UN struggles to cash in tsunami aid pledges

SIX weeks after the Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy, the UN has received little more than a third of tsunami aid funding pledged by governments, a senior official said yesterday.

While the UN appeal of €760 million has been largely met with written commitments, only €275m has been donated, said

Margareta Wahlstrom, special envoy of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

“It’s a very laborious process to get to 100% of the appeal,” she said in Geneva.

“This is our key message to government donors: Please convert your pledges into hard cash in the bank. It’s only cash in the bank that makes it possible to do work on the ground.”

Despite the unprecedented outpouring of promises of help in the disaster’s wake, bureaucratic regulations and government earmarking have made it difficult to transform pledges into money readily accessible, she said.

Meanwhile, relief agencies distanced themselves from allegations by the Sri Lankan army that a shipment of supplies from Britain was carrying potential bomb-making equipment bound for Tamil controlled areas. The accusation was posted on the Sri Lankan Army website and claimed that a consignment of 76 metal pots contained stocks of steel balls.

It claimed that the 150 balls, discovered when the shipment arrived in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo last Saturday, “could be used for production of bombs or explosives”.

The metal pots were meant to be distributed in the northern and eastern parts of the country which were ravaged by the December 26 tsunami.

According to the army website, the suspicious supplies were addressed to the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO), the aid wing of the Tamil Tigers’ LTTE party, and have been confiscated by the port and naval authorities.

But in Britain, the Department for International Development and the Disasters Emergency Committee said they had no knowledge of such developments.

Major aid agencies working in the country, including the Red Cross, Save the Children and Christian Aid, all said they did not know of any shipments being impounded in Sri Lanka.

Raja Loganathan, from the TRO branch based in Tooting, south London, dismissed the army reports.

“It is all propaganda, the government do not want to give the aid to the TRO,” he said.

Tension between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers have remained high since the 2002 ceasefire ended two decades of fighting.