What is happening to
the millions donated for tsunami survivors?
By Catherine Philp
Many thousands are still
forced to live in temporary camps in Sri Lanksa thanks to official
incompetence and bureaucracy
SARINA crouches in her tent in the devastated fishing town of Hambantota,
sorting through the few children’s clothes that survived the tsunami.
Outside the rain begins to fall and with a sigh she pulls down the flaps to
stop the water leaking inside.
“We are tired of being here,” she says as the temperature inside begins to
rise and the air starts to swelter. “We were promised we’d be in houses in
six months but still we are living in a tent and we don’t know when we will
ever have a home of our own.”
When emergency aid began pouring into Sri Lanka in the days and weeks after
the tsunami, it came in a flood through open doors flung wide by a grateful
nation. But as the weeks and months have gone by the reconstruction effort
has slowed to a crawl, hampered by bureaucracy, incompetence and corruption,
much of it on the part of the Sri Lankan Government.
Six months after the tsunami struck, thousands of survivors still live in
sweltering tents, while others inhabit temporary shelters that will have to
be rebuilt in the coming weeks as monsoon rains grow heavier.
Aid workers call the failure a betrayal that is holding the survivors back
from beginning to rebuild their lives.
“It’s a mess,” one United Nations official said. “We should have all these
people properly sheltered by now. But this country is awash with aid money
that people can’t spend because they are so busy jumping through the hoops
that the Government is putting up for them.”
Hambantota, almost totally devastated in the disaster, was meant to stand as
a model for reconstruction across the island with plans to rebuild a town
from scratch three miles away from the rubble-strewn bay.
But its story so far is emblematic of the chaos and confusion surrounding
the rebuilding effort.
Soon after the tsunami, the Government declared that no reconstruction could
take place within 100 metres of the shoreline, to create a buffer zone to
protect against future disasters. In the case of Hambantota, this accounted
for the entire old town, which is sandwiched between a crescent bay and a
salt-water lagoon.
Amid great fanfare, ground was broken on a site newly cleared from the
jungle, where 2,000 homes were due to be built. Six months later, however,
just 47 of those homes have been completed, built by a Buddhist relief
organisation and handed to the Government for allocation. Last week only two
of the homes were occupied by families — and they were still coming and
going from their tented homes in a relief camp, because the Government had
failed to match the building effort with services of its own.
“There’s no electricity or water so how can we stay here?” Fatima, 44, said,
looking around the empty living room. “Tonight we’ll go back to our tent in
the mosque.”
Down amid the rubble of the bay where the town once stood, Zaruk and his
family are also still living in a tent.
Even if the new town had power and water, they would not want to move there.
“I am a fisherman, how can I go and live in the jungle?” he said. “I want to
rebuild my house right here so I can fish again but because we are in the
100-metre zone the Government will not let us.”
Even getting back to sea to earn a living is fraught with difficulty. Three
days ago, Zaruk finally received a new boat paid for by an aid organisation
and distributed by the Government. But without nets it is useless.
Further down the coast there are fishermen who have received nets but no
boats. Elsewhere they have boats but no outboard motors.
Aid workers are under few illusions about where the fault lies. “Once the
emergency phase of relief was over, everything we did had to go through the
Government,” the head of one international relief agency said. “And that’s
when everything started to slow down.”
Chaos and confusion typify the relationship between the international
efforts and the Sri Lankan Government. A UN worker who tried to call the
fisheries department to sort out the problems with supply of equipment to
fishermen found that no one was there to take her call. An aid organisation
that signed an agreement for a piece of land on which to build, discovered
that two other agencies had agreements for the same land.
The distribution of fishing boats in Galle almost broke down in a riot after
the first five boats were given to fishermen who already had their own.
The remainder were withdrawn in a hurry and still languish in warehouses.
Government officials agreed a deal for an aid organisation to build
permanent houses, but later the agreement was scrapped because the plans for
the homes did not include any bathrooms or lavatories.
A government ministry asked Unicef for two ambulances to help with medical
work in refugee camps, but when they finally cleared customs, two months
after their arrival, they were hit with a $40,000 (£22,000) tax bill for
each one — more than twice the cost of the vehicles. The ministry refused to
pay and the agency has been left pondering whether it will have to send them
back.
Oxfam has also had to pay duty of £500,000 for its fleet of relief vehicles.
There have been calls for tax breaks to be given to the agencies.
Chamila Andrama, a UN official in Galle, said: “Organisations have no choice
but to work with the Government — but they make it very hard for us. It’s
six months after the tsunami and still very few people have homes or
livelihoods. We should have done so much more than this by now.”
While frustration grows in the aid community, anger is building among the
survivors. The angriest are the so-called “100-metre refugees” who lost
their homes close to the sea and are now forced to live in limbo, barred
from rebuilding their homes where they stood and dependent on the Government
to build them a home elsewhere.
In Peraliya, in the shadow of a wrecked train, where the tsunami claimed
more than 1,000 lives, the 100-metre refugees sit in tents or poorly
constructed wooden huts, gazing at their neighbours just metres away, busily
reconstructing their homes. Each of their neighbours has received a chunk of
compensation, but for those whose homes were inside the buffer zone there is
nothing.
H. L. Gunawardna, the divisional secretary for Galle, said: “We aren’t
giving them any money because they don’t need it, we are going to build them
houses.”
But for that to heppen land needs to be found elsewhere, a time-consuming
process made even more laborious by the layers of bureaucracy involved.
Experts are divided over the wisdom of the buffer zone and even officials
admit that without it the rehousing task would be much easier.
Ananda Amaratunga, Galle’s district co-ordinator for the Task Force for
Rebuilding the Nation, said: “If there was no buffer zone we could have
everyone rehoused. But this is a government policy.”
For householders perhaps, but not for the wealthy hotel owners who have been
granted permission to rebuild right up to the shoreline. Katja Schaefer, who
is a rehabilitation adviser with the UN, said: “We are highly suspicious of
the 100-metre rule. People should be allowed to stay there if they want to.”
Most unfortunate of all are those who lived in the buffer zone but did not
own their own land and so under the Sri Lankan Government’s policy are not
entitled to be rehoused at all.
At Katugoda, on the outskirts of Galle, the railway track marks the boundary
of the buffer zone. On the shore side, the squatters who lost their homes
sit in stifling tents while on the other, builders are busily at work on
permanent homes behind the row of temporary shelters already built there.
Nobody knows how many there are, because on paper, they do not exist.
“These are the poorest of the poor and there’s nothing we can do for them,”
Ms Schaefer said. “They lost their homes, they’ve lost their families, they
have lost everything. They haven’t even started to get over the trauma. To
give them a house is the beginning of recovery.”
Aid officials say that the building of permanent homes must be speeded up or
the camps of wooden temporary shelters will quickly turn into slums. But
people are not holding their collective breath. “Come back in two years and
you’ll still see people living in temporary shelters,” one aid official
said. “With the money we have here that is inexcusable. But if things don’t
change fast, that’s the way it looks.”
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