The rubble of twisted concrete and metal bakes in the hot Mediterranean sun of a regional heat wave. A year on from Israel’s 51-day military operation in 2014, not a single one of the 11,000 destroyed homes in Gaza has been rebuilt. Photo credit: UNRWA Archives/Shareef Sarhan

By Charlie Hoyle
BETHLEHEM, Palestine, Aug 15 2015 (IPS)

The rubble of twisted concrete and metal bakes in the hot Mediterranean sun of a regional heat wave.

Eight months ago, the infrastructural devastation in the Gaza Strip was the same, except floodwater and freezing winter temperatures swept over the heaped remnants of people’s homes and businesses.

A year on from Israel’s 51-day military operation – in which over 2,200 Palestinians were killed, including more than 500 children – not a single one of the 11,000 destroyed homes has been rebuilt.

The task of large-scale reconstruction work was entrusted to the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM), a United Nations-brokered agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority which would oversee the distribution of building materials entering Gaza.“Most of the 100,000 Palestinians displaced by the [2014] war continue to live in makeshift shelters, often in the rubble of their former homes, and the landscape is littered with miles upon miles of apocalyptic decay where homes, shops, and restaurants once stood”

To date, only 5.5 percent of the building materials needed to repair and rebuild homes and other damaged infrastructure has entered the coastal enclave, according to Israeli rights group Gisha, founded in 2005 to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especial Gaza residents.

Failed promises by donor countries which pledged 5.4 billion dollars last October, political tensions between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and Israel’s continued restrictions on materials entering the territory have all impeded reconstruction efforts.

However, many hold the GRM directly responsible for the glacial pace of reconstruction, arguing that the terms of the agreement have entrenched Gaza’s underdevelopment by granting Israel control over nearly every aspect of the rebuilding process.

“Israel actually has deep power over every single house built in Gaza,” says Ghada Snunu, a reporting officer at Ma’an Development Centre in Gaza.

“We cannot build a house if Israel says no. Israel decides whether homes are built or not.”

As part of the GRM, Israel has case-by-case approval over individual applications for building materials, veto power over construction companies put forward by the Palestinian Authority to provide those materials, and access to the Authority’s Ministry of Civil Affairs database, which registers the ID numbers and GPS coordinates of Palestinians whose homes were destroyed.

According to Gisha, private owners, building plans, locations and the quantities all require Israeli approval, with companies and merchants who store the construction materials – mostly aggregate, cement and steel bars – forced to place security guards and install cameras to supervise the goods 24 hours a day.

This lengthy and expensive bureaucratic process, designed specifically to meet Israel’s stated security concerns, has meant the process is at a virtual standstill.

“The GRM has failed because it gives Israel veto power over everything. There are no changes on the ground so far,” complains Snunu.

In January, the Brookings Doha Centre said in a policy briefing that the GRM has effectively seemed to offer “legitimacy to the Israeli blockade” and placed “exclusive reliance on Israel’s willingness to allow the flow of reconstruction materials” for success of the mechanism.

In recent months, Oxfam says that more building materials are entering Gaza, but the levels are still only 25 percent of those before Israel’s blockade was imposed some eight years ago.

“At this pace it could take 19 years to finish just the rebuilding of homes destroyed in 2014 and at least 76 years to build all the new homes that Gaza needs,” said Oxfam’s Arwa Mhunna.

Most of the 100,000 Palestinians displaced by the war continue to live in makeshift shelters, often in the rubble of their former homes, and the landscape is littered with miles upon miles of apocalyptic decay where homes, shops, and restaurants once stood.

The vast infrastructural damage last summer, caused by an unprecedented amount of explosive weaponry used by Israel’s military, compounds the effects of an eight-year blockade and two other Israeli military offensives since 2008, with damage from those conflicts barely addressed.

Gazan institutions and stakeholders have been largely excluded from the rebuilding process following the three wars, placing the civilian population at the mercy of political infighting, unfulfilled international promises and Israel’s blockade.

“Gaza had already been destroyed completely before the war. This agreement did not change anything, Palestinians were told their homes would be rebuilt, but these promises have been broken by the international community and the PA,” says Snunu.

In May, the World Bank reported that Gaza had the highest unemployment rate in the world at 43.9 percent, with 67 percent of under 24-year-olds unemployed. Real per capita income is now 31 percent lower than it was 20 years ago, at 970 dollars a year, the report added.

At least 80 percent of Gazans are dependent on humanitarian aid.

“The situation in Gaza is getting more serious and dire,” says Mhunna. “The humanitarian crisis is continuing and now affects all aspects of life. Displacement has lasted for over a year since the war and there is a devastating economic situation.”

Hamas officials, rights groups, and both local and international NGOs had repeatedly stressed last year during ceasefire negotiations that Gaza must not return to a status quo of blockade.

Since Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005 – withdrawing some 9,000 settlers and military forces – it has repeatedly claimed that it is no longer occupying the territory and has held Hamas responsible for the civilian population.

