been put into place off the coast of Vietnam, at the Vietnamese government’s request.  And now we’ve moved these typhoon early-warning systems across the South Pacific islands. 

So we need to look at the major Pacific Rim and Indian Rim risks from natural disasters, and create systems that will allow us to mitigate their effects.  And I think this is the time to do this, to capture this powerful and very poignant moment to protect people in the future.  We are prepared to do that as a government.  We are moving rapidly with our fellow donor governments, with UN agencies, with the Federation, with NGOs, and with the IOM. 


I’m glad to answer questions.

QUESTION:   The Pentagon said that there was no damage nor loss of life on Diego Garcia.  Could you tell us what sort of warning Diego Garcia received to allow it to escape from any sort of damage?

 NATSIOS:  It is not a matter of escaping:  there is nowhere to escape, it’s three feet above sea level.  If the tsunami had approached, there was nowhere to go.  There are coral reefs around Diego Garcia, and that’s what stopped the tsunami.  It is not because they got any advance warning.  They didn’t.

When Secretary Powell and I were with Jeb Bush in a helicopter, and going along the coast of Aceh, we noticed whole areas that were almost untouched.  We saw the same thing in Sri Lanka.  Some untouched while areas right next door were completely and totally destroyed.  As I looked down below, I could see there was a difference geologically in the stone formations in the ocean, a difference between the areas that were affected from the areas that were not affected.  It has to do with the geology of the area, not any early warming systems.

The same thing is the case on the Burmese coast, for example.  They were spared some of that because of the peculiar geography of that coastline.

I think the same is true with the Maldives.  The Maldives are just above sea level, but they also have some of the coral reefs.  The particular geography of the islands, that’s what protected it.

QUESTION:  What would make the United States step up its contribution more than the 350 million [dollars] currently in line?  And could you quantify for us the military involvement in that operation?  Could you step up the volume of contributions more than 350 million?    I’d like to know how much is at stake with the military.

 NATSIOS:  The military contribution in terms of the salaries of the soldiers, and the cost of running the aircrafts and the ships, is not included in our 350 million, that is in addition.  We’ve tried to get the military to tell us but they don’t keep records the way we do in the relief effort.  We estimate that the cost of the military operation is about five or six million dollars a day, for the operations.

They are doing some purchasing of relief commodities which would be included as part of the 350 (million dollars).  If they are purchasing medical equipment, for example, or food, that’s included.  We are jointly purchasing some collapsible plastic water containers at local markets in Asia in order to fill them up with clean water, and that would be included in the 350 million.

The military is using enormous resources at this point, and what we are doing is coordinating very carefully with local governments to see what the order of need is.  I think the complexity of coordination in all this is very high.  There are so many independent actors functioning that we have to get all this working together or we will get ourselves in our way and we will be duplicative, and we don’t want to do that.

What the military is using now that is most useful to us are the aircraft, particularly the helicopters that get into, for example, the coastline of Sumatra, the coastline of Aceh --  which no one actually had reached in the first ten days.  Many people were very badly injured and they dragged themselves up into the highland areas, and many of them were afraid to come back down because they were afraid of more tsunamis.  We’re trying now with the helicopters working with the Indonesian authorities to get people to come back down.  If they’re injured they are then medavaced to hospitals and clinics which are being set up for trauma. 

QUESTION:  (inaudible)

 NATSIOS:  Our pledge is an initial pledge based on the relief efforts.  I have to tell you, I’ve being involved in this work for 15 years, and I’ve never seen that much money pledged.  I hope it all comes through.  We don’t have a problem with pledges right now.  What we have a problem with is logistics on the ground and actually reaching people in remote and difficult locations.

We also have a problem with coordination, which is why we need OCHA and the UN to do what they do typically so well.  They have a convening authority, to get everybody in the same room whose working on this.  It’s a very important power:  the convening authority.

Secondly, they have information-sharing on their Relief Web, showing what everybody is doing on the same chart, and we don’t duplicate what another donor is doing or what other aid agencies are doing.  That is very important.  And then putting a comprehensive budget together, which they did last week.  I was at the ASEAN Conference when Kofi Annan presented the $ 950 million appeal.

