Sri Lanka under pressure over aid fiasco

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 June 2005, 14:44 GMT]
President Chandrika Kumaratunga on Wednesday denied claims that her government was mishandling billions of dollars donated by the international community to help Sri Lanka recover from December's devastating tsunami, press reports said. Meanwhile Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar denied that unwieldy bureaucracy and a lack of professionalism was to blame for the delays in post tsunami relief.

Addressing a conference hosted by CNN in Atlanta, President Kumaratunga said she did not know why the media was saying that tsunami reconstruction work was not happening in Sri Lanka or that there was corruption.

President Kumaratunga said reports that the relief effort had been hampered by widespread corruption and incompetence were “completely false”.

International press reports, including those in Britain’s prestigious Financial Times and Daily Telegraph newspapers, have been strongly critical of Sri Lanka’s performance.

Five months after the Indian ocean tsunami disaster, many hundreds of containers of aid are stranded at ports in Sri Lanka because of bureaucratic bungling and missing paperwork, the Financial Times reported mid-May.

A quarter of all aid shipped to Sri Lanka after the tsunami are on the dockside while Sri Lankan officials say most of the containers are stranded in Colombo because of missing paperwork and bureaucracy, the paper added.

“[Donor] money is not being spent because the Colombo government refuses to delegate authority on the ground, to revise its ludicrous bureaucratic procedures, to root out corruption or to speed up the snail's pace of supplies through customs,” an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph reported on May 28.

But on Wednesday Lakshman Kadirgamar, Sri Lanka's foreign minister, denied allegations that aid agencies were being obstructed by unwieldy bureaucracy and that government officials routinely failed to attend meetings with the agencies.

The Financial Times newspaper quoted him as citing the strain the tsunami had put on the Sri Lanka’s civil service as the reason for the delays in providing relief and rehabilitation assistance to large numbers of people in along the island’s devastated northern, eastern and southern coasts.

But a week after attending a major conference of Sri Lanka’s international donors, World Bank Vice President Praful Patel told Reuters in an interview that aid money given to rebuild Sri Lanka is getting held up on the ground, to the frustration of donor governments and agencies.

"There is impatience on the part of everybody, including the government and the donors, about the pace at which things are moving," said Mr. Patel.

"The frustrations come from the fact that the pledges that were made and the money that was made available are not moving fast enough on the ground," he said.

Hitches included a government ban on building close to the shoreline, intended as a safety precaution, Mr. Patel said. "People who are on the shoreline are still waiting for their plots to be allocated elsewhere, and there are issues with some of them not wanting to move because they have lived for hundreds of years on this location."

Mr. Patel said most pledges from international donors had been converted into real commitments, so funding was not the issue. At least $9 billion in private and official aid has been raised for countries battered by the tsunami in one of the biggest charitable fund-raising efforts in history.

Donors have pledged $3 billion to Sri Lanka alone, even though President Kumaratunga said the total cost of reconstruction would be about $1.7bn.

Two thirds of coastal Sri Lanka was affected by the giant wave, which killed 40,000 people and left 500,000 homeless.

Amidst the delays, prices of building materials are rising sharply in Sri Lanka as aid agencies flock to rebuild the island's tsunami-ravaged coast and could translate into fewer houses being built, Reuters quoted donors as warning on Wednesday.

Some materials are scarce, a sales tax is compounding matters, and some donors, worried that government bureaucracy will delay rebuilding, have begun buying land to build on rather than waiting for it to be allocated for free, Reuters reported.

On Wednesday President Kumaratunga told the CNN-hosted conference that there had been more than 120 visits to Sri Lanka by heads of state, including United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, to Sri Lanka, and insisted that all had applauded the work being done.

"Every single one of them has told us, told the newspapers in Sri Lanka and abroad, that Sri Lanka is an exemplary case of how well the tsunami reconstruction, or any reconstruction after a natural disaster, has been handled," she asserted.