What the world press is saying

We beg to differ. Egeland was right on target. We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world’s poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world’s richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That’s less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities.

The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Bush’s turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the US budget that we allocate for non-military foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the US spends 24 per cent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 per cent.

Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the US ‘‘has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world.’’ But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.

Making things worse, we often pledge more money than we actually deliver. Victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged. And back in 2002, Bush announced his Millennium Challenge account to give African countries development assistance of up to $5 billion a year, but the account has yet to disperse a single dollar.

Bush said that the $35 million we’ve now pledged ‘‘is only the beginning’’ of the US’ recovery effort. Let’s hope that is true, and that this time, our actions will match our promises.

Editorial in The New York Times

A response to enormity

The death count has mounted with a horrifying momentum. The raw figures are attached to appalling stories: of 1,000 people killed in the Indonesian province of Aceh when a three-storey-high wall of water slammed into a sports field during a match; of at least 1,000 people killed on a single train in Sri Lanka that was swamped with waves; of more than 700 dead at Thailand’s Khao Lak beach resort, including hundreds of vacationing tourists. One senior Red Cross official in Southeast Asia put it succinctly: ‘‘The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable.’’

This tragic toll will go on rising in the coming days as more bodies are retrieved; even worse, it will grow by the tens of thousands unless one of the largest international relief operations in history can quickly be mounted. The World Health Organisation warned that unless clean water and sanitation can be provided, as many people could die from communicable diseases such as cholera and malaria in the stricken areas during the coming weeks as from the earthquake and tsunami. Just behind disease comes the threat from exposure: There may be 1 million homeless in Sri Lanka alone. Scores of seaside fishing villages, together with their boats, have been obliterated.

Pledges of international aid have surpassed $100 million, including $35 million promised by the Bush administration. Still, it was possible to understand the frustration of Jan Egeland, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, who said that rich nations have grown ‘‘stingy’’ about providing international aid even as they have grown more wealthy. A UN aid appeal next month for 11 countries affected by this disaster is likely to be numbered in the billions.

Secretary of State Colin L Powell’s response was partly reassuring: He said that ‘‘clearly the US will be a major contributor to this international effort. And, yes, it will run into billions of dollars.’’ It will be up to Powell’s successor at the State Department, and Congress, to ensure that promise is realised.

Editorial in The Washington Post

Learning from disaster

It is hard to take in the scale of the human tragedy wrought by the Indian Ocean tsunami. The catastrophe has affected 10 countries from the Indonesian island of Sumatra through Sri Lanka to distant Somalia, but the combination of a globalised world, mass tourism, easy communications and the Christmas holiday season means that its impact is being watched and experienced in distant continents. Exotic islands and palm-fringed beaches have become scenes of hell, a Hollywood disaster movie come to horrifying life — with the dazed and lucky survivors limping home through the arrival lounge at Heathrow and elsewhere in Europe.

Too many of the victims are still unidentified and unburied, but it is already clear that a tsunami early warning system, like the one that has existed for almost 40 years in the Pacific, where seabed earthquakes are more common, could have helped save thousands of lives, except perhaps in the areas closest to the epicentre. It is true that for all the advances in seismology, earthquakes are still notoriously difficult to predict, but a tsunami, which occurs after an earthquake, is entirely predictable.

Sri Lanka was hit two-and-a-half hours after the earthquake. It beggars belief that the government in Thailand, which had up to an hour to issue a warning, failed to do so — partly for fear of the effect on the country’s lucrative tourism industry, which of course is now in ruins. In a world with a cornucopia of fast and reliable communications systems, a coordinated alert allowing flight and evacuation should be easily possible. This is about familiarisation, and resources, with casualties the highest in the poorest areas. Lessons must be learned and quickly applied. The UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Japan in mid-January could not be more timely. More immediately, the priority must be carefully targeted emergency help. Aid agencies are right to avoid rushing in until they can be confident that their resources will be put to the most effective use. Fresh water, food and shelter will be the most urgent needs, along with the disposal of corpses. Efforts will be required to combat waterborne diseases , made doubly difficult by the destruction of hospitals and clinics. It is a time for coordination, not turf wars, and right that the UN, with its experienced specialised agencies, should take the lead. And that is the easy bit. It will take many months before there can be anything like a return to normality in these regions. Long after that a huge and sustained effort will be required to rebuild shattered infrastructure.

