Caught in the Crossfire of Disaster and War

Charities in Sri Lanka struggle to meet the needs of tsunami victims and those affected by civil conflict

Arunachalam Sundararajah looks east to the Sri Lankan coastline with a feeling that resembles envy.

Many families on the shore live in new houses or own new fishing boats donated by charities working to

help the region recover from last year’s tsunamis, says the 60-year-old store owner. “There’s been special consideration for them.”

Here in Tiriyai, a small town in the northeast with no electricity or telephone service, assistance has been less forthcoming. While the town escaped the tsunamis unscathed — it is located about two miles away from the ocean — Mr. Sundararajah and others are victims of a manmade disaster.

Fighting between government forces and separatist rebels has left dozens of burned-out concrete buildings and a damaged irrigation tank that prevents farmers from growing rice, the town’s main staple. From the porch of his small grocery, Mr. Sundararajah looks out on the battered landscape and wonders when more help will arrive.

The tsunamis that hit Sri Lanka generated an unparalleled outpouring of donations to this small country off the southern tip of India, with estimates that close to $1-billion has been earmarked for this country’s recovery. The assistance was sorely needed — the tidal waves killed more than 31,000 people and left up to a million people without homes — but it also has created a dangerous rift between people like Mr. Sundararajah and the tsunami survivors who live on what some now call “the Golden Coast” because of all the relief money channeled there.

Several charities, such as Mercy Corps, Oxfam International, and CARE Sri Lanka, are trying to solve the problem by redirecting part of their disaster funds to Sri Lankans who live near the coast but were not hit by the massive waves.

“We’re trying to strike a balance between the tsunami folks and the conflict folks,” says Jim Jarvie, Mercy Corps’s director of program development and policy in Sri Lanka. “If you keep the tsunami aid only going to one, you’re creating jealousy.”

Housing Problems

To be sure, not all the needs of the tsunami-affected Sri Lankans have been met. Many of them lack housing and remain in makeshift camps. The government has limited the building of houses near the seaside due to safety concerns, but many families want to return to their homes near the water.

While Sri Lankan authorities have wavered on whether building can take place on an area commonly referred to as the buffer zone, the limits have hampered nonprofit efforts to build new residences. As a result, parts of the east coast look almost exactly as they did just weeks after the wall of water swept through them.

“Let me be honest, it’s not going as it should,” says Benjamin D. Kauffeld, humanitarian-assistance program manager for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Sri Lanka. “The reality is that anywhere you go, even in New Orleans, reconstruction is usually a two-to five-year endeavor. Nonetheless, the government of Sri Lanka could be doing some more things to remove obstacles to the reconstruction, namely the buffer zone, which has really tied up housing.”

In addition to the housing woes, concerns have been raised about the coordination of charitable efforts. Several government and nonprofit officials complain that too many aid groups, as well as philanthropic Americans and Europeans unaffiliated with a charity, have entered the country.

“The problem with Sri Lanka was not that we didn’t get enough aid, we got an overabundance of it,” says Sanjana Hattotuwa, a consultant to Info-Share, a charitable group in Colombo, the nation’s capital. “We didn’t have the capacity as a country to handle it. We were swamped by aid.”

But of all the challenges to tsunami recovery, many charity officials say the greatest one is figuring out how to treat people in Sri Lanka equitably. If they focus only on tsunami survivors, they say, they could exacerbate the country’s ethnic divisions.

Mercy Corps, which is based in Portland, Ore., has been one of the most vocal advocates for redirecting tsunami dollars. With the disaster’s emergency period over, the group has started to spend its tsunami largess in areas near the coast that were unaffected by the disaster but have been caught in the crossfire of the nation’s 20-year civil war between militant members of the Tamil minority group and the government, which is ruled by the majority Sinhalese.

Signs of Inequity

The move has benefited Tiriyai.

