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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 328-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
RESPONSES TO THE ASIAN TSUNAMI EARTHQUAKE DISASTER
Wednesday 9 February 2005 MR JAN EGELAND and MR OLIVER ULICH Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 9
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Wednesday 9 February 2005 Members present Tony Baldry, in the Chair Mr John Battle Hugh Bayley Mr John Bercow Mr Tony Colman Mr Piara S Khabra Tony Worthington ________________ Witnesses: Mr Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, and Mr Oliver Ulich, Sudan Desk Officer, United Nations Office for the Coordination of the Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), examined. Chairman: We are dealing with the humanitarian response to the tsunami and I will ask John if he might lead on questions. Q1 Mr Battle: Quite often - and I think sometimes very unfairly - the UN's agencies are accused of not responding fast enough, appropriately enough and the rest of it. If I could make an introductory comment: as the tragedy in South-East Asia was unfolding and of course the media were there and there was an immediate appeal, I think sometimes we get it right. I thought the fact that we did not have television appeals for clothing and toys, as happened in Africa in the seventies, was helpful: Will you send money? I can recall that in the early eighties, when there was a hurricane crisis in the Caribbean, frozen chickens were sent from the European Union to the Dominican Republic, not realising of course there were no fridges or electricity: a totally inappropriate response. I would like to ask you, in the light of what has happened and looking back, how do you get that balance right between the need to respond quickly and yet make sure that the response is appropriate and addresses the real needs on the ground? How did that work in the case of the tsunami tragedy recently? Mr Egeland: I think, indeed, as you are strongly hinting, we have a better humanitarian system now: better methods, better organisations, better tools then we have ever had before. It is unpredictable the muscle we are able to put in. As we just discussed, it was inadequate in Darfur. It was fully adequate actually for the emergency phase in the tsunami case: it was like pushing a button. I was myself leading the effort from the first day: it was like pushing the button and out come billions of dollars and thousands of aid workers. I vividly remember in the Darfur case that we were asking the world for six helicopters. From April to June of last year, the world did not give us a single helicopter, and in the end we had to scrape together enough money to charter them at market price in Sudan. In the Tsunami case, we asked for helicopters on the second day of the emergency, and we got, within days, five helicopter carriers, ships with hundreds of helicopters available for Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and we avoided the second wave of death (which is preventable disease, epidemics, starvation, etcetera) because of a very robust and effective response. Q2 Mr Battle: Just to contrast, I think you put a note out on the website asking for volunteers/aid workers to go - as you do in an emergency crisis, is that right? - and is it true that you get them for a crisis such as tsunami, but you could not get any to go to Sudan? Mr Egeland: We do not in the UN normally advertise for aid workers, but our non-governmental partners do. It was not even that necessary: it was very easy to get all the agencies to deploy immediately. Many people knew, of course, that they were going to an emergency with all the resources immediately available, where their heroic work would be followed minute by minute by television, and where they did not have to stay for a very long time. We asked in Darfur to go to a place in the desert for a long time, in a very inhospitable climate, where you are exposing yourself to a lot of danger. Q3 Mr Battle: One of the questions I was asked regularly during, as it were, the commentary on the crisis - you know: "Would the Government match the people's money" and the rest of it - was: "Will it be new money?" And at the back of my mind was the question, "Or will it come out of resources that really should be going to the Millennium Development Goals now?" because we are so far behind on them and we need to increase the effort. What can the UN do to build developing countries' capacities themselves to cope with disasters? I think India, for example, responded and said they could cope and did not need the resources. But really it is a question of how spending on disaster prevention can be tailored with, fitted with efforts also to meet the Millennium Development Goals? I just wonder, if there is another great natural disaster, another earthquake, would that not mop up even more money and put us even further back when it comes to the Millennium Development Goals? How do you see that tension working out? Mr Egeland: Number one, it is very important that you in Parliament help us to make sure that British and European Union monies, as far as possible, are fully additional to other monies, because we could end up with 2005 starting unprecedentedly generously and ending unprecedentedly stingily, with other and even worse situations; for example the Congo, where, as I say, already people are dying at unacceptable levels. Secondly, no, I think the tsunami response has been exemplary in many ways also by it focusing on disaster prevention, which is very much related to meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Early warning has really come on the international agenda. Local capacity building is on the agenda. In general our television screens tend to overestimate the international response and not the local response. People were saved by local Red Cross societies, by local civil defence, by the local priest or mullah, and not by search and rescue teams flying in from Europe or anywhere. We are now embarking on a ten-year action plan for disaster prevention that came out of the World Conference in Kobe, Japan, which I chaired on behalf of the UN just after the tsunami, by chance it was after the tsunami, and we got a lot of attention there to the importance of disaster prevention. The tsunami should never have taken as many lives as it did. Had there been an early warning system, parents would not have sent their children down to the beach in Sri Lanka, Thailand and elsewhere after the tsunami was heading towards beaches - and there was enough time to have early warning. If there had been more local capacity in Aceh, there would also have been more people saved. Q4 Mr Khabra: Could I draw your attention to your proposal that 10% of the $4 billion to $5 billion spent on disaster relief should be spent on disaster prevention and mitigation. What savings, in your view, might an international community make