It is exactly a year ago that a huge earthquake destroyed much of the ancient Iranian city of Bam, but only a small fraction of the $1bn of aid pledged has reached it. Amid talk of convening donor conferences, promises of financial help to the Indian Ocean already look terrifyingly small compared to the scale of what is being called the most expensive natural disaster ever — one estimate is $13bn. The range and destructiveness of the tsunami, its extraordinary global resonance and the common humanity that binds us — wealthy western tourists and poor Sri Lankan fishermen alike — requires that this time the world does what decency requires be done.

Editorial in The Guardian

Help poor nations prepare for calamities

The daunting destructive power of the quake not only shook the countries located near the epicenter, but it also created tsunami that crashed into the shorelines of faraway countries, swallowing up many people. The quake had a magnitude of 9.0. It was the fourth largest in the last 100 years and was 360 times more powerful than the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake.

Everything must be done to rescue the survivors. What is noteworthy in the news reports is that there were no signs that evacuation orders or warnings were made in any of the countries. Indian fishermen told local TV staff that they felt a shock, like being hit from behind, when they were mending fishing nets on the shore. Nobody appears to have been warned of the coming danger.

In tsunami-prone Japan, it is accepted wisdom to flee to higher ground when people feel a severe trembling of the Earth. Even in distant places where a quake cannot be felt, evacuation warnings are issued to residents. Earthquakes often break out in countries facing the Indian Ocean as well. With the exception of Indonesia, though, tidal waves are infrequent in those countries and few precautionary measures are in place. Those countries probably were not prepared for distant earthquakes, such as the latest one. Moreover, they are all struggling financially. Indonesia and Sri Lanka have also been rocked by armed conflicts. They cannot afford to spend money on measures — such as quake-resistant standards for buildings — for unpredictable earthquakes.

Japan and other nations are providing emergency assistance by dispatching personnel to the affected countries. Medical supplies, food and other vital aid must be given quickly. After such urgent needs have been met, longer-term measures should be implemented. Official assistance to developing countries could be used to help residents better prepare for earthquakes and tidal waves. Although great strides have been made in science, it is still not possible to know when the gigantic energy contained in the Earth will erupt. The earthquake that broke out in Sumatra drove home that cold reality. Japanese people must always be prepared for a great temblor, such as one with an epicentre in Tokyo, as well as the Tokai, Tonankai and Nankai earthquakes. Efforts should be redoubled to prepare for such natural disasters.

Editorial in The Asahi Shimbun

How to rein in the Apocalypse horsemen

Only in the minds of poets and hymn-writers are floods cleansing. In real life, they are filthy, opening sewers, contaminating water sources and spreading disease. The Indian Ocean is now surrounded by a thin strip of wreckage, a flotsam of broken buildings and unburied corpses: perfect conditions for cholera, typhoid and malaria. For many of the survivors, the misery is just beginning.

International relief agencies are rushing to supply the stricken areas with food and medicine, water purification tablets and tents. They start with some advantages. In most of the affected countries, only a narrow stretch of coastline was inundated: a mile or two inland, there are roads, hospitals and a functioning infrastructure. Where wars, famines and land earthquakes can degrade large swathes of territory, the devastation of a tsunami is concentrated. Aid workers will not, by and large, need to transport their supplies across difficult country, nor negotiate their way past local warlords.

On the other hand, the damage is colossal. Often, in the aftermath of a cataclysm, initial casualty figures are exaggerated. In this case, the reverse has been true: each passing hour has seen an upward revision of the death toll. And today’s gruesome tally covers only those who have already perished in the waves; it does not take account of those who will surely die through sickness, exposure and malnutrition.

While some of the blighted regions are accessible, others are not. The floods have claimed thousands of lives in India’s Andaman and Nicobar islands, which cannot easily be supplied from the mainland. In some remote archipelagoes, we have not even begun to assess the extent of the destruction. Other territories are rendered inaccessible, not by geography, but by civil unrest, notably Aceh in Indonesia and the eastern parts of Sri Lanka where, on top of everything else, the tidal waves appear to have scooped landmines out of demarcated minefields and seeded them along the shore. When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

There was nothing we could do to prevent the tidal waves: nature can unmake in moments what man has built up over centuries. But we can prevent an epidemic. Aid agencies large and small have been quick to respond to the emergency, including Merlin, a small charity that is among the beneficiaries of our Christmas Appeal.

Editorial in The Daily Telegraph