We will make our own assessment as to whether more money will be needed to be contributed by the United States after the multi-donor, multilateral assessments are done of the cost of reconstruction, which will take a little bit longer because they require a review of the infrastructure. 

I don’t think most people know, but a great deal of damage was done by the earthquake in Banda Aceh, and in all of Aceh, before the tsunami hit.  Seventy to eighty percent of the bridges are now down, they are not functional on the road system in Aceh.  They were not affected by the tsunami because they were in the mountains. The earthquake was 9.0 on the Richter scale which is the fourth worst earthquake in recorded history.  That is a massive earthquake.  The road system was damaged as well and the Indonesians are now sending heavy equipment to clear the roads so that we can use the roads to get relief supplies in rather than relying on the air force to do that. 

So we will look at the assessments and when we see what they say, we will see whether or not there are additional resources needed. 

QUESTION:  [inaudible] …of a humanitarian relief force, a letter from President Chirac to Kofi Annan.  I just wanted to know what your reaction would be and how far any discussions have gotten in there?

 NATSIOS: This is the first I’ve heard about it.   I would have to read the letter and see the proposal.  Though, I have to say, I recall when OCHA was created in 1991 after the Kurdish emergency there was also a proposal for an early reaction force, quick reaction force.  I might also add it was President Bush 41 that at the G7 meeting of 1991 or 2, proposed the creation of UNOCHA. There had been a UNDRO Here in Geneva and it was increased in its authorities by a proposal made by the President’s father interestingly enough, and it was President Bush 41 when he was Ambassador to the UN in 1970, we actually have a video tape of it, who propose the creation of UNDRO in the first place 35 years ago.  So there is an interesting process of increasing the capacity of the UN proposed by President’s father and I must say I’ve had a lot more relief resources since I took over.

The total U.S. expenditures in all humanitarian relief operations, civil wars, famines, and natural disasters, last year was 2.4 billion dollars which is 40 percent of  the total all countries in the world spent.  So we are the major donor in it, we are very proud of that and we will continue to be supportive.  Much of that money goes to UN agencies like WFP.  Sixty percent that goes through WFP comes from AID.  We are proud of that, we urge other countries to contribute as well.  We are the largest donor to UNICEF, UNHCR, the ICRC, and we have been for many years.

QUESTION:  How would you respond to the UN initiative to the financial tracking system to insure the accountability and transparency?

 NATSIOS:  The tracking system that Jan Egeland mentioned?  OK, we think that there is always a risk when there is a huge amount of money and commodities and complex operations of accountability problems so we welcome Jan Egeland’s initiative, we will cooperate with it, and provide assistance, technical and financial if it’s necessary.

QUESTION:  Speaking of the reconstruction do you have any particular projects in mind as United States preferences or are you ready to cooperate with the United Nations to give priorities to the projects.

 NATSIOS:   We have AID missions in all of the four countries that are the most severely affected.  I have instructed the AID missions - and Secretary Powell has instructed the Embassies - to cooperate fully with the reconstruction assessments which are being undertaken by the international community.  We will provide technical people from AID, along with people from the State Department, on those missions so that we have a coordinated plan for reconstruction.  We expect the World Bank will play a role in coordination of the reconstruction level, but once again want to emphasize that reconstruction will be under the authorization the control and the direction of the countries themselves.

QUESTION:  I’m a little bit confused about all these billions that are being coughed up, if I may use that word, by the private citizens of the world, which sometimes supercedes official government funding.  Now, the appeal of $977 million of Jakarta, I suppose, and what we talked about today at this conference, is going to be funded from government contributions and the tracking system and all that; but what is going to happen with all these supplementary billions that the private citizens and corporations of the world brought together, like 140 million U.S. dollars in one day in the Netherlands last week?  Is that all going to go through NGOs or through the Red Cross, or is there going to be some sort of central coordination for that, too, internationally?