from increased spending on disaster prevention? What response did you actually get to your proposal? How would such funds be spent? There are three different important issues. Mr Egeland: Indeed. The savings are documented: for every pound you will be spending for disaster prevention, you get seven- to ten-fold back in savings in disaster intervention, disaster emergency relief. The reaction to my proposal has been a very positive one. Actually a number of donors say they already give one-tenth of their humanitarian monies to disaster prevention. I would like to see that it is actually the case for many and that also their development money is spent according to these principles. We should try to monitor that now, as we implement the disaster prevention strategy coming out of Kobe, and especially try to get the rich world, which is getting bigger and bigger and richer and richer - and it is not only the north-western corner, it is also many other countries: Gulf countries, Asian countries, Eastern European and others - now to participate in building capacity in the most disaster-exposed communities. In Cuba, hurricanes hardly take lives any more because they have a great disaster prevention system: they evacuate, they put people into shelters, they educate, they have systems. In Haiti, disasters routinely take thousands of lives because there is no disaster prevention or preparedness scheme. Q5 Mr Khabra: I wonder if you could be a little bit more specific with regard to the nature of spending on prevention. What sort of expenditure you would like to do on what. Is it something like the early warning system or whatever? Mr Egeland: No, it is a combination. Q6 Mr Khabra: What would you include actually? Mr Egeland: An early warning system, public education systems, shelters, better housing. One very important idea we have launched is that all schools and all hospitals should be disaster-safe areas within the next ten years. All new schools could be that and all old schools should be retro-fitted, so that instead of being death traps, as they often are now - rooms collapse and so on in earthquakes - they should be safe areas, so that people can go and use them as shelters and those who are in the schools and the hospitals are not killed. Building local governmental capacity, local non-governmental capacity is also very much part of the disaster prevention strategies. Chairman: We promised to get you away by ten to four but we could not miss the opportunity whilst you are here of just asking you a couple of quick questions on the reform of the international humanitarian system. Q7 Mr Colman: You may have seen the speech that Hilary made at the Overseas Development Institute about two weeks before the Asian tsunami, and it is really to get comment on that, particularly the idea of giving UN OCHA more power to coordinate humanitarian response. I wonder how that has gone down with other UN agencies and NGOs. Has there been any resistance to it? Do you think there are legitimate concerns, if UN OCHA was given, if you like, the pre-eminent role, in terms of loss of flexibility? And I am particularly interested, given your last comment about how local response to humanitarian disasters is very important, but in this case Hilary is suggesting perhaps top-down control by yourselves. Mr Egeland: The things are not necessarily alien to each other. We need to have a humanitarian system that works. If it is to work, we need to have local partners that work. Those local partners have to be empowered and given enough resources, and usually we have to have an international input. That input has to be predictable. We have to have predictable monies coming. Why do we get only 65 per cent of our too small appeal for the Congo when mass death is happening, and why do we get 100 per cent of our funding for Iraq and Kosovo and the tsunami? We are too uneven in our donor response but we are also too uneven in our humanitarian response. Why were we robustly and immediately there for the tsunami victims but we were not there as humanitarian partners for the Darfur victims? Q8 Mr Colman: There was a proposal from Hilary to make UN OCHA the sole way in. Mr Egeland: Yes. He says that the Emergency Relief Coordinator and the Humanitarian Coordinator should be more robustly providing humanitarian leadership. That I think we should. I think it is generally agreed in among NGOs and donors and most of our agencies that they would like to see that happen. Hilary Benn also proposes a fund for this. That we will discuss among UN agencies. I would foresee agreement on funds being put at my disposal for joint logistic services, joint transport, joint communication, joint shelter for the early deployment of field operatives, and so on. Funds for those who have a clear mandate, I do not necessarily want. Why should I be a channel for money from the UK to the World Food Programme to buy the food that they are mandated to buy, for example? I think it is more those gaps where we could have a stand-by fund. A fund was created after the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. You will remember the Kurdish refugee crisis: hundreds of thousands of refugees were up in the mountains and on the TV screens every night in 1991. I was then the Deputy Foreign Minister of Norway. It was horrendously frustrating - much worse even than the Darfur one has been for us now. They did not get a blanket within the first ten days but there were all of these television cameras there. Then the Emergency Relief Coordinator OCHA or the Department of Humanitarian Affairs was created and the Central Emergency Revolving Fund to be quick money for these kinds of emergencies. That fund does not work well because it is a loaning institution. You have to pay back. And the agencies, especially the less well-funded ones, cannot guarantee that they will be able to pay it back, so they do not use it. Therefore, we need a fund, at least for the joint logistics services and to fill some of the gaps, by camp management protection and other things that we have discussed here today. Q9 Chairman: Thank you for coming and talking to us. These are issues which cause us considerable concern and we are very conscious of the enormous responsibility placed on yours and OCHA's shoulders, because when things go wrong the finger of blame tends to be pointed not at those who have perpetrated these tragedies but at UN and OCHA. We are keen to give you whatever help we can. We are very grateful to you and Mr Ulich having come here today and explained these issues more clearly. Thank you. Mr Egeland: Thank you very much for your interest in this. May I end by complimenting: the British Parliament has helped us put a number of issues on the international agenda. That has been much appreciated by the humanitarian community. You have also, with the UK Government, been a leader in providing money to some of the most important humanitarian issues, and we thank you for that. |