Yet 10 years later, Israel controls the movement of Palestinians in and out of Gaza, the food they can have access to, whether they can receive medical treatment or not, and now under the terms of the GRM, whether their homes can be rebuilt.

“The GRM harms Palestinians more than it benefits them. What is clear in our demands is that the GRM heightens the blockade and Gaza will not be rebuilt unless the blockade is lifted,” says Snunu.

“Palestinians need solutions for the crisis, not mechanisms that manage the crisis.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

The district of Kavre in Nepal was one of the worst casualties of the Apr. 25 earthquake that devastated great swathes of this South Asian nation. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Aruna Dutt
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 9 2015 (IPS)

As Nepal’s monsoon rains approach, some humanitarian aid remains tied up in the capital Kathmandu and there are concerns that a rush to build shelters could lead to the same shoddy construction that collapsed during the Apr. 25 earthquake, a U.N. official said Wednesday.

John Ging, Operations Director of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), briefed the press about his three days spent in Nepal reviewing the state of the humanitarian situation, response and reconstruction two months after the 7.3 magnitude earthquake."From the outset of the disaster response, Nepalese people, as first responders, were helping each other regardless of gender or other considerations." -- Jamie McGoldrick

“In the urgency to rebuild, and in the impoverishment that is there, we have to be alert to the real danger of there being a ‘build back worse’ rather than a ‘build back better’,” Ging insisted.

So far, an appeal for 422 million dollars has only been 46 percent funded, he said. “We hope to see that mobilised very quickly because people cannot stand in the rain.”

The disaster affected around eight million people – almost one-third of the population of the country – resulting in extreme devastation, with 2.2 million people losing their homes.

Moreover, an estimated 1.5 million children have been directly affected by the impact of the earthquake on Nepal’s education system, with one million children now without a permanent classroom, Jamie McGoldrick, U.N. Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in Nepal, told IPS.

Tej Thapa, South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, told IPS they have been hearing stories of minority communities having greater trouble accessing aid and have received some anecdotal evidence of problems of LGBTI communities accessing aid.

“Humanitarian and other groups have adopted a ‘do no harm’ principle, where aid is distributed evenly to all communities but separately – physically separately,” added Thapa. “The Dalits queue up in a different line from the high castes.”

This separation confirms the deeply rooted caste system in Nepal which results in human rights abuses towards lower castes, and if not addressed in the Constitution it may prevent the goal of “building back better”, which Ging stated is strongly encouraged in humanitarian efforts.

The hurried drafting Nepal’s Constitution could also be an impeding factor to this goal, as it has been predicted to result in further human rights issues. The Preliminary Draft of the Constitution was approved by Nepal’s Constituent Assembly Jul. 7 although it was due to be completed in 2012.

“The draft as it stands is regressive, particularly on women’s rights, minority rights, identity rights, and press freedoms,” Thapa told IPS. “The current political position seems to be to move ahead with this constitution regardless, and hope that laws and practice will sort out the problems over the years, which is deeply worrying.”

“The constitution is the supreme law of the land and if rights are not protected through that document then there is little reason to believe there will be any further political will to amend the problems,” says Thapa.

“The U.N. stands ready to provide any technical assistance required to ensure compliance of the constitution with the international human rights instruments to which Nepal is a party,” says McGoldrick.

Despite these legal factors, U.N. officials assert that Nepalese communities are working together to assure the people in most need are prioritised and nobody is left behind.

“I commend local authorities and local organisations for their show of true humanity in the face of devastation, that made no distinction between any people,” Ging said.

“From the outset of the disaster response, Nepalese people, as first responders, were helping each other regardless of gender or other considerations,” McGoldrick affirmed, “Most notably, youth took a lead role in coordinating and delivering aid. Also, family members, friends, neighbours, business owners etc., all recognised their role to play in helping their fellow citizens.”

U.N. officials also insist that international humanitarian aid is being distributed evenly among communities.

“The U.N., through the UNDAF, has conducted a thorough analysis of the most vulnerable groups in Nepal and addressed inclusion as a main tenet of its programming. This approach is continuing with the relief and recovery work,” McGoldrick explained.

“Aid is delivered based solely on need and in an equitable and principled manner. Moreover, all humanitarian programming was designed keeping in mind specific needs of vulnerable groups such as women, children, elderly and/or minorities; so as to ensure the aid is provided to them in an equitable and apolitical manner.”

Another preventative factor to ‘building back better’ could be Nepal’s massive debt to foreign lenders of about 3.8 billion dollars, according to the most recent World Bank numbers.

While the earthquake and its aftershocks caused damage amounting to about 10 billion dollars – about one-third of the country’s total economy, the country’s creditors have not agreed on a debt-relief settlement.

Nepal will not receive debt relief from the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust as it does not “fulfill the criteria of the fund”, says McGoldrick.

Nepal, one of the world’s least developed countries (LDCs), had a projected goal of 6.7 billion dollars for the next phase of rehabilitation and reconstruction of the destroyed infrastructure and services, and received 4.4 billion dollars in pledges at an international donor conference in Kathmandu two weeks ago, although that remains to be delivered.