On a recent Thursday morning, P.M. Xavier, a Mercy Corps aid worker, prepares to make one of his regular visits to the town as part of the charity’s expanding operations in the northeast. While Tiriyai is about 25 miles north of Trincomalee, the coastal city where Mr. Xavier lives, the trip takes about two hours by van due to poor road conditions.

During the trip, signs of the disparities in aid are apparent. A few miles outside Trincomalee, a half-dozen or so charities have started building new concrete houses for tsunami survivors. Less than a hundred yards away, Sri Lankans displaced by the war live in ramshackle huts made of tin, wood, and leaves from palm trees.

The Sri Lankans affected by the conflict have received “just enough to survive, but not enough to get back to normal,” says Mr. Xavier, a 28-year-old Tamil.

Along the route to Tiriyai, Mr. Xavier’s driver steers the van through a dozen or so military checkpoints. The white van flies a ragged flag with the Mercy Corps logo and a sticker showing an AK-47 machine gun with a diagonal red stripe through it to show rebels and soldiers alike that the vehicle contains people not involved in the war.

When he arrives in Tiriyai, Mr. Xavier meets with a group of 15 residents to find out what the town needs to rebuild. They sit in a classroom of the local school, the largest structure in the town still intact. Nearby a Danish team of specialists in defusing landmines, wearing protective face shields and body armor, probe a muddy field for explosives.

The townspeople ask Mr. Xavier for funds to replace a library, which they say was burned to the ground in 1985 by government forces. He explains that Mercy Corps will pay for part of the cost of the new library, but that town residents will also need to contribute by either donating books or helping to clear the land for the building.

During the half-hour meeting, participants drink Olé, a sugary sweet Sri Lankan soda. Mr. Xavier says the bottle the yellow drink comes in is an example of how places like Tiriyai and other Tamil towns across the island are being forgotten. “This is what is happening to the country,” says Mr. Xavier, pointing out that the soda’s name appears in English and Sinhala, but not in the Tamil language.

Redirecting Donations

To spend tsunami dollars in Tiriyai, Mercy Corps received permission from several major donors to redirect their gifts. The charity declined to name those contributors, citing privacy concerns.

Other charities, such as the American Red Cross, have declined to use their tsunami funds for such efforts because it might upset donors.

“The money the American Red Cross has received is for the tsunami,” says James R. Ackley, country coordinator for the nonprofit organization in Sri Lanka. “It is important for us to meet the donors’ intent.”

Indeed, the U.S. Agency for International Development has requested its money remain focused on the regions directly hit by the tidal waves.

“We’ve had some push-back from our administration, Congress, and others to keep it directly focused on what might be defined as tsunami survivors,” says Mr. Kauffeld of the U.S. aid agency.

Even so, Mr. Kauffeld says the agency has raised $1.5-million from Geneva Global — a company in Wayne, Pa., that oversees charitable projects for wealthy donors — that will be spent in part on programs that benefit people on the island who were not affected by the natural disaster.

The money from Geneva Global, which will be matched by the U.S. aid agency, may seem small in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to Sri Lanka for the disaster, but according to Marshall Wallace, director of Do No Harm, a research project that seeks to improve international aid in war zones, small sums can do much to deal with disparities in relief aid.

When people say, “‘We want equivalent,’ they don’t really mean that,” Mr. Wallace says. “What they want is to be treated with respect and dignity. They don’t like anyone treating one group as if they are the only victims.”

Lack of Cultural Understanding

Sri Lankan nonprofit officials say that’s exactly what some international charities are doing because they lack a firm understanding of the country and its residents. They say outside aid workers often are insensitive to the country’s ethnic conflict and the needs it has created, such as the more than 300,000 Sri Lankans who remain displaced from their homes because of the war.

“A Western middle-class, white suburban male or female simply can’t understand or grapple with the trauma of 20 years of conflict inflamed by the tsunami deaths,” says Mr. Hattotuwa of Info-Share.

