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While the United Nations appears to be adept at having meetings, the organisation is hopeless on the ground say career foreign service officers in tsunami-affected regions.

As news media are increasingly dominated by footage of US, Australian and regional military forces actually delivering aid to stricken survivors of the Boxing Day tsunami, UN officials are carping about housing in major cities far removed from the front lines and passing around elaborate business cards.

Organising to organise seems to be the word of the day for the UN, say career US foreign service officers anonymously, who fault the international organisation for taking credit where none is due and proving hopeless at actually delivering relief.

A blog (The Diplomad) run by “career US Foreign Service officers” — many serving in what they call the “Far Abroad” as a eupehmism for what appears, often, to be Sri Lanka — is loading the internet with accounts of UN ineptitude in the wake of the tsunami disaster.

The same QuickBird pics, but the before and after have been aligned so that they overlap perfectly. Click a button to toggle between the views for a dramatic view of the tsunami damage.

Tsunami – Kalutara Beach, Sri Lanka
The “Before/After” button below (the one that is currently labelled “Before”) toggles the image between the “Before” and “After” satellite photos.
The “Previous” and “Next” links will take you to the previous or next image set … there are 14 sets in this series. (3 added, 2005-01-06)

CJAD 800 : News
Death toll from Asian earthquake, tsunami rises to about 160,000
Updated at 1:33 on January 7, 2005, EST.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (CP) – The death toll from the devastating tsunami that hit Asia and Africa soared to about 160,000 early Friday after Indonesia announced almost 20,000 new deaths.

Health officials have warned the death toll could jump even higher without a continual supply of aid and world leaders struggled Thursday to figure out the best way to help victims – and prevent such a catastrophe from happening again.

Donors concluded an emergency one-day summit as relief workers scrambled to move aid to areas of Sumatra, the Indonesian island hit hardest by the earthquake and giant waves that crashed ashore Dec. 26. Volunteers hurled sacks of rice and instant noodles into trucks as U.S. helicopters loaded with other supplies buzzed overhead en route to isolated communities.

Indonesia said Friday its death toll from the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the tsunamis it spawned was 113,306, up from its previous estimate of 94,200. More than 10,000 are still missing in the Aceh province of Sumatra Island, the Ministry of Social Affairs said.

The Command Post – Global Recon – U.N. Warns Tsunami Death Toll Could Reach 300,000
Reuters reports the World Health Organization warns that the tsunami death toll could double to about 300,000 unless survivors received clean water and other basic services by the end of the week.

Excerpt from:
Chrenkoff
Wednesday tsunami update
The death toll: In this table.

The big picture: “The United Nations says ‘extraordinary progress’ is being made. The UN says the total amount of aid pledged had risen to between $US2 billion and $US3 billion ($A2.55 to $A3.99 billion).”

This is a handy list of who’s giving what. As the report notes, the aid is coming even “from the world’s poorest: Russian town of Beslan – scene of a bloody school siege last year – pledged 1m roubles ($36,000) from the fund set up after the mass hostage-taking; Mozambique – one of the world’s poorest nations – has donated $100,000; [and] Nepal and East Timor have also pledged donations.”

From Down Under:

“Australia is prepared to spend whatever it takes to help rebuild countries ravaged by the tsunami, Prime Minister John Howard will tell a relief summit in Jakarta today.”

Most of Australia’s effort is directed at Indonesia, which in addition to being the world’s largest Muslim country (and the world’s largest Muslim democracy), is our nearest neighbor, with a see-saw history of relations. It makes a moral sense, it makes a strategic sense, and it’s also an investment in the stability of Indonesia. Hence:

“Australia’s response to Indonesia’s tsunami tragedy has heralded a new era of close relations between the two countries, the Indonesian ambassador to Australia said yesterday, and would be remembered for ‘years to come’. The praise came as the [Sydney Morning] Herald learned that the Prime Minister, John Howard, was the first foreign leader Indonesia’s President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, contacted after the disaster.”

It’s not just Australia:

“Rear Admiral Doug Crowder of the US Navy was having trouble making out the words of his Indonesian counterpart, Major-General Bambang Dharmono, over the roar of the two US Seahawk helicopters parked behind them on the military airstrip.

“The silvery haired admiral moved closer, his hands still on his hips but his face now within 30 centimetres of the camouflage-clad Indonesian. They were comparing notes on the relief airlifted into Aceh for victims of the tsunami. Admiral Crowder could still not hear.