“We still have a significant shortfall in our humanitarian appeal and we are asking member-states to redouble their effort,” Ging said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness, who says that unless someone steps in to alleviate the financial crisis facing the U.N. agency, “ it is innocent refugees who will again suffer”. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
JERUSALEM, Jul 3 2015 (IPS)

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) faces a severe financial crisis which could see core services to desperate Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank halted unless donors step in before the end of September.

“Currently we have a deficit of 101 million dollars and, as things stand now, UNRWA will struggle to function after September because we don’t have enough money to fund even our core activities for the last few months of the year,” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness told IPS in an exclusive interview.

“However, following a number of stringent austerity measures already in place, we should be able to continue with life-saving, emergency services to the end of the year,” he added.“As things stand now, UNRWA will struggle to function after September because we don’t have enough money to fund even our core activities for the last few months of the year” – UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness

Due to the financial crisis, the contracts for 35 percent of the 137 internationals employed by UNRWA will end by Sep. 30 without further extension or renewal. The U.N. organisation has taken these steps to reduce costs while trying not to reduce basic services to Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.

“UNRWA is facing financial crises on all fronts. Broadly speaking we have two sources of funding,” Gunness told IPS. “We have our general fund which funds our core services such as education, health relief and social services. Then we have our emergency funds which are for Gaza and the West Bank because there is a blockade and an occupation respectively.

“We’re also dealing with more than 400,000 displaced people in Syria, the 45,000 refugees who’ve fled to Lebanon and the 15,000 who’ve escaped over the border into Jordan.”

Following Israel’s devastating military campaign against Gaza in July and August last year, UNRWA launched a reconstruction initiative, worth 720 million dollars, at the international reconstruction conference in Cairo in October last year.

Part of the money was for rental subsidies for those Gazans whose homes were so damaged that they were uninhabitable and needed a roof over their heads, and part of it was for reconstruction.

“In February this year, we had to suspend that programme because there was a 585 million dollar shortfall. Due to the deficit not one single home in Gaza has been rebuilt, so there is a real crisis in regard to reconstruction,” said Gunness.

Last year in Syria, UNRWA launched an appeal for 417 million dollars but only 52 percent of this money was received. The shortfall forced the organisation to reduce its six cash distribution programmes from six to three.

Cash distributions have become one of UNRWA’s major emergency response programmes in Syria due to so many U.N. installations being bombed and destroyed as a result of the civil war raging there, thereby crippling its normal means of helping refugees.

With the money received for Syria, UNRWA was only able to distribute an average of 50 cents per refugee per day.

“Imagine trying to survive on 50 cents daily. It is almost impossible and although our donors have been very generous, they have not been generous enough,” said Gunness.

In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees from Syria rely on UNRWA for various things, including rental subsidies so that they can have a roof over their heads.

“We had been giving out a 100 dollar monthly rental allowance. This gets you very little in Lebanon, which is an expensive country,” Gunness told IPS.

“When I was last in Lebanon I visited a Palestinian refugee family in the poverty-stricken Shatila camp in Beirut. They were paying 200 dollars a month to live in a room 20 feet by 20 feet [6 metres by 6 metres] with a tiny bathroom and kitchen.

“Their rental subsidy was cut at the end of June and I suspect that family is now living on the street. This is the reality of the crash crisis for just one family of refugees from Syria who have been made homeless.

“And this is only one story that relates to the emergency funding UNRWA receives,” Gunness added.

“In relation to the general side of our funding, what we’ve seen over the years is a gradual increase in the structural deficit of our general fund which has led to the current deficit of 101 million dollars.”

UNRWA’s monthly running costs are 35 million dollars. This includes the salaries of 30, 000 staff members, 22,000 of whom are teachers, as well as the distribution of basic necessities for refugees such as food.

“So, unless someone steps in to alleviate the crisis, even tougher decisions may need to be made in the next few weeks and it is innocent refugees who will again suffer,” said Gunness.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Nepalese people carry UK aid shelter kits back to the remains of their homes, 10 days after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the country on 25 April 2015. Credit: Russell Watkins/DFID

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 26 2015 (IPS)

Blessed with more than 4.4 billion dollars in pledges at an international donor conference in Kathmandu on Thursday, the government of Nepal is expected to launch a massive reconstruction project to rebuild the earthquake-devastated South Asian nation.

But the pledges came with a caveat.“It is critical that the international community and Nepal learn from the mistakes of past emergencies, where up to half of pledges are never delivered on." -- Caroline Baudot of Oxfam

“While donors were generous, many of them strongly emphasised the need for Nepal to strengthen efficiency, transparency and accountability in handling international assistance,” Kul Chandra Gautam, a former deputy executive director of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, told IPS..

“They also emphasised the need for political stability, early local elections and speedy completion of the long pending Constitution drafting process,” said Gautam, a native of Nepal and a former U.N. assistant secretary-general, who is based in Kathmandu.

A jubilant finance minister, Ram Sharan Mahat, told reporters the donors’ meeting, titled the International Conference on Nepal’s Reconstruction, was “a grand success”.

