A good day's work was done in Jakarta yesterday when an emergency summit pledged immediate and long-term aid to victims of the Indian Ocean disaster.
There was agreement on the urgent need to co-ordinate aid and reconstruction through the United Nations. And there was clear evidence that military and logistical resources to deliver water, food, shelter and medicines are beginning to catch up with the desperate needs of the five million people affected and the 1.5 million who are homeless.
Now that overall responsibility for providing relief has been agreed between the UN, the countries directly involved and regional and world powers, a highly demanding challenge to ensure it is delivered upon is posed. The experience of other disaster relief efforts such as in Bam or Darfur does not augur well, either in getting immediate aid to people in good time or ensuring that longer commitments made are eventually met. Making his appeal for $1 billion at the summit yesterday, the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, recalled such shortfalls, including those from governments which recycle existing funds rather than pledging new ones.
This is a vital issue. Otherwise resources will be displaced from one world region needing these funds to the Indian Ocean disaster, which has caught the international imagination and attention so impressively over the last 10 days. Africa must not suffer from any such displacement, as many agencies and political leaders have emphasised. Sub-Saharan Africa absorbed some $19.4 billion official development assistance and aid in 2002 compared to the $3 billion plus so far pledged to the tsunami disaster.
African countries are much more vulnerable economically than the Asian states involved, although these countries' coastal populations have been devastated. In fact the economic impact of the disaster is small for Indonesia and India, though more severe for Thailand's tourism and Sri Lanka's fisheries.
There is good reason to hope that the outpouring of sympathy and human solidarity can be channelled constructively towards more long-term disaster relief and developmental goals if public pressure is kept up and political leadership provided. The striking images of suffering and devastation from Aceh and Sri Lanka create a demand for logistical and military facilities best met by organising them on a standing basis, not an ad-hoc one. This would have to be organised as a partnership between the UN and its member-states. World powers are learning the political benefits of using military resources for direct relief of suffering, rather than war-making, through this crisis, as well as harnessing the assets of charitable and developmental agencies.
Debt relief for those affected has also a vital, if nuanced, role to play in relating disaster relief to developmental goals. The crisis has put this issue squarely on the international agenda. It must now be kept there.