“So he bowed his head slightly, putting his ear up to General Dharmono’s mouth. Then he placed his left hand on the Indonesian’s shoulder.

“The image would have been unthinkable two weeks ago.”

As the report notes, “military officers on both sides acknowledged they could not have imagined such close cooperation, especially in such a politically sensitive province [Aceh]. Admiral Crowder said later that he expected the joint efforts would improve the prospects for resuming full military ties between the countries.”

Excerpt from:
Telegraph | Opinion | American stinginess is saving lives
But the waters recede and the familiar contours of the political landscape re-emerge – in this case, the need to fit everything to the Great Universal Theory of the age, that whatever happens, the real issue is the rottenness of America. Jan Egeland, the Norwegian bureaucrat who’s the big humanitarian honcho at the UN, got the ball rolling with some remarks about the “stinginess” of certain wealthy nations. And Clare Short piled in, and then Polly Toynbee threw in her three-ha’porth, reminding us that ” ‘Charity begins at home’ is the mean-minded dictum of the Right”. But even Telegraph readers subscribe to the Great Universal Theory. On our Letters Page, Robert Eddison dismissed the “paltry $15 million from Washington” as “worse than stingy. The offer – since shamefacedly upped to $35 million – equates to what? Three oil tycoons’ combined annual salary?”

Mr Eddison concluded with a stirring plea to the wicked Americans to mend their ways: “If Washington is to lay any claim to the moral, as distinct from the military, high ground, let it emulate Ireland and Norway’s prompt and proportionate attempts to plug South-East Asia’s gaping gap of need and help avert a further 80,000 deaths from infection and untreated wounds.”

If America were to emulate Ireland and Norway, there’d be a lot more dead Indonesians and Sri Lankans. Mr Eddison may not have noticed, but the actual relief effort going on right now is being done by the Yanks: it’s the USAF and a couple of diverted naval groups shuttling in food and medicine, with solid help from the Aussies, Singapore and a couple of others. The Irish can’t fly in relief supplies, because they don’t have any C-130s. All they can do is wait for the UN to swing by and pick up their cheque.

The Americans send the UN the occasional postal order, too. In fact, 40 per cent of Egeland’s budget comes from Washington, which suggests the Europeans aren’t being quite as “proportionate” as Mr Eddison thinks. But, when disaster strikes, what matters is not whether your cheque is “prompt”, but whether you are. For all the money lavished on them, the UN is hard to rouse to action. Egeland’s full-time round-the-clock 24/7 Big Humanitarians are conspicuous by their all but total absence on the ground. In fact, they’re doing exactly what our reader accused Washington of doing – Colin Powell, wrote Mr Eddison, “is like a surgeon saying he must do a bandage count before he will be in a position to staunch the blood flow of a haemorrhaging patient”. That’s the sclerotic UN bureaucracy. They’ve flown in (or nearby, or overhead) a couple of experts to assess the situation and they’ve issued press releases boasting about the assessments. In Sri Lanka, Egeland’s staff informs us, “UNFPA is carrying out reproductive health assessments”.

Which, translated out of UN-speak, means the Sri Lankans can go screw themselves.

Xeni Jardin:
Another collection of satellite photos of affected areas, including Aceh and Nicobar. Link (Thanks, Catherine Giayvia)
…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

I’ve not seen it discussed much at all, the damage in Africa. Let’s not neglect that the tsunami hit there, too.

Tsunami-Info.org…
Somalia Seeks Aid for 50,000 Victims

NAIROBI, Kenya – Somalia appealed Monday for international aid to victims of the deadly tsunami that slammed its shores, with an official saying at least 50,000 people urgently need food, water, shelter and medical help after losing their homes and livelihoods.

Read more in this AP article.

Tsunami-Info.org…
News Feeds & Blogs From Around the World, Collected by Andy Carvin

Excerpt from:
The Command Post – Global Recon – The Darker Side
Amidst all the stories of heroism and humanity by the relief workers, there are some stories showing that we’re a very imperfect species.

Concerns have been raised in Indonesia that children orphaned by the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Aceh are being taken away by unidentified adults claiming to be relatives, or wanting to adopt them.
[...]
Last Friday, Raja, a 5-year-old boy who lost his parents in the earthquake was among hundreds of Acehnese on board a Hercules transport plane that landed at an Air Force base in the North Sumatra provincial capital of Medan, where many have taken refuge.