“The total pledge made today was 4.4 billion, which was more than expected… 2.2 billion in loans and 2.2 billion in grants,” he said.

India’s Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj pledged 1.0 billion dollars while China promised 3.0 billion yuan (483 million dollars) in assistance.

Additional pledges included 600 million from the Asian Development Bank, 260 million from Japan, 130 million from the U.S., 100 million from the European Union and 58 million from Britain, supplementing an earlier offer of up to 500 million dollars from the World Bank.

Nepal had a projected goal of 6.7 billion dollars for the next phase of rehabilitation and reconstruction of the destroyed infrastructure and services.

This was a rather conservative or realistic needs assessment, considering that the estimated loss and damage from the earthquake was over 7.0 billion dollars, and it usually costs more to “build back better” than just the replacement cost of the destroyed and damaged infrastructure, Gautam said.

It was understood, he pointed out, about one-third of the estimated needs would be met from national resources and two-thirds would come from donors.

Donors really opened their hearts for the suffering people of Nepal, he said.

“We were delighted that even small poor countries like neighbouring Bhutan and faraway Haiti were forthcoming with generous pledges of 1.0 million dollars each,” said Gautam.

The United Nations estimated that about eight million people – almost one-third of the population of Nepal – were affected by the earthquake in April, described as “the largest disaster the country has faced in almost a century.”

More than 8,600 people were reported to have died, and according to U.N. figures, more than 20,000 schools were completely or significantly damaged and about a million children and 126,000 pregnant women are estimated to have been affected.

Caroline Baudot, Oxfam’s Humanitarian Policy Adviser, told IPS the proposed investment provides Nepal with a golden opportunity to get people back on their feet and better prepared for the future.

“Now that pledges have been made, Oxfam is calling for communities to be consulted when the reconstruction plan is developed and implemented, continued attention to livelihoods and access to services, and that future disaster risks are reduced through reconstruction.”

She said donors and the Government of Nepal must now ensure there is a long-term plan which listens to communities – putting people at the center of the reconstruction process, which builds improved basic services like hospitals and ensures new buildings are safe and earthquake resilient.

“It is critical that the international community and Nepal learn from the mistakes of past emergencies, where up to half of pledges are never delivered on. Donors must make good on their promises and ensure the finance they have committed reaches those who need it,” said Baudot.

In a message to the conference, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Nepal has stood strong during this crisis.

“I commend the exceptional efforts of the country’s government and people – in particular the youth who have found new and innovative ways to help their country.”

He also said that the United Nations “stands ready to support the government and people of Nepal in this endeavor. I am confident that Nepal, with its resilient people will be able to recover from this devastating disaster.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Students at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 19 2015 (IPS)

Since 2002, a year after it invaded Afghanistan, the United States has poured over 100 billion dollars into developing and rebuilding this country of just over 30 million people. This sum is in addition to the trillions spent on U.S. military operations, to say nothing of the deaths of 2,000 service personnel in the space of a single decade.

Today, as the U.S. struggles to salvage its legacy in Afghanistan, which critics say will mostly be remembered as a colossal and costly failure both in monetary terms and in the staggering loss of life, many are pointing to economic and social gains as the bright points in an otherwise bleak tapestry of occupation.

“Much of the official happy talk on [reconstruction] should be taken with a grain of salt – iodized, of course – to prevent informational goiter.” -- John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
Among others, official groups like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) say that higher life expectancy outcomes, better healthcare facilities and improved education access represent the ‘positive’ side of U.S. intervention.

From this perspective, the estimated 26,000 civilian casualties as a direct result of U.S. military action must be viewed against the fact that people are now living longer, fewer mothers are dying while giving birth, and more children are going to school.

But the diligent work undertaken by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) suggests that “much of the official happy talk on [reconstruction] should be taken with a grain of salt – iodized, of course – to prevent informational goiter.”

Formed in 2008, SIGAR is endowed with the authority to “audit, inspect, investigate, and otherwise examine any and all aspects of reconstruction, regardless of departmental ownership.”

In a May 5 speech, John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General, called the reconstruction effort a “huge and far-reaching undertaking” that has scarcely left any part of Afghan life untouched.

Poured into endless projects from propping up the local army and police, to digging wells and finding alternatives to poppy cultivation, funds allocated to rebuilding Afghanistan now “exceed the value of the entire Marshall Plan effort to rebuild Western Europe after World War II.”

“Unfortunately,” Sopko said, “from the outset to this very day large amounts of taxpayer dollars have been lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.

“These disasters often occur when the U.S. officials who implement and oversee programs fail to distinguish fact from fantasy,” he added.

‘Ghost schools, ghost students, ghost teacher’

In one of the most recent examples of this disturbing trend, two Afghan ministers cited local media reports to inform parliament about fraud in the education sector, alleging that former officials who served under President Hamid Karzai had falsified data on the number of active schools in Afghanistan in order to receive continued international funding.

“SIGAR takes such allegations very seriously, and given that they came from high-ranking individuals in the Afghan government, and also that USAID has invested approximately 769 million dollars in Afghanistan’s education sector, SIGAR opened an inquiry into this matter,” a SIGAR official told IPS.

