FRS Remarks
Reflections on 2005, A Year of Suffering:
The Tsunami, Katrina, Pakistan and Beyond
Raymond Offenheiser
January 22, 2006
Reflections
Almost one year ago to the day, I was standing on a beach in Ampara, one of several eastern coastal districts of Sri Lanka where the tsunami hit hard and casualties exceeded thirty thousand. The images surrounding me were hard to absorb.
Over long stretches of beach, once populated by fishing families, there was nothing left. Houses had been literally sheared off their plinths and deposited in the lagoons behind the beach with their inhabitants in them. A local school was sheared in half and all that remained was a wall with half of a colorful mural of children playing, a globe and images from faraway places
There is one moment that sticks in my mind about this visit. I was standing about 200 yards from the sea when I looked up. There about forty feet above me was a pair of sneakers and a mass of seaweed hanging from a power line. As I gaze at this image, I I struggle to wrap my mind around being confronted with a wall of water high enough to deposit these sneakers on this power line so far from the high watermark.
Fast forward eight months and I am standing along a coastal road in Biloxi, MS. As I again try to take in this scene, I look up and what do I see but sneakers hanging from a powerline. In an instant, the distance between Biloxi and Ampara shrinks to nothing. What I saw in Ampara, I am now seeing in Biloxi with pretty much the same results.
Along the beach in East Biloxi, I am standing alongside a 200 yard long, four story high casino built on a steel barge that was deposited two hundred yards inland on top of an historic, two story mansion. Behind casino row, blocks of houses were floated off their plinths and left in shambles. Ninety-percent of the housing in East Biloxi was destroyed as this forty foot wave crashed into the coast.
These sneakers became for me a metaphor for the destruction that nature can unleash on unsuspecting and vulnerable communities. They provoke lots of thoughts. Who did they belong to? Where had they been? What happened to their owners? Did they survive? What is their story?
At Oxfam, the tsunami and Katrina did not define our year. For us there was also the quake in Pakistan, ongoing conflict in Darfur, famine in Niger, the strife in the eastern Congo, an earthquake in Guatemala and hurricane Stan in Central America. Seven major emergencies this last year.
You may find this somewhat surprising but the reality of last year was that the number of humanitarian emergencies was no greater than normal. What was different was their scope and scale.
The Sprint
As we look back over the year what can we say about what happened and did not happen?
In viewing any of these kinds of emergency events, it is important to realize that there are two phases to any emergency. There is a sprint phase and a marathon phase.
The sprint is the period immediately after the emergency when there is a danger of greater loss of life owing to further tragic events: aftershocks in an earthquake, flooding, or populations isolated in a conflict zone. During this phase, it is critical that humanitarian organizations swing into action quickly to do whatever it takes to stabilize the situation and prevent further loss of life.
This can mean different things in different situations. In the tsunami zones, it meant getting victims to organized shelters and providing them with food, potable water, clothing and other necessities. In Niger, it means getting food into famine affected areas as quickly and efficiently as possible. In conflict zones, it means getting access to affected civilian populations and getting them out of harms way. This often requires invoking provisions of international law on the global level and shaming conflicting parties in the international media into respecting the Geneva Conventions.
Key to success during the sprint phase is strong coordination among agencies and a combined effort to prevent the outbreak of a broader public health crisis which often can happen when large populations are displaced, are drinking non-potable water and living in unsanitary conditions.
The good news from last year is that we won the sprint phase in the tsunami response. There was not a single major outbreak of disease and significant loss of life across twelve countries in the tsunami region after the event. Given the scale of this disaster, this is a phenomenal accomplishment. When you hear folks bashing the UN system in the future, you might remind them of this fact. This would not have happened were it not for the critical coordination role provided by the UN.
In Pakistan, we have not been so lucky. The Pakistan earthquake could not have come at a worse moment in a worse place. It struck in the most remote areas of the Himalayan foothills just before the winter snowfall customarily isolates hundreds of highly dispersed mountain villages. Some 3m persons are homeless and exposed to very harsh weather.
Some have been persuaded to move to camps at lower altitudes in milder conditions. Others want to stay closer to home to protect family assets. Those of us working in this area have had to recognize that lives will be lost over the winter. We must do the best we can to provide adequate warm shelter. Shortly after the quake, Oxfam staff took over a tent factory in Pakistan and began overseeing the manufacture of tents that would provide emergency shelter. Meanwhile, other teams have been working in the lowland valley camps to equip them to get through harsh winter, while others are rushing tents into high mountain areas and setting up systems for the supply of potable water and hygiene.