Charities new to the country counter that they have developed local expertise by hiring Sri Lankans. For example, Mercy Corps, which was only operating on a limited basis on the island before the tsunamis, hired Mr. Xavier, a former government worker who has also worked for Sri Lankan charities.

But Mr. Hattotuwa says that employment practice may end up hurting the country. As international charities hire local staff members, who are drawn to the promise of high salaries from overseas groups, they deprive Sri Lankan charities of badly needed human resources.

“The aspiration of a very, very good community-based organization activist because of economic imperatives would not be to continue the work he or she has been doing in the community,” he says.

The Sri Lankan government has its own concerns about the influx of outside nonprofit groups and so-called disaster tourists, philanthropic individuals unaffiliated with any charity. During the emergency, a diverse collection of people entered the country to help, sometimes offering unusual services, such as trying to heal tsunami survivors with crystals.

Tax on Supplies

Since then the government has tightened rules on charitable efforts, including levying a tax on imported relief supplies.

Oxfam, for example, had to pay $1-million in customs fees to bring 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles into the country in June. The new rules have winnowed the number of international aid groups, but many remain.

In Kinniyai, an island just south of Trincomalee, for example, K.M. Nihar, a program coordinator at Kinniyai Vision, a local charity, says nonprofit groups have continued to “mushroom” in the area.

While he has been asked to collaborate with many organizations, he says he prefers to ally with groups that have worked in Sri Lanka for many years, such as Oxfam and Save the Children, because he is skeptical of some of the new arrivals. “I don’t know their policies and aims,” he says.

A.M. Murbarak, the Sri Lankan official who oversees Kinniyai, hometo about 13,000 families, says he knows of at least 13 international nonprofit organizations in the area, but suspects several more operate there under his radar.

“I need the NGO details,” he says, using the shorthand term for nongovernmental organization. “We want to coordinate with them.”

An American who leads a small, unregistered charity that works in a village south of Kinniyai defends his decision to operate independently of the authorities. The official, who asked not to be identified for fear of being kicked out of the country, says the group has earned the trust of Tamil residents. Working with the government, which is widely seen as pro-Sinhalese, might jeopardize that bond, he says.

Antiterrorism Rules

The conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese has affected how other charities operate in the country as well.

For example, the American Red Cross wants to start programs in areas controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Homeland), the largest rebel group, but says it cannot do so because of U.S. antiterrorism rules that prohibit nonprofit groups from working with militant organizations. (The Tamil Tigers, known also as the LTTE, were designated a terrorist organization by the United States in 1997.)

The Red Cross is required to sign agreements with local authorities before starting charitable operations in an area, and in LTTE territory, the rebels are the de facto government.

“We’re not in the northeast in part because of these issues,” says Mr. Ackley, the Red Cross’s Sri Lankan country coordinator. “Our lawyers are looking this over.”

Other charitable organizations, such as CARE, provide assistance in rebel-held areas and coordinate their activities with the LTTE, but make sure not to provide funds to the group or its charitable arm, the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization.

“We don’t sign agreements with the LTTE,” says Nick Osborn, who directs CARE’s operations in Sri Lanka. “We also don’t put any funding through the LTTE.”

Making Progress

Despite Sri Lanka’s twin challenges of civil war and natural disaster, Mr. Xavier of Mercy Corps says he sees progress in some parts of the island.

One such place is Kalampathai, a town next to Tiriyai. Several years ago, the residents of Kalampathai were forced from their village by the war and moved to the seaside. Last December, the tsunamis wiped out their temporary shelters.

But today, 85 Kalampathai families are returning to the site of their original village thanks to international aid groups. Mercy Corps has hired Sri Lankans to clear the brush and debris from the abandoned area, while an Italian charity is building the new houses.

Walking around the construction site, with contractors banging away on new homes, Mr. Xavier says this town’s example suggests that the tsunami aid, despite the concerns of the inequities it has created, may also help heal this country’s battle scars.

“This is a new opportunity,” he says.