He has become a focus of attention, his story appearing on the front pages of local newspapers in the past few days.

Soon after his arrival, a couple who claimed to be his parents tried to take him away but they were stopped by Ms Mutiara, who noticed that the couple did not look Acehnese.

Suspicious of their intentions, Ms Mutiara put several questions to them.
[...]
Under questioning, the couple finally confessed they were not Raja’s parents, but claimed they lived next door to his family.
Ms Mutiara suspected that the couple had in fact been paid by someone, perhaps a member of a child-trafficking syndicate, to collect the child.

Excerpt from:
The Command Post – Global Recon
“We find them by the smell,” says Kerg-Reut Khaolamai, manager of the Ayutthaya Elephant Palace and Royal Krual, as the body is bagged and carried out.

“Then the elephants clear the way and lift them out. They have not done this kind of work before.“

Tsunami Missing Persons
Find Missing Persons from Tsuanami affected areas.

Excerpt from:
The Command Post – Op-Ed – Counting The Cost
The human toll of the recent [tsunami] tragedy will never be known exactly. It looks like it will never be known even approximately. All the official figures are, as at 01 January 2005, neccessarily drastic under-estimates. To see why, and what the difficulties are in estimating even approximately the toll in human life, read on.

HELP ARRIVES:

RAHAM LINCOLN – Desperate, homeless villagers on the tsunami-ravaged island of Sumatra mobbed American helicopters carrying aid Saturday as the U.S. military launched its largest operation in the region since the Vietnam War, ferrying food and other emergency relief to survivors across the disaster zone.

From dawn until sunset on New Year’s Day, 12 Seahawk helicopters shuttled supplies and advance teams from offshore naval vessels while reconnaissance aircraft brought back stark images of wave-wrecked coastal landscapes and their hungry, traumatized inhabitants.

“They came from all directions, crawling under the craft, knocking on the pilot’s door, pushing to get into the cabin,” said Petty Officer First Class Brennan Zwack. “But when they saw we had no more food inside, they backed away, saying `Thank you, thank you.’” . . .

More than a dozen other ships were en route to southern Asian waters, with the USS Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious assault vessel carrying Marines, headed for Sri Lanka, which along with Indonesia was the worst-hit area. The mission involves thousands of sailors and Marines, along with some 1,000 land-based troops.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: More her

…excerpt from: instapundit.com…

HERE’S AN INTERESTING LIST of tsunami blog links.

…excerpt from: instapundit.com…

Oops… It looks as though you may have to be an actual Canadian in order to have the Canadian government match your donation, as I stated here recently. I’m not entirely certain of how this would work in practice, however, as there are Canadians all over the world, all of whom should qualify to have their donations matched, and I’ve read that the great majority of donations are being made via the Internet. I suspect that the government’s qualification may come after the fact of someone having not fully worked out the implications of the quasi-post-geographical nature of the present (happens to the best of us): They may simply not be expecting non-Canadians to start donating via .ca charities.
…excerpt from: www.williamgibsonbooks.com…

Excerpt from:
CJAD 800 : News
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (CP) – After the devastation wreaked by the seas, a deluge from the skies deepened the misery for tsunami-stricken areas of southern Asia on Saturday, triggering flash-floods in Sri Lanka that sent evacuees fleeing and increasing the threat of deadly disease as survivors shivered in relief centres.

The death toll was expected to hit 150,000. A magnitude 6.5 aftershock jolted Sumatra as the world’s aid efforts shifted into high gear in ways big and small: elephant convoys working in Thailand, global assistance reaching $2 billion with a fresh pledge from Japan and the U.S. military launching one of the biggest relief missions in history.

The confirmed death toll from the quake and tsunamis that hit a week ago Sunday passed 123,000 and the United Nations has said the estimated number was approaching 150,000. Thailand said it expects its death toll to reach 8,000.

Excerpt from:
The Australian: Gerard Baker: Tsunami must be fault of the US [December 31, 2004]
INEVITABLY, confronted with a tragedy of unimaginable scale, the human mind looks for someone to blame. In the Dark Ages, disasters were ascribed to the wrath of God. Now, in an odd inversion that we like to think of as progress, they are adduced as evidence of no God.

In the absence of a deity to decry or appease when the earth moves in such devastating fashion, humankind reaches for the next best thing – worldly authority. Authority should have known it was coming. Authority didn’t do enough to prevent it. Authority was too preoccupied with its own nefarious priorities to care.

