Submitted by crinadmin on
Summary: This paper hopes to examine what has been achieved so far and what has still to happen, and to suggest what should be done better.
On 26 December 2004, an earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami that hit the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives, Malaysia, Burma, the Seychelles, and Somalia. Within the space of a few hours, the giant waves devastated thousands of kilometres of coastline and the communities that lived there. While the final death toll will never be known, official estimates indicate that at least 181,516 people perished and 49,936 remain missing. It was the world’s most severe natural disaster since the East Pakistan hurricane of 1970. A further 1.8 million people were displaced into temporary camps or took refuge with communities that were unaffected. In recent times, only war, famine, and epidemics have caused more destruction. After 26 December, Oxfam International mounted the largest humanitarian effort in its 63-year history. In the 11 months since, we have helped some 1.8 million people, using the $278m given to us. Once the emergency relief was done, we turned to recovery and reconstruction. This covered a range of issues: the provision of clean water and sanitation; the reviving of livelihoods; rehabilitating agricultural land; giving women and men a say in the rebuilding of their lives and communities. The watchwords have been ‘reconstruction plus’, i.e. seeking to help poor communities to escape the poverty that made them so vulnerable to natural disaster in the first place. However, perhaps one of the most important activities has been — and continues to be — the provision of shelter. This issue has given governments and agencies involved in tsunami relief and rehabilitation their most difficult task, and we have to face up to the fact that the job has still only just begun. The Office of the UN’s Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery reported that, as of September 2005, it would be another 12–18 months before every displaced person in Aceh had adequate transitional shelter. It called this ’an unacceptable situation that needs to be urgently addressed’. By 26 December 2005, Oxfam estimates that around 20 per cent of the people made homeless a year earlier will be in satisfactory permanent accommodation. There have been some serious obstacles to faster progress — for example, the fact that in Aceh, Indonesia, land that was home to an estimated 120,000 people is now submerged or permanently uninhabitable. Other delays have more to do with problems of bureaucracy and organisation, in governments and in the international humanitarian agencies. Proposals for buffer zones — land near the sea that would not be built on again — has significantly delayed rebuilding in India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. Government institutions in Aceh were badly damaged by the tsunami, as was all the province’s infrastructure, and the lack for some months of a fully functioning civil authority made coherent planning extremely difficult. This paper hopes to examine what has been achieved so far and what has still to happen, and to suggest what should be done better.