Submitted on Jun. 18 to the Acting Administrator for USAID, the official inquiry raises a number of questions, including over widely cited statistics that official development assistance has led to a jump in the number of enrolled students from an estimated 900,000 in 2002 to more than eight million in 2013.

While USAID stands by these figures, sourced from the Afghan Ministry of Education’s Education Management Information System (EMIS), it is unable to independently verify them.

Faced with allegations of “ghost schools, ghost students, and ghost teachers”, SIGAR has requested an immediate response from USAID as to whether the agency is able to investigate allegations of fraud, and verify that it is receiving accurate data, in order to ensure that U.S. tax dollars are not being wasted, the SIGAR official explained.

This is no easy undertaking in a place where students are spread out over an estimated 14,226 schools primarily in rural areas, and where even the education ministry does not keep tabs on security threats, or the literacy of teachers, let alone the particulars of curricula.

Last year SIGAR reported that the education ministry continues to count students as ‘enrolled’ even if they have been absent from school for three years, suggesting that the actual number of kids in classrooms is far below the figure cited by the government, and subsequently utilised by U.S. aid agencies.

In his May 5 speech Sopko claimed that a top USAID official believed there to be roughly four million children in school – less than half the figure on which current funding commitments is based.

There is no question that continued funding is needed to bolster Afghanistan’s education system.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) office in Kabul, the country continues to boast one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, standing at approximately 31 percent of the population aged 15 years of age and older.

There are also massive geographic and gender-based gaps, with female literacy levels falling far below the national average, at just 17 percent, and varying hugely across regions, with a 34-percent literacy rate in Kabul compared to a rate of just 1.6 percent in two southern provinces.

These are all issues that must urgently be addressed but according to oversight bodies like SIGAR, they must be addressed within a system of efficiency, transparency and accuracy.

Furthermore, discrepancies between official statistics and reality are not limited to the education sector but manifest in almost all areas of the reconstruction process.

Take the issue of life expectancy, which USAID claimed last year had increased from 42 years in 2002 to over 60 years in 2014.

If accurate, this would represent a tremendous stride towards better overall living conditions for ordinary Afghans. But SIGAR has cited a number of different statistics, including data provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) World Factbook and the United Nations Population Division, which offer much lower numbers for the average life span – some as low as 50 years.

Although the original data comes directly from the USAID-funded Afghanistan Mortality Survey, conducted in 2010 by the Afghan Ministry of Public Health, and would therefore appear to pass the reliability test, SIGAR is concerned that “USAID had not verified what, if anything, the ministry had done to address deficiencies in its internal audit, budget, accounting, and procurement functions.”

While SIGAR is not able to put a concrete number on losses resulting from poorly planned programmes, theft and corruption by both American and Afghan elements, and weak administration of monies placed directly in the hands of Afghan ministries, a SIGAR official told IPS it is hard to imagine that the overall cost to U.S. taxpayers “is not in the billions of dollars.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Gazan fishermen Ibrahim Al Quka and his brother Sami Al Quka, who had his hand shot off by the Israeli navy even though he was within Israel's restricted fishing zone. Credit: Mel Frykberg

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Jun 8 2015 (IPS)

Three Palestinian fishermen were injured last week after Israeli naval forces opened fire on fishing boats off the coast of al-Sudaniyya in the northern Gaza Strip, bringing to 15 the number of farmers and fishermen shot and injured by Israeli security forces recently as they attempted to earn a living.

The Israeli navy limits Gaza’s fishermen to a three nautical-mile zone off Gaza’s coast. However even fishermen within that zone have come under fire and been shot, injured and killed or had their boats destroyed or confiscated.“Gaza fishermen have come under fire and been shot, injured and killed or had their boats destroyed or confiscated … Gazan farmers trying to access their agricultural fields … are also regularly shot and injured, and sometimes killed”

As most of the shoals are further out to sea, Gaza’s fishing industry has been decimated and thousands of Gazans deprived of a living and unable to support their families.

Gazan farmers trying to access their agricultural fields within Israel’s 500 metre to 1 km buffer zone next to Israel’s border are also regularly shot and injured, and sometimes killed.

Gaza’s decimated economy has been further damaged by Israeli limits on Gazan exports to two of its biggest markets, the occupied West Bank and Israel.

Agricultural produce and manufactured goods used to underpin the coastal territory’s economy before Israel and Egypt enforced the Gaza blockade.

After last year’s war between Hamas and Israel, one of the conditions for a ceasefire was the easing of the blockade.

While Israel has allowed some goods to be exported from Gaza, this is insufficient to rejuvenate its economy.

Analysts and political commentators have repeatedly warned that Israel’s continued siege and restrictions on Gaza could destabilise the region further, leading to more violence and possibly a new war.

Destruction in Gaza following last year’s war between Hamas and Israel. Credit: Mel Frykberg

A report on the situation by the Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee of the Office of the Quartet Representative was released after a meeting in Brussels on May 27.

