January 20, 2005 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Horrified by the devastation wrought by the tsunamis in South Asia, donors in the United States poured more than $300-million into the coffers of relief charities.
With television news showing the destroyed villages and the massive numbers of people — especially the tens of millions of children — whose lives ended or were turned upside down, it was hard for Americans not to act. But even the widest-screen TV could not provide the perspective that donors needed to participate in a global humanitarian effort.
For that they must see that the world already suffers from an array of man-made disasters, a tidal wave of civil wars far more deadly than the rampaging tsunamis. When a man-made emergency mixes with a natural disaster — as happened in Indonesia and Sri Lanka — the result is toxic. What do we do to avoid that mix?
The first step is for charities to help donors see beyond the faces on television to glimpse a picture of global humanitarian need.
Death and devastation have ravaged South Asia for decades, the work not of Mother Nature but human nature. Even before the great waves hit, more than half a million people had been ousted from their homes in Indonesia, the result of active armed separatist movements and government crackdowns. In Sri Lanka, whole villages had been engulfed in the horror of child soldiering, with school-age children transformed into fodder for what is considered to be the world’s biggest suicide- bomber group.
The relentless violence in those countries and the social dislocation caused by conflict were among the reasons that too few financial investments had been made, investments that could have alleviated the tsunamis’ death toll of 130,000 in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
The most striking example was Aceh, Indonesia, where insurgency movements and government soldiers are still fighting. In some places 8 in 10 people were buried in water and mud in minutes because their shelters were so flimsy. A shaken Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who toured this part of Sumatra by air, described a 200-mile wasteland of flattened villages.
The tsunamis have shown that place is everything. It wasn’t just where you stood on the beach that determined your fate, but where you were standing in the world.
The United States, a country that ended its civil war 140 years ago, would not have found itself fighting a natural disaster and juggling a man-made one at the same time. Most American buildings would not have fallen down in response to the tsunamis and earthquakes, the first responders would have had more resources, and the casualty rates would have been much smaller.
Nor would those Americans whose oceanfront property washed away been left penniless. The Western world has a huge insurance industry, but house, car, and even flood insurance is nearly unknown in many parts of the globe. Americans can call the Federal Emergency Management Agency after a flood and get cash grants. In Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and many other Asian countries, no such public-private insurance safety net exists.
To be sure, American donors have been extraordinarily generous in response to the loss of life and livelihoods. One likely reason: A poll taken before the tsunamis found that 85 percent of registered American voters are confident that relief dollars will get to victims of a natural disaster. But donors are much more skeptical when it comes to helping charities pay for projects that promote peace and political stability, fuel long-term reconstruction, or help refugees of war.
Charities must explain how important such long-term investments are. Indonesia in particular is too important to ignore. It has the largest Muslim population of any country, larger even than Saudi Arabia, and it has been trying to establish a democracy after decades of tyranny. It would make an enormous difference for the United States and the world if Indonesia succeeded in building a solid democracy, a noncorrupt market economy, and a tolerant, pluralistic society.
If American donors understand the value of such investments — including the benefits to our own security — they will be more likely to follow up emergency aid with gifts to support sustained development.
Those private gifts will prove to be increasingly important.
Pledges for tsunami relief and reconstruction have been extraordinary. But it is possible that not all of the $5-billion to $6-billion that governments promised for those efforts will materialize. In the past, governments that pledged gifts to natural disasters have been less likely to come through than private ones. The December 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, is a case in point. The earthquake not only brought enormous casualties, but also destroyed more than 85 percent of the buildings in and around that city. Iran says governments pledged $1-billion, but the country received only $17-million. The same lack of follow-through has stymied reconstruction in Mexico City, Ethiopia, and Kobe, Japan, as well as many other parts of the world.
Private donors have a historic opportunity to show their vision now by putting money not only into disaster relief but also into longer-term strategic reconstruction projects that reduce the risks of future natural disasters, improve preparedness for other catastrophes, and reduce political and ethnic conflict. Donors need to help support efforts that go beyond the 12 nations hit by the tsunamis to the countless others whose people suffer from poverty, disease, conflict, and ejection from their homes and land.
Americans like to think of themselves as the most generous people on earth, but the metrics don’t bear this out. Today people in the United States give 21 cents per day to assist the world’s less fortunate, 15 cents in government-sponsored assistance and 6 cents in private largess. In Denmark, which has a smaller gross domestic product than the United States, the country and its citizens give four times as much.
Private dollars from Americans are even more important now than in the past. Ten years ago the United Nations declared 14 humanitarian situations to be emergencies because of the large number of people affected. Today the number is 21. The five million people affected by the tsunamis make that the biggest emergency. Nonetheless, two million people have already lost their lives in Sudan’s 21 years of war. As the ink dries on a new peace deal, another two million people, displaced in Sudan’s Darfur province, face the whips and bullets of the Janjaweed militia along with dehydration and hunger. In northern Uganda, a massive war of children against children has created legions of “night commuters” — children who leave their parents before nightfall and head to camps closer to cities for fear they will be abducted and forced to commit atrocities against their own people. Iraq and Afghanistan also require aid, though these humanitarian emergencies get more news-media attention than those in Africa.
Post-tsunami American donors must do more than think globally and act locally. If they don’t start giving globally they will have missed the message of the waves altogether: In today’s world, we sink or swim together.
David Hamburg is president emeritus of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Nancy Langer has worked on human-rights and humanitarian programs for 25 years.