There is plenty of authority to blame for the devastation caused by the Sumatran earthquake this week. Governments in Bangkok, Jakarta and Colombo will shoulder some of it. Governments farther afield will be inculpated for the poverty of their response. Media organisations will be attacked for being too callous and too mawkish. Unsurprisingly, perhaps the most inviting target is the US.

In the past three days I have been impressed by the originality of the latest critiques of the evil Americans. The earthquake and tsunami apparently had something to do with global warming, environmentalists say, caused of course by greedy American motorists. Then there was the rumour that the US military base at Diego Garcia was forewarned of the impending disaster and presumably because of some CIA-approved plot to undermine Islamic movements in Indonesia and Thailand did nothing about it.

To be fair, even the most animated America-hater, though, baulks at the idea of blaming George W. Bush for the destruction and death in southern Asia. But the US is blamed for not responding generously enough to help the victims of the catastrophe. A UN official this week derided Washington’s contribution as stingy.

Excerpt from:
BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Asian disaster: How to help
Global aid organisations have launched urgent appeals for donations to help survivors of Sunday’s Indian Ocean earthquake disaster.

More than 120,000 people are confirmed killed by the waves and millions more are homeless.

Many governments and organisations – including the US, Canada, Australia, the EU and the UN – are sending aid.

The UN has warned that supplies are urgently needed to support the survivors and to try and prevent disease which, it says, could double the death toll.

The Disasters Emergency Committee – www.dec.org….uk – is an umbrella group of UK aid organisations – including Action Aid, British Red Cross and Oxfam – working to provide clean water, food and shelter to thousands. To call from the UK, dial 0870 60 60 900.

The United Nations World Food Programme – www.wfp.org… – is seeking donations to feed victims of the earthquake.

Medecins Sans Frontieres – www.msf.org… – is sending aid workers to the region, focusing on medical care for survivors and displaced people after the rescue operations.

The United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef – www.unicef.org….uk – is working to meet the “urgent needs of hundreds of thousands of people” affected by the tsunami disaster.

Read the rest at the link at the top of this post…

Google Search: tsunami

Excerpt from:
Overhead Costs of International Relief Organizations
Below, I’ve highlighted in blue those organizations with less than a 10% overhead rate, and in orange those organizations above the 10% mark, but that may still be worthy of your consideration. For instance, the Doctors Without Borders organization has a high overhead rate, but presumably this is because it’s more expensive to have doctors on staff than other kinds of disaster relief workers. Still, their website does not have as much transparency as one would like, in terms of how and where they spend their money. Also, Oxfam also has a high overhead rate — again, making me curious why this is so. Some, like Save the Children were a surprising find (not one of the ‘usual suspects’ that people had emailed me about). Apparently, they had the “largest international organization presence” in the Aceh Province when the tsunami hit (see their web site below). Also, note that AmeriCares has one of the lowest overhead rate, at 1.5%.

Excerpt from:
The Command Post – Global Recon – Operation Give: “Fill the Plane” Campaign
Operation Give, a charitable organization that sends toys and other goods to the children of Iraq and Afghanistan, have found a way to collect supplies for the relief effort and get them over there quickly, thanks to the generosity of FedEx.

Rev. Donald Sensing best described the operation at his weblog, so I took the liberty of excerpting what he wrote to best explain what OpGive is doing.

Chief Wiggles (aka Army Chief Warrant Officer Paul Horton), who founded Operation Give while serving in Iraq, just announced he has arranged for free FedEx relief flights to aid tsunami victims. Paul explains all here.
[Read more...]

This is pretty f*cked-up. So it surprises me that there weren’t any Americans mentioned, such tourists generally being pretty arrogant in foreign countries.

Insensitivity to the worst disaster in history takes on a new meaning as European visitors to Phuket complain about their surroundings…
…excerpt from: www.dcthornton.com…

Chaminda writes with this announcement of a local candlelight vigil and memorial service, organized by Vancouver’s Sri Lankan community:

Date: Sunday 2nd January 2005
Time: 3:30PM
Place: Vancouver Art Gallery, West Georgia Street, Vancouver.

The Sri Lankan community in the Greater Vancouver area is getting together at this time of national tragedy. Religious leaders from the Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim communities will be conducting services and leading prayers in the memory of all those who perished as a result of the massive ocean waves which washed ashore in so many countries in the South East Asian region.