“Over a year on from the breakdown in talks between Israel and the Palestinians, there is still no tangible political horizon in sight,” stated the report.

“The last year has repeatedly presented us with reminders not just of where the flashpoints and difficulties persist, but also that in the absence of a political horizon, the vacuum quickly fills with animosity and violence.”

The report outlined how the removal or reduction of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement, trade and access remained essential to securing economic growth.

“Movement and access restrictions, both physical and regulatory, hinder economic development in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and affect nearly all aspects of Palestinian life.”

Employment in Gaza and its economy would be boosted by Israel easing the blockade while the private sector would be strengthened. These in turn would reduce tensions and contribute to Israel’s security needs.

The failure of Hamas and Israel to reach any agreement is further aggravated by the stalemate within the Palestinian unity government due to the inability of Hamas and Fatah to reach consensus on jointly governing Gaza and the West Bank.

The rivalry between the two groups has delayed international aid, without which no reconstruction, redevelopment and economic growth in Gaza can take place.

The Office of the Quartet Representative pointed out five development areas that need to be focused on to improve the situation in the ground – an effective Palestinian government, movement and trade, reliable infrastructure, investment and sustainable land usage.

Meanwhile, Israel is continuing with new plans to relocate thousands of Bedouins in the West Bank and Israel after the move received the green light from Israel’s Supreme Court.

Some 7,000 Bedouins from the central West Bank, most of them situated east of Jerusalem, and 450 in southern Hebron will be “relocated” by force.

The forced removals have been accompanied by coercive measures such as the demolition of buildings and infrastructure on the grounds that they were built without permits, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

However, in area C of the West Bank, which comprises 60 percent of the territory, very few permits are issued by Israel’s Civil Administration, which controls the West Bank, because most of the land has been appropriated for Israeli settlement expansion.

“The Bedouins and herders are at risk of forcible transfer, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as well as multiple human rights violations,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

Bedouins in Israel’s Negev settlement within the ‘Green Line’ can also be forcibly relocated after the Israeli court rejected their appeal to be allowed to stay.

“This court is not the address for creating chaos,” stated Justice Elyakim Rubinstein recently in rejecting the appeal of Bedouin residents of the unrecognised Negev settlement of Umm al-Hiran, reported the Israeli daily Haaretz.

In the ruling, Rubinstein noted that the residents – who are slated to be evicted, and whose houses are to be demolished to make way for the construction of the Jewish town of Hiran – have been living in this place for 60 years, after moving to the Nahal Yatir area in 1956 at the orders of the military governor, and that the eviction and demolition of the 50 or so structures they built will affect the lives of hundreds of people.

Despite this, the judge said he believed that the eviction was reasonable and proportional due to the fact that the land in question was owned by the state and that buildings were erected without permits.

However, the Umm al-Hiran residents argued that they were the victims of discrimination and that their property rights were being infringed.

Jews were able to obtain property rights to land on which they had settled but the Bedouins’ right to land on which they had settled was never formalised.

Edited by Phil Harris

Palestinian families take shelter at an UNRWA school in Gaza City, after evacuating their homes in the northern Gaza Strip, July 2014. UNRWA has now launched a humanitarian reconstruction programme. Credit: Shareef Sarhan/UNRWA Archives

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has launched an ambitious recovery plan for Gaza following the 50-day devastating war between Hamas and Israel which has left the coastal territory decimated.

However, the successful implementation of this plan requires enormous international funding as well as a long-term ceasefire to enable the lifting of the joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the territory.

“We are working on a 24-month plan aimed at 70 percent of Gaza’s population who are refugees but this will only be possible if the blockade is lifted and construction materials and other goods are allowed into Gaza,” Chris Gunness, spokesman for the UN Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA), told IPS.

“Taxpayers are being asked once again to fund the reconstruction of Gaza and at this point there are no security guarantees, so a permanent ceasefire is essential if we are not to return to the repetitive cycle of destruction and then reconstruction,” Gunness said.“If Gaza is to recover and Gazans are to have any hope for the future, it is vital that the international community intervenes to help those Gazan civilians who have and continue to pay the highest price” – Chris Gunness, UNRWA spokesman

The attack on Gaza, euphemistically code-named “Operation Protective Edge” by the Israelis, now stands as the most severe military campaign against Gaza since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967.

“The devastation caused this time is unprecedented in recent memory. Parts of Gaza resemble an earthquake zone with 29 km of damaged infrastructure,” said Gunness.

Following the ceasefire, the Palestinian death toll stood at 2,130 and more than 11,000 injured.

Over 18,000 housing units were destroyed, four hospitals and five clinics were closed due to severe damage, while 17 of Gaza’s 32 hospitals and 45 of 97 its primary health clinics were substantially damaged. Reconstruction is estimated to cost over 7 billion dollars.

According to UNRWA, 22 schools were completely destroyed and 118 damaged during Israeli bombardments, while many higher education facilities were damaged.

Some 110,000 displaced Gazans remain in UN emergency shelters or with host families, according to UNRWA.

