Take lessons from the tsunami response

The international disaster specialists are beginning to pour into Islamabad. So too are the aircraft packed with sniffer dogs, tents, blankets and food rations. And around the world governments are again disbursing millions in emergency aid for yet another Asian disaster that is epic in scale.

But if in the coming days Pakistani authorities can take a moment to escape the melee that is the effort to help the people of Kashmir — to find graves for up to 40,000 dead and homes for up to 2.5 million survivors — they would do well to cast an eye towards Indonesia.

Ten months after the Asian tsunami disaster levelled much of the Sumatran province of Aceh, leaving 160,000 dead and hundreds of thousands more with their lives in tatters, aid workers and officials there are still pondering the lessons learned.

Thanks to an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy from around the world and Indonesia's rapid decision to open up conflict-torn Aceh to outside help, much went well in the response to the disaster.

Pakistan, however, must also pay attention to what did not go right in Aceh, aid workers and officials said. The problems ranged from bureaucratic barriers and strategic miscalculations on what sort of housing to build, to UN agencies and private charities more focused on competing with each other than helping victims.

In the days immediately after the December 26 tsunamis, the logistical difficulties of getting into Aceh meant — as it does now in south Asia — that international relief supplies only trickled in.

International access

Within a fortnight, dozens of aid organisations and hundreds of aid workers had set up camp in Aceh, to which international access had for years been heavily restricted. "Aceh went from being North Korea to being Woodstock in the space of about two weeks," says Bill Hyde, head of the International Organisation for Migration's Indonesia Disaster Recovery Programme. What Hyde and other disaster experts call an unprecedented amount of help quickly led to problems of coordination, however.

Within weeks an often-bitter competition had begun among aid agencies often more intent on showing off rapidly deployed projects to donors than determining what was really needed.

For Indonesian authorities that created an often perplexing situation — and Pakistani officials could confront the same, aid workers and officials warn. "It feels like a wave of kindness and concern. It feels great," says one Indonesian government adviser of the international outpouring that followed the tsunamis. "The ‘but' is that, especially with the UN, a lot of that gets overtaken by inter-agency rivalries.

The UN Development Programme is fighting the UN High Commission for Refugees who is fighting the World Food Programme who is fighting the World Health Organisation. The territoriality of it all is baffling and frustrating."

Aid workers say that competition manifested itself in Aceh in misguided projects — often carpeted with logos — that were often simply meant to impress donors.

Some contend it also complicated the process of long-term planning, something Islamabad must begin as soon as possible. Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the outspoken head of the government agency formed to coordinate the reconstruction of Aceh, says one of the problems with Indonesia's response to the tsunamis was its failure to foresee the need for a proper transition from the initial emergency response to reconstruction.

Lose the momentum

"The transition from relief stage to recovery stage is very critical. If you are not prepared for that then you can lose the momentum that you have," he says.

That is still the case in tropical Aceh where some 65,000 people remain under tents. Some 500,000 people are thought to live in the more than 1,600 barracks Jakarta built as temporary shelters. But, according to Kuntoro, more than 30 of those barracks, each of which can house 100 people or more, lie empty.

That sort of issue — with the added problem of a looming winter — will confront Pakistan with the UN estimating that up to 2.5 million people will be left homeless. Beyond that, Kuntoro says, is also a daunting timeline that will inevitably confront both authorities and survivors in Pakistan.

His agency began work in April and has a four-year mandate to oversee a largely internationally funded reconstruction effort likely to cost up to $5 billion (Dh18.35 billion). But that will get Aceh "just the basics", Kuntoro says, and it will be years beyond that before the province is rebuilt, if ever.

"In Kobe it was only this year that the reconstruction was declared finished," he says. "It took 10 years. And that happened in Kobe, in a really advanced country [Japan] with advanced technology. Four years is very fast for Aceh."

– Financial Times