A Billion Lives by Jan Egeland

Author:Jan Egeland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

My colleagues from Geneva and our Japanese hosts are thrilled that their hard work for development and prevention of disasters has, for the first time ever, gotten worldwide attention. More than five hundred journalists file stories on our concluding press conference, which I barely manage to get through. I am obsessed to get on a plane by late afternoon that could get me to New York by Sunday morning and a possibility of recovering from the fever in my own bed and in the care of my family. A month’s marathon is nearing its end. I doze through the more than twelve hours of flight until the captain comes with bad news. Snowstorms on the U.S. East Coast have worsened, all airports in and around New York are closed, and we have to land in Chicago. I spend thirty-six hours in endless lines at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport before I finally make it back to New York on late Monday night, one month after the tsunami struck.

In the next weeks and months, the emergency phase slowly gives way to recovery work. Fishermen are getting boats and nets, primary schools open, local medical clinics reopen, and slowly the homeless are getting better tents or even prefabricated temporary housing. However, the problems we had signaled since day one—large numbers of uncoordinated international aid groups with lots of money—are becoming more acute as the emergency phase is coming to an end. To provide on-the-spot leadership in Aceh in January, I had sent the director of our Response Coordination Branch in Geneva, Joel Boutroue, to Banda Aceh. In his handover note to his successor in mid-February, Joel concluded, “We need to constantly remind ourselves that we are here to lend our full support to the authorities and help them set up mechanisms that will be able to absorb the massive emergency, recovery, and development aid in the pipeline. For such a set-up to be viable and sustainable, it must be under the full control of civilian authorities at provincial, district, and sub-district levels…. We were so far fairly successful in ensuring a stable dialogue and exchange of information between the UN, NGOs, authorities—generally from Jakarta—in charge of the operations and the Indonesian Military…. During the transition period it will be crucial to ensure that most of the key actors adhere to broad sector strategies. Failure to achieve this could result in substantial waste of money, duplication, and unsustainable level of assistance.”

I will see for myself nine months later that Joel’s hope for strong partnership and coordination between internationals in support of local and national authorities will not be fulfilled.

The clearest sign that my role as tsunami emergency relief coordinator is coming to an end is Secretary-General Annan’s announcement in February that former president Bill Clinton will be special envoy for tsunami recovery. We had begun looking for such a high-profile personality for the longer haul already in late January. In the end it is Mark Malloch Brown, just named the secretary-general’s new chief of staff, who came up with the idea of asking President Clinton.

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