…excerpt from: feeds.feedburner.com…

Keith Pleas Blog – Friday, December 31, 2004 Entries
Susi’s NGO (non-gorvenmental organization) on Bali – IDEP – was resonsible for much of the recovery work from the Bali bombing and the irony is that much of the organization around that disaster is being put to use immediately to bring relief to the Aceh victims. Lee Downey – one of the lead volunteers on the trucks taking in the aid was in fact the volunteer who managed the morgue from the bombing. He’s got a digital camera and 2GB of media, so there should be some “on the ground” images available soon.

Surfacing from the deluge of news reports about the devastation of coastal Thailand fishing towns, political sniping at the amount of aid pledged by the United States, and frustrated Western seismologists staring at flashing instruments without the phone numbers of anybody in Sumatra, one realizes that only certain details of the tragedy seem to linger — all of them being small, individual acts of heroism.
…excerpt from: www.salon.com…

Read. This. Page. It will upset you, disgust you, hopefully piss you off, but it will also tell at least part of the real story of what’s going on five days after the tsunami.

Excerpt from:
India Uncut
It’s five kilometres of hell, and it’s right here at Nagapattinum.

Kaviarsi studies — make that studied — in the sixth standard. Her schoolbooks lie a short distance away, and besides them lies a doll. The girl herself lies on a makeshift pyre on what used to be her home, her face totally blackened, her neck twisted upwards, the skin peeling off her legs like torn stockings. There is a large empty container of Pepsi lying just besides her, and four other bodies. And besides the pyre, towards the sunset, are five long kilometers of slushy wasteland strewn with dead bodies.

It wasn’t like this five days ago. We — me and two companions — are at a part of Nagapattinum called Akkarakadai, where a prosperous fishing community lived. This five-kilometre-long stretch of land was filled with houses, and had at its heart a bustling Sunday marketplace. The people here were well off — some of them had expensive fishing launches costing many lakhs of rupees. Then the tsunami came.

These settlements begin half a kilometre from the sea, across the road, but the tsunami swept everything away. Every single house was flooded away, all the way till the end of the stretch, and when I went there, I just saw one long expanse of slush. In the distance, there were pyres burning.

Dr Narasimhan, a man I’d wanted to meet, who heads a team of relief workers that has come down from Salem, told me when I called him that we had to walk into that expanse, beyond the pyres. “Walk towards the sunset till you find me,” he said, and we did.

It took us half-an-hour to traverse the half-kilometre or so until we reached him. The ground was like quicksand in parts, and our shoes would sink in with each step and resist our attempts to lift our feet again. We came across dead bodies on the way: a young girl in a basket, her limbs akimbo, and her face, with some dried blood on it, contorted in an expression that even Damien Hirst would have found too macabre. Three feet away from her lay a woman, with a frozen look of horror on her face, etched into an eerie permanence.

“In an unprecedented situation, you need an unprecedented response”

“For the next five kilometres,” Dr Narsimhan motion towards the setting sun, “you will find bodies everywhere. Only the distance you have walked so far — around half a kilometre — has been cleared of corpses. This is the furthest point till which bodies have been cleared. There is so much work to be done.”

“It’s five days since the tsunami happened,” I say. “Why is this place so deserted, why hasn’t all this been sorted?”

Dr Narasimhan sighs. “Sorted,” he asks. “All that the government has been doing is lining the streets outside with bleaching powder. They are not interested in coming here, they left this to the NGOs. And look at this.” He extends his hands towards me. “We’re doing all the work of moving bodies with surgical gloves made of latex, which are no protection against cuts and bruises.”

My girlfriend, who doesn’t read this blog nearly as often as she should, is Canadian so I post this here mostly for her benefit. :)

The Canadian government, until January 11th, will match any donation to major relief operations working from Canada.

In other words, you double the size of your donation if you send money this way, rather than by sending it directly to an affected country or donating in your own country.

Donations to Oxfam Canada, the Canadian Red Cross, World Vision Canada, UNICEF Canada, Care Canada, Doctors Without Borders, World University Service of Canada , Salvation Army, Canadian Food for the Hungry International, Save the Children Canada, and SOS Children’s Villages will all be doubled by the Canadian government — but only until January 11th.

Best wishes to everyone for the new year.
…excerpt from: www.williamgibsonbooks.com…