The reconstruction of shelters alone will cost over 380 million dollars, 270 million of which relates to Palestinian refugees.

According to the Palestinian Federation of Industries, 419 businesses and workshops were damaged, with 129 completely destroyed.

“We have a two-year plan in place which addresses the spectrum of Palestinian needs. Currently we have 300 engineers on the ground in Gaza assessing reconstruction needs,” Gunness told IPS.

Palestinian boy inspecting the remains of a house which was destroyed during an air strike in Central Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, July 2014. Credit: Shareef Sarhan/UNRWA Archives

UNRWA’s strategic approach has been divided into the relief period, the early recovery period and the recovery period of up to four months following the cessation of hostilities.

“The relief period, which will continue for the next four months, involves urgent humanitarian intervention including providing shelter, food and medical needs for displaced Gazans,” said the UNTWA spokesman.

“The early recovery period will continue for the next year and will address the critical needs of the population such as repairing damage to environmental infrastructure, restoring UNRWA facilities and supplementary assistance for livelihood provisioning.

“The recovery period will last for two years and will focus on the impact of the conflict through a sustainable livelihoods programme promoting self-sufficiency and completing the transition of UNRWA emergency and extended-stay shelters back to intended use and full operational capacity.”

One thrust of UNRWA’s programme will focus on protection, gender and disability. The increased numbers of female-headed households and households with disabled men is having an impact on unemployment patterns.

“Women are the primary caregivers and are closely linked to homes and the psychological trauma being exhibited by children. Furthermore, there have already been signs of increased gender-based violence,” explained Gunness.

“We want to focus on raising awareness of domestic violence, how to deal with violence in the home and building healthy and equal relationships through our gender empowerment programme.”

The UN agency will also address food distribution by providing minimum caloric requirements through basic food commodities, including bread, corned beef or tuna, dairy products and fresh vegetables. Non-food items provided include hygiene kits and water tanks for 42,000 families.

Emergency repairs to shelters are also being undertaken with 70 percent more homes destroyed or damaged than during the 2008-2009 hostilities. Emergency cash assistance for refugee families to meet a range of basic needs is also being distributed.

“Due to the enormous damage done to hospitals and health facilities, UNRWA has so far established 22 health points to provide basic health services to the sick and wounded, and health teams have been deployed to monitor key health issues,” noted Gunness.

The psychological impact of the war is another area that concerns UNRWA.  “There isn’t a person in Gaza who hasn’t been affected by the war. In consultation with UNRWA’s Community Health Programme, we have hired additional counsellors and youth coordinators who will provide a range of services to groups and individuals.”

“If Gaza is to recover and Gazans are to have any hope for the future,” said Gunness, “it is vital that the international community intervenes to help those Gazan civilians who have and continue to pay the highest price.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Members of Abu Sheira's family in front of the tent they set up in the grounds of Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By Khaled Alashqar
GAZA CITY, Sep 8 2014 (IPS)

“When the [Israeli] shelling started, I gathered up my family and headed for what I though was a safe place, like a school, but then that became overcrowded and lacked sanitation, so we ended up in the grounds of the hospital.”

Islam Abu Sheira from Beit Hanoun, a city on the north-eastern edge of the Gaza Strip, was speaking to IPS in front of what has been his family’s makeshift ‘home’ at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for the last two months. His eyes misted over as he recalled his devastated home and his efforts to find a safe refuge for his family."I found no other safe place to shelter in but Al-Shifa Hospital. Together with our seven children we fled into the hospital grounds and slept our first night under trees to escape the Israeli missiles that were destroying whole areas, killing entire families" – Islam Abu Sheira, a refugee from Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip

In his forties, Islam described his family’s ordeal after Israeli shelling left them homeless and they first sought refuge in a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. relief and development agency for Palestinian refugees, and were then forced by overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions to move out and seek shelter elsewhere.

“I found no other safe place to shelter in but Al-Shifa Hospital. Together with our seven children we fled into the hospital grounds and slept our first night under trees to escape the Israeli missiles that were destroying whole areas, killing entire families, ” said Islam,  adding that “during the war, the only thing we were looking for was a place that could protect us from the shelling.”

Like the majority of Palestinian families whose homes were destroyed, they have lost their belongings and, for the time being, their chances of living a life of dignity. Most families in the Gaza Strip were forced to leave their homes so quickly that they had no time to take anything with them.

“We simply have no livelihood and my children sleep every night on the ground without even a blanket to cover them,” lamented Islam. “We have been living a primitive life since we fled our home without even taking the clothes we need.”

As the numbers of people escaping the shelling mounted, so did the difficulty of sheltering them. Schools did their best, but there were insufficient basic necessities and medical supplies, and they were housing four or five persons, if not more, in each classroom.

Palestinian families whose homes were destroyed by Israeli shelling of Gaza sheltering in a UNRWA school. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

Jamila Saad, a housewife who is taking care of her 12-member family and also fled to one of the UNRWA schools, told IPS: “The school was receiving more and more refugees, and we and the other refugee families were sharing one toilet. We need a better life for our children and we hope that our home will soon be rebuilt so that we can begin a new life there in our new home.”