Despite these best efforts, this is a logistically very difficult situation to operate in. Most areas can only be reached by helicopter and populations are highly dispersed, meaning that our response must be equally dispersed over literally hundreds of villages. We know the sprint here will continue through the winter as families cope with the cold and contract respiratory illnesses. We know that there will be large numbers of deaths through the winter despite our best efforts.
In the southern US, FEMA and the Red Cross were responsible for leading during the sprint phase and they failed miserably and are still failing in many parts of the region. After watching the US government for three days completely bungle its response, Oxfam decided to join the relief effort, the first time it had ever responded to an emergency here in the US. In responding to Katrina and Rita, all the fundamentals of good response that we know from our international work were not operating. No command center; no clear chain of command; no framework for inter-agency cooperation across different levels of government; no alternative system of communication. In short, a massive failure of leadership and institutional competence. Parenthetically, I would say that the response of the government of Thailand to the tsunami was far more competently organized and executed than that of the government of the US to Katrina. You might reflect upon that for a moment.
At Oxfam, we focused on trying to assist the most vulnerable and poorest communities affected by the two hurricanes. During the sprint phase, we set up coordination centers in several key locations across MS and LA to facilitate an organized response to the emergency.
We know from our experience overseas that the first thing communities need is to see strong leadership imposing order on the chaos and organizing the reliable delivery of needed goods. That is what we did. As other smaller volunteer groups came in like Hands-On America that many here in Carlisle have supported, they were able to plug into the organizational architecture that Oxfam had established at the community level. We now have five such centers operating and will open another five very shortly.
Their role has evolved from providing immediate response to a more complex task of assisting communities to raise their voice and get the attention of leaders in both the state and national level.
In East Biloxi where we set up our first coordination center, we had to organize a trip to Washington, DC for city councilman Bill Stallworth to personally visit with Trent Lott and other senior members of the MS delegation to light a fire under FEMA and the Red Cross. They finally showed up in East Biloxi some six weeks after the storm hit. Now however, these centers are playing an even more critical role as the reconstruction process gets underway.
The Marathon
For most emergencies, the public only sees what happens during the sprint phase. Once the media finds that it can no longer extract one more dramatic video shot or heart wrenching interview, the klieg lights go off and the cameramen fly home. It is then that the real work begins. It is then that we need to think about how to return families to a dignified life beyond the emergency shelter. Doing this is enormously complex and it requires a long term commitment.
During this marathon phase, our job is to get families out of emergency shelters into temporary housing and begin the process of identifying how we can move them back to permanent housing in their former communities. It is the time when we are trying to assist families in rebuilding their lives.
In the first phase of the marathon, we provide cash for work. This has two positive effects. It gives victims some disposable income that they can use to buy necessities in the local market. It also serves to stimulate the local market which has usually collapsed owing to the disaster. We enlist families in planning strategies for the building of transition housing, long term housing and livelihood opportunities.
We are now deeply into the marathon phase in the tsunami areas and in the southern US. We will not get to this phase in Pakistan until after the spring thaw.
For families, there are two issues intimately intertwined during this marathon phase. Where will we live and how will we make a living? In short, housing and jobs. These two issues are the same in Aceh as they are in Biloxi. A few words on each.
In the tsunami countries, with some small exceptions most all families are now in temporary housing units and all should be by March. Oxfam built thousands of temporary housing units. Efforts are underway to accelerate building of permanent units. These efforts have been hampered on the ground by political meddling at the national and local level by conflicting political groups. This has been particularly problematic in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, both countries where this relief work is going on in the context of longstanding civil conflict among different ethnic groups and political factions. We have worked quietly with President Clinton who in his role as UN Special Envoy on Tsunami affairs has been able to pressure heads of state throughout the region to stop the bureaucratic infighting, shine the light on corrupt practices or sectarian politics and get the work moving.
The real obstacles are practical ones. Where do we build the permanent units? What land is available? How do we get title at favorable prices? How do we manage our way through efforts to manipulate the market by land speculators and well-connected private interests who see this situation as a chance to make a fast buck. It is dicey work in developing countries where there are complex intrigues that involve generals, traditional families, and political bosses. These problems aside, we have been moving steadily ahead getting folks into homes and making plans for building homes for others.
Once the housing problem is resolved families can also think long term about their livelihood opportunities. For farmers, fisher folk and petty traders, they must know where they will live in order to know whether they can survive pursuing their traditional economic activities. A fisher family located fifteen miles inland with no means to get back to the seaside has little chance of surviving in the fishing trade. These are the kinds of problems we are addressing. It is slow work. We anticipate being at it for another two years.
Like the tsunami affected areas, the major problem to be resolved in MS and LA is housing. Almost a half million homes were affected by Katrina and Rita. Thousands of families are still living in shelters, tents or with relatives. The lucky ones have finally gotten a trailer from FEMA but probably it is not hooked up to a source of power or water.
