Saturday, January 08, 2005
DIPLOMAD GETTING THE WORD OUT
Francis Till, in New Zealand’s National Business Review, writes:
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.
They sure are. Those Diplomads are bringing to light what potentially is one of the greatest scandals in UN history (which is saying something). Here’s the site’s latest:
This Embassy has been running 24/7 since the December 26 earthquake and tsunami. Along with my colleagues, I’ve spent the past several days dealing non-stop with various aspects of the relief effort in this tsunami-affected country. That work, unfortunately, has brought ever-increasing contact with the growing UN presence in this capital; in fact, we’ve found that to avoid running into the UN, we must go out to where the quake and tsunami actually hit.
Sitting VERY late for two consecutive nights in interminable meetings with UN reps, hearing them go on about “taking the lead coordination role,” pledges, and the impending arrival of this or that UN big shot or assessment/coordination team, for the millionth time I realized that if not for Australia and America almost nobody in the tsunami-affected areas would have survived more than a few days. If we had waited for the UNocrats to get their act coordinated, the already massive death toll would have become astronomical. But, fortunately, thanks to “retrograde racist war-mongers ” such as John Howard and George W. Bush, as we sat in air conditioned meeting rooms with these UNocrats, young Australians and Americans were at that moment “coordinating” without the UN and saving the lives of tens-of-thousands of people.
(Via Clear and Present)
UPDATE. Now the EU is facing UN-like criticism over tsunami inaction. This from Jochen Buchsteiner in German conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
While American soldiers were delivering emergency supplies to isolated disaster areas and Australian doctors were treating the injured, Europeans were having meetings or, worse yet, trying to set dates for meetings. The French Minister of Public Health, Douste-Blazy, posed a rhetorical question while visiting Sri Lanka: was it “normal” that his colleagues in Brussels held their first discussions on the subject a full ten days after the catastrophe?
If this major natural catastrophe can be overcome with hardly any European action, then Asians can do without Europeans in other areas of endeavor as well.
UPDATE II. Australians continue to do useful things:
Caltex Australia will donate one million litres of fuel to charities involved in the tsunami relief effort, the company says.
The $1 million Litres for Life project will include donations of fuel by Caltex, and matching donations from its franchisees, resellers and employees.
The fuel would be donated to major Australian charities to use in local collection drives, international air or sea transport and on the ground in the devastated areas.
UPDATE III. Consider again the speed of Australia’s response:
By Thursday, the energetic [Cabinet boss Peter] Shergold had convened a small, high-level taskforce to work through options for the bilateral assistance plan. It included the heads of Treasury, Defence and Foreign Affairs, AusAID boss Bruce Davis, Defence Force chief General Peter Cosgrove, and ambassador to Jakarta David Ritchie. Within 48 hours the group had prepared the broad outlines of the billion-dollar offer, including both cash grants and concessional loans.
General Cosgrove, you’ll remember, was last year damned by Margo Kingston as Australia’s greatest coward. Margo remains on holiday.