The complex and harsh conditions that the Palestinian refugees are suffering in schools and other shelter centres has pushed most international organisations to provide the refugees with as much aid as possible, but this is far from finding a final solution for the refugees’ suffering.

The conditions of the thousands of refugees who have lost their homes has placed the new Palestinian government before an enormous challenge and a huge responsibility to provide these refugee families with care and a secure environment, as well take on the responsibility of implementing the reconstruction programmes financially aided by the European Union and donor states in accordance with ceasefire agreement brokered in Cairo between Israel and Hamas, especially in terms of the reconstruction of Gaza.

Mufid al-Hasayna, Minister of Public Works and Housing in the new Palestinian unity government, told IPS that “the amount of destruction of houses and economic facilities is massive, and the population of Gaza is living under hard conditions, so we are working hard to improve the living conditions of people. We are working on programmes to start reconstruction of the Gaza Strip and rebuild destroyed houses and

Al-Hasayna believes that the blurred vision Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have of their future after 50 days of war and their constant fear of being retargeted by the Israeli occupation forces have only added to a worsening of their situation.

Amjad Shawa, Director of the Palestinian NGO Network, told IPS: “The harsh circumstances that the Gaza Strip underwent over the 50 days of the Israeli occupation’s war reduced the population’s access to water and food and threatened people’s security, while the bombing of residential high ‘towers’ housing dozens of families has left serious impacts on civilians.

According to Shawa, the housing situation is now all the more dramatic because, even before Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’, the Gaza Strip was already suffering from the deficit of 70,000 housing units that had been destroyed in the 2009 and 2012 wars.

“Following the two wars, scheduled housing projects to rebuild the infrastructure were not implemented, and the deficit of housing units has reached a state that has put the population in a situation of real disaster,” Shawa told IPS.

He called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to form an independent body of Palestinian civil society organisations to create a plan for reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.

According to a report prepared by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), in June 2014 the Gaza Strip was home to an estimated population of 1.76 million living in a coastal area that extends along the Mediterranean Sea and covers approximately 365 square kilometres with a maximum width of 12 kilometres.

The PCBS believes that Gaza Strip’s narrow surface area and high population has contributed to some extent to the distribution of people in large blocks and increased its population density, turning the Strip into one the most densely populated areas in the world.

Population density in the Gaza Strip has reached 2,744 per square kilometre, and experts say this means that food, health and education should be the top priorities for the future development agenda of decision-makers.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Chakravarthi Raghavan
GENEVA, Jul 22 2014 (IPS)

The world of today is considerably different from the one at the end of the Second World War; there are no more any colonies, though there are still some ‘dependent’ territories.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as the decolonisation process unfolded, in most of the newly independent countries leaders emerged who had simply fought against foreign rule, without much thought on their post-independence economic and social objectives and policies.

Some naively thought that with political independence and power, economic well-being would be automatic.

Chakravarthi Raghavan

By the late 1950s, the former colonies, and those early leaders within them who yearned for better conditions for their peoples, realised that something more than political independence was needed, and began looking at the international economic environment, organisations and institutions.

In the immediate post-war years, the focus of efforts to fashion new international economic institutions (arising out of U.S.-U.K. wartime commercial policy agreements) was on international moves for reconstruction and development in war-ravaged Europe.

As a result, in the sectors of money and finance, the Bretton Woods institutions [the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) or World Bank], were established – even ahead of agreeing on the United Nations Charter and its principle of sovereign equality of states (one nation, one vote in U.N. bodies) – on the basis of the ‘one-dollar one-vote’ principle.“Within the Bretton Woods institutions, there was no direct focus on promoting ‘development’ of the former colonies; what little happened was at best a side-effect of the lending policies of these institutions and the few crumbs that fell off the table here and there, often to further Cold War interests”

In pursuing their wartime commercial policy agreements, the United Kingdom and the United States submitted proposals in 1946 to the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) for the establishment of an international trade body, an International Trade Organization (ITO).

ECOSOC convened the U.N. Conference on Trade and Employment to consider the proposals; the Preparatory Committee for the Conference drafted a Charter for the trade body, and it was discussed and approved in 1948 at a U.N. conference in Havana.

Pending ratification of the Havana Charter, the commercial policy chapter of the planned international trade body was fashioned into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and brought into being through the protocol of provisional application, as a multilateral executive agreement to govern trade relations, i.e., governments agreeing to implement their commitments to reduce trade barriers and resume pre-war trading relations through executive actions subject to their domestic laws.

At Havana, during the negotiations on the Charter, Brazil and India had expressed their dissatisfaction, but had reluctantly agreed to the outcome and the provisional GATT.

The U.S. Senate, as a result of corporate lobbying, was however unwilling to allow the United States to be subject to the disciplines of the Havana Charter and did not consent to an ITO Charter; the result was that the provisional GATT remained provisional for 47 years, until the Marrakesh Treaty which brought the World Trade Organization (WTO) into being in 1995.

Within the Bretton Woods institutions, there was no direct focus on promoting “development