Getting folks back into homes is proving to be nightmare. Paradoxically the reasons are more political and bureaucratic than practical.
Let me describe this nightmare for you.
You are a working class family and own a home worth $100K. You have 50K of equity in the house and owe another $50K. You are without work and have no source of income and are living in a shelter in a nearby county on a long waiting list for a FEMA trailer. You tried to apply for funding from FEMA to repair your home. You did this on line at the public library near where you are staying. Your deed and many other personal documents were washed away with the storm. So you were unable to complete the FEMA form before the program timed out in 45 minutes. Once it timed out, you could no longer apply because your application is deemed invalid and must be appealed to a formal FEMA appeal process to reopen your case. Turns out, there are no such tribunals operating anywhere near you.
If you were lucky enough to complete the form, it was thrown out because you listed your income as zero. Since FEMA expects you to have some income or to estimate your income based on your pre-hurricane level, it throws out your application. FEMA now suggests that you must apply for a Small Business Association loan before it will give you assistance. So you apply to the SBA only to be rejected after a two month review because you have no collateral and no income. SBA then refers your case back to FEMA. Meanwhile your bank is asking for payment on the balance of your original loan.
If you had homeowners insurance, you contact your insurance company seeking payment against your policy. You are surprised to find that while the company told you that you had comprehensive coverage, they now tell you that you were insured against wind and rain but not flooding. And if you claim damages for wind damage to your roof, you are denied because they claim that the primary damage to your house is flood-related therefore you are again denied payment.
In Washington, the federal government approves $11.5B in Community Development Block Grant Funding that is intended to assist poor communities with the rebuilding of homes and infrastructure. Turns out that the MS Republican leadership has used its political leverage in DC to secure a number of waivers in the use of these funds at the state level. On the face of it, the flexibility could enable state legislatures to direct the funds to the poorest communities where it is needed. But suddenly, the governor imposes a whole set of conditions on the use of these funds.
The governor announces that these funds will be used exclusively to compensate what he refers to as “the responsible poor.” Responsible poor are those families who do not live in a flood plain. Turns out many poor families live in flood-prone areas because that is the only place they can afford to live.
For those who live off the flood plain, the “responsible poor” are those who bought flood insurance on their properties. Turns out that flood insurance is very expensive and only a small percentage of poor families off the flood plain can afford flood insurance.
Historically, 70 percent or better of community development block grants are reserved for poor and low income families. Turns out the governor has secured a waiver raising this goal to only fifty percent. This means that middle and upper middle class families along the coast can apply for and secure CBDG’s to cover repairs on their homes worth $500K or higher. They are eligible for up to $150K in coverage even if they had insurance.
State legislators in Jackson attempt to protest these provisions that are designed to direct funding to the wealthier coastal communities but are told that these provisions have been approved by the US Congress and that State legislators have no legal jurisdiction to override these waiver provisions. So the governor can direct the funds as he sees fit.
There is much more detail to this sordid tale of politics and finance that I will not bore you with. Suffice it to say, that at Oxfam, we realized that poor and vulnerable families were going to be left high and dry by this process. We see our job as not rebuilding the homes of victims. There are far too many for us to rebuild. This is job for contractors and for the market.
But if the poor are going to have any opportunity to rebuild they must secure access to the funds that have been earmarked for this purpose. We are therefore devoting considerable staff time to educating communities about their rights, assisting them in accessing these complex bureaucratic processes both in Washington as well as in Jackson and Baton Rouge. We are partnering with the NAACP and the Children’s Defense Fund to hold town meetings in communities throughout the region to inform them of these events. We have convened diverse civil society groups in Jackson to educate state legislatures about their needs and the urgency for legislators to take action to reverse the governor’s plans. We have assisted state level organizations in the preparation of some ten bills intended to guarantee equity in the distribution of state and federal funding. We are also working with DC based civil rights organizations that have filed suits against FEMA for discriminatory practices. And we are enlisting support from some of the largest NYC law firms to challenge the practices of major US insurance companies.
Our work has shifted in this region has of necessity required that we combine our work in delivering short term relief during the sprint phase and marathon phase with doing community organizing that will empower citizens to understand and press for their rights in this complex post-emergency scramble to capture resources during the marathon. This is marathon that will be on for another two to three years just like the one in the tsunami region.
Little difference between sneakers on the line here and there, little difference between the basic needs of people here and there.
Forgotten Emergencies
Last year was certainly a year dominated by the images of the tsunami and later Katrina and Rita. Yet I would ask you in the future when you see such dramatic images to ask whether there may be another emergency that is just as dramatic but forgotten by the press. Did you know for example that some 3m people have died over the last decade in the conflicts in the eastern Congo and that this conflict simmers on today? Did you know that the UN announced the likelihood of a famine in Niger in October of 2004 and no one including the media took note until people were dying ten months later?
During the height of the tsunami relief response, Oxfam had six hundred staff in the Sudan trying to support some 2.3m refugees. Yet because of the massive outpouring of funds for the tsunami, private giving for Sudan completely disappeared. We eked by with support from the European Union and individual European governments.
Each year there are numerous forgotten and invisible emergencies. This year watch out for an outbreak of conflict again on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Look for famine in Kenya. Look for an even more desperate situation inside Zimbabwe. Remember these when the press pumps up the big emergency that will attract all the dollars.
Lessons from a year of drama
Are there any lessons to be drawn from this year that should shape the way in which we see these events? A few thoughts.
Coordination is critical for a successful response. You saw reasonably good coordination in the tsunami response thanks to UN leadership. You saw the impacts of poor coordination in the Katrina and Rita response.
Focusing on the vulnerable is critical. The poor are the hardest hit in most all emergencies. This is not an accident. They live in the most vulnerable areas: coastal areas in the Indian Ocean areas and flood plains in MS. They are the most likely to be overlooked in the long term response phase.
It is important that in responding to any emergency that we don’t just return people to a live of poverty but rather we act creatively to build it back better. In this sense, we have a real opportunity to work with governments, communities and donors to do it right. We should not squander this opportunity.
It is important in all emergency responses to as Deep Throat advised to follow the money. The chaos of an emergency creates great opportunities for corruption and misdirection of funds. Beyond the hard work we do on the ground, it is important to keep a sharp policy eye on politicians and other interests groups who are seeking to cream off benefits for ends totally unrelated to emergency recovery.
Finally we must realize that it is critical that we win both the sprint and the marathon. A short term perspective assumes that we can rescue everyone in 48 hours and all will be fine. A simple look at the reality in Pakistan would tell you that there is no way that housing for 3m people can be built in a week, a month or even two years in a country where the per unit annual capacity of the entire housing industry can only meet a quarter of the need. This is a tough long term slog. Most post emergency work is.
A Final Word
Let me offer a final word more as a American than as a representative of Oxfam. I have to say to you candidly that I am disgraced by the performance of my government towards our citizens in MS and LA.
The events in MS and LA have torn the shroud off the problem of poverty in America but more importantly it has torn the shroud off the indifference and downright hostility of our government officials toward our own citizens.
Some quick facts:
No new money was appropriated for Katrina and Rita despite the White House spin. It was money drawn from other budget line items. Much of that money was drawn from cuts in entitlement programs for the poor.
These cuts came at a time when we were also authorizing another tax cut. The third tax cut we have seen since 9/11 when we are ostensibly at war. We borrowed the money to cover the tax cut from China and Japan.
This is the first time in American history when we have seen tax cuts during war time. During every other war taxes have gone up.
Our ballooning budget deficit in Washington, DC means that we lack the funds needed for the rebuilding of these regions. Lacking the funding means we also lack the institutional capacity.
At this same time, we gave the oil industry emergency funding to get their drilling capacity back on line at a time when they were making windfall profits. Welfare is good for corporate America but not for its poor.
As one watches this drama unfold, one has to ask what is the deal American citizens have bought into. What is the role of government in our lives? The ideology driving the response to Katrina and Rita is that smaller government is better and the market will provide.
But on the ground, you realize that markets will not rebuild the levees around New Orleans, the market will not provide credit to destitute families trying to get back into their homes, and the market will not guarantee that their insurance policies are paid against legitimate claims.
One has to be shocked to see this level of incompetence within our own borders. I would only offer that it is not about the ability of government to perform these functions; rather it is about 30 years of efforts by certain political interests to treat government as the enemy, defund solid programs, and turn leadership of important government agencies over to buffoons, hacks and political loyalists.
This past year demonstrates very clearly what can happen when we absolutely need government and government is not there.
In the face of these emergencies we need strong government agencies lead by skilled professionals to step in and provide citizens with the protections they need.
As citizens, we need to start pushing back on the political discourse that we have been fed for the last thirty years that government is all bad and is bleeding us dry. Historically in America, government has done many things well.
And it is in times like these that we need government and we need competent government. And we need to be willing to pay for that government.
The tax cut frenzy that we have been presented as good public policy is gutting our institutions of competent programs and people. At the same time, it is favoring protections and welfare for corporations and the rich over ordinary citizens. We are going to need to reverse this trend or we will be unprepared when an Avian flu pandemic strikes or another 9/11 catches us unaware.
This is perhaps the most important lesson Americans must grasp from our experience of 2005.