 NATSIOS: The President of the American Red Cross sat next to me at a briefing that I gave President Bush and AID with 22 NGOs plus the Red Cross on the response.  My memory is, and I have poor memory for these things, I think she said the Red Cross had raised 247 million dollars just in the U.S. for the tsunami response.  We are seeing huge amounts of private money and so if it’s a private donation to particular NGO or Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent, then that is the way the money would be spent.  We work with the NGOs on a daily basis, we coordinate with them very closely, we provide funding to them, and they are very transparent, we are transparent with them.  I know that’s done in Europe as well as Canada and Japan, Australia, New Zealand, other donor governments, the same relationship exists with the NGO community.  I think what I did when I went on television for a week to explain how this all worked, we urge people not to give used clothes or to give old pharmaceuticals from their medicine cabinets or old equipment, but cash was what was necessary and it should be to internationally recognized NGOs to do this work because they have expertise in it, and their accountability system setup, and we put on our website the 50 or so NGOs in the U.S. that had passed standards that were accepted within the NGO community about accountability, accounting systems, how you publicize what you do, your governing system that sort of thing.  Most of that money is not going through governments.  It is a separate funding stream but I have great confidence in the NGO community, recognized NGOs will spend it properly. 

My understanding is the businesses in the U.S. are primarily going through NGOs and the Red Cross movements when they make their contributions.  We do know in the field that American businesses, and I suspect European and Asian businesses as well, are making direct contributions on site, because they are in the region itself.  For example, I know IBM helped the Sri Lankan government set up the [information technology] system that is managing the information for the central ministries that are coordinating all of the response.  The President of the Sri Lanka showed us at lunch when I was there with Secretary Powell this really very elaborate system for the Sri Lankan government to track all of this. It was very impressive, and I say how many years have you had this in effect, they said we had in effect two weeks.  They did almost immediately, which is very impressive.

 

QUESTION:  If I may follow up on that one.   There is always this worry about lags, you know, pledges and then where are the checks?  Is it not so that what private people contribute, not only in the United States, but may be you have an overall view of that, that is in most cases immediate funding, right?

NATSIOS:  Particularly when private individuals give money, and I suspect most corporations, so that is direct.  The money we have, we have 350 million dollars we can spend right now but we don’t have projects worth that amount because the assessments have not been completed yet.  So I told the staff, what we are going to do is what’s right from a management stand point.  We will respond to needs, we will spend the money as we need it, but don’t try to increase the amount of spending just to make a public statement.  Right now we are designing with ECHO and the British AID agency and UN agencies in Sri Lanka a shelter program.  We announced when we were there a $10 million contribution by the U.S. which we sent to the USAID mission in Sri Lanka, to do temporary housing.  Why is that important?  Because, according to the President of Sri Lanka, 290 schools are the primary residence of most of the displaced people.  And they want to bring the school children back to school. They can’t do it because they are full of families.  So these are not tent cities that we are setting up. These are actually physical structures that will be built in anticipation of a longer term reconstruction program that will actually build the towns back to what they were before. The second thing we announced was a 10 million dollar cash for work program. Very important to get money back into people’s pocket, to recreate markets, and markets won’t get recreated unless there is demand by people to buy things.  And we want the private markets to function. Because as much as we like the relief commodities, the best way for people to support themselves is to purchase things on the market.  So the best thing we can do is to put people’s money, small amounts of money, in each family’s pockets. Usually we try to rely on the women, who are the heads of households, to be the caretaker of the funding. We did this very successfully after the Mozambican floods in the late 90s. We gave $100 to 90,000 households to the women who were the heads of the households, and we checked later what they did with the money. The rebuilt their mud huts.  They bought windows and doors and wood for their roofing material.  They bought clothing because all the clothing was destroyed. They bought furniture for their houses and they paid school fees for their children, which is exactly what we wanted them to do with the money. But they did it on their own.  There was not a big bureaucracy involved.  Very low overhead rates.  And many of us who do disaster response realized that direct amounts of money to the people themselves is the best response because they know what they need themselves. And I think there is a general agreement among my colleagues who are development ministers in other countries that this approach we need to consider very seriously here.

QUESTION:  What do you feel about Mr. Egeland when he says we shouldn’t forget the other disaster areas around the world, that they are being neglected, and that if you look at some places last year they were only getting a third of the aid that they needed. 

NATSIOS:  We tend not, the U.S. government, in many of these emergencies, to make pledges. We just expend the money. We find it has more integrity to it when you just spend the money, and then you report what you spend.  Last year, as I said we spent 2.4 billion in cash and food resources in all emergencies worldwide using the OECD definitions.  The OECD in Paris keeps records, which are available if anyone wants to look at them, about how much each country contributes to disaster relief in these emergencies.  It is not how much you pledge, it is not how much you obligate, it is how much you expended.  That’s what ODA is reported as.  How much you actually spend.  So that is a spent figure. Jan, properly, listed what has been the case.  It think if you actually went through here, and I am not trying to boast about the United States, that is not my purpose here, but if you went through you would see we were contributors to a large percentage of these emergencies. 

QUESTION:  Mr. Egeland has been talking also today about the financial tracking system that now donors will be able to follow where the money has been going right down to where it is being spent.  How do you feel about that?  Do you think that will mean that more people will be willing to give more money.  Someone like yourself who is waiting in the wings to give money because you want to make sure it is spent properly?

NATSIOS:  We have our own tracking system.  We have an Inspector General’s Office and a General Accounting Office and we have a large financial management office at AID. So we want Jan to do that and we will cooperate with him, but we have to rely on our own systems when we expend money from U.S. Treasury because it is required by Federal Law.  I don’t have a choice.  I can’t wave the Inspector General’s Statute nor do I wish to.  In fact I called the Inspector General in the day after the disaster and I said, Jim Ebbitt, you send people out right now so we don’t have any trouble.  The Inspector General is being very cooperative. His view is that we should catch the weaknesses in the system before it becomes a problem, not after it becomes an embarrassment. And I agree with him.

QUESTION:  How do you evaluate the initial United Nations response to this disaster considering that the U.S. is sometimes critical of the U.N. bureaucracy?

NATSIOS:  I can tell you that WFP was on the ground moving food with us very rapidly. The best logisticians in the UN system are in the WFP because they move commodities around. UNICEF started within a few days to do the assessments that led to the beginning of the immunization campaign.  The immunization levels of children are dangerously low in Aceh.  The child mortality rates in Indonesia are exceptionally low: 23 deaths per thousand kids, which is a very low rate for an advanced developing country.  But they have a good health care system. Unfortunately we don’t know what the rates are in Aceh because it is in the middle of an insurgency. And that is the reason the immunization rates are so low.  I think one thing we could do across the whole island, not just in the effected areas, is to do a mass immunization campaign.  Because once you get immunization rates above 85 percent, usually that is a way of ensuring there are no epidemics of communicable diseases that you can immunize against.   Certain things like diarrhea, for example, you just have to get clean water for.  An interesting story though about how this all works.  On the first week we realized there is going to be a problem with clean water from all of the agencies. So we have been producing a little bottle of solution in an Indonesian factory, in fact we are doing it all over the developing world as part of the international effort to provide clean water for the poor.  It is sodium hypochloride.  You put a capful in a ten liter plastic container of water and it purifies the water. We have a manufacturing plant producing 10,000 of these each day for the rest of Indonesia.  We took a weeks supply, 62,000, we moved them immediately to Aceh, started distributing them, and so almost three quarters of the displaced families in Aceh now have a water purification kit.  What we found out was that one of the American ships had the capacity to produce 90,000 gallons of fresh water a day.  And they said well we don’t know how to get it to them.  How do you get it to half a million displaced people?  So our staff bought, in the markets in Indonesia, 6200 collapsible water containers.  We transported them in a C-130 provided by the military to Banda Aceh. The military filled them up on this ship, and then the NGOs and the UN Agencies distributed them to the displaced people. And that shows sort of an integration of military to logistics systems, with donor aid agencies purchasing power, with a distribution networks of the UN agencies, IOM, and the NGOs which are so effective in these emergencies. And that is the way it is supposed to run.  I can’t tell you everything is running with that degree of clarity, but that is the idea.

(end transcript)

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)



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