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I think we all recognize in Quentin’s Great Dark Man the uncensored bottom’s dream of “the real man” — a fantasy not quite out of date or through with us yet, despite its embarrassing and masochistic origins in the hash, scornful atmosphere of the high school locker room.Floods in Pakistan affect millions; U.N.-led relief effort lacks financial support
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The vast majority of funding for the U.N.-led relief operation so far has come from traditional donors — principally the United States, Australia, Denmark and Britain. Many of Pakistan’s regional allies and neighbors, including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as other developing countries, have sent only a trickle of aid in the crucial first weeks of the crisis.
“It’s been abysmal, it’s been terrible. There is no relationship between the number of people in acute need of help and what has actually been provided in this first month,” said Jan Egeland, a former U.N. relief coordinator who managed the international response to the tsunami in South Asia in 2004. “We got more in a single day just after the tsunami than Pakistan got in a month.”
The floods have killed about 1,500 people. That toll is far lower than the toll in other recent disasters, including the 2004 tsunami, the earthquake in South Asia in 2005 and the earthquake in Haiti in January. But the floods have left more people in need of food, shelter and other life-saving assistance than those disasters combined.
Many analysts have blamed “disaster fatigue” for the paltry commitment in aid. On Thursday, U.S. and U.N. officials hope to overcome that by emphasizing the dire nature of the situation and pointing out that the problems will linger after the waters recede.
The stakes are particularly high for the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan, which fears that an inadequate response in Pakistan could destabilize the government there and undermine military goals across the border.
While money was slow to start flowing, U.N. officials said that they are roughly halfway toward meeting a goal of $460 million in aid. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is attending the gathering Thursday, is expected to announce an increase in U.S. aid to Pakistan.
The lack of assistance from Pakistan’s allies in the Islamic world has been a source of frustration among the country’s officials.
State media in Saudi Arabia reported Tuesday that the country had raised $20.5 million to support the Pakistani flood victims. But that was the kingdom’s first significant donation, and it came three weeks into the crisis. Pakistan considers Saudi Arabia one of its closest allies, and the Saudis have in the past lavished money on charities and religious organizations in Pakistan.
Before the Saudi announcement, no Muslim nation had given Pakistan more than the $5 million donation made by Kuwait, according to U.N. records.
Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Rustam Shah Mohmand, said donors from the Islamic world traditionally prefer to work through networks of nongovernmental organizations and private charities, rather than through the United Nations or even the government.
But for Pakistanis whose lives have been destroyed by the floods, the paucity of aid from the Muslim world has been just one more disappointment.”It is really sad that even our brother Islamic countries provide very little aid in this hardest time,” Mohammad Usman, 58, said recently as he sat outside his badly damaged home in the northwestern town of Charsadda. “We expected more, but what we are hearing is nothing.”
The United Nations has been struggling for years to convince Islamic countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and other wealthy gulf states, to direct relief money through U.N. programs in order to ensure a coordinated response. Some of the U.N. appeals have paid off. Kuwait, for instance, recently committed to put 10 percent of its giving to international organizations. But much of the Islamic world remains reluctant.
John Holmes, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, said that Saudia Arabia, Iran and Syria have sent food, tents and other supplies to Pakistan, but the giving has been largely ad-hoc and uncoordinated.
“We’ve have been encouraging the gulf countries . . . to channel a lot more of whatever they give through the multilateral organizations, whether it’s the U.N. organizations, NGOs or the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement,” Holmes said.
Anemic levels of giving have not been limited to Pakistan’s Muslim allies. China, which Pakistan considers perhaps its closest ally, had provided less than $2 million as of Wednesday.
Zar Ali Khan, a civil society activist in the regional capital of Peshawar, said Pakistanis are told that “our friendship with China is as high as the Himalayan mountains and as deep as the seas. But assistance from China, Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich countries has disappointed us.”
The United States, which has seized on the floods as an opportunity to help rehabilitate its tattered image in Pakistan, had provided $90 million as of Wednesday, making it by far the largest single donor.
There are signs that aid from the Muslim world might pick up. On Monday, Iranian state TV reported that the country’s Chamber of Commerce has pledged a million dollars, and an influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, said his office would give $50,000.
“As the only Islamic Republic in the region, we should be a model for the Islamic world,” said Sarem Rezaee of the Iranian Red Crescent Society. “We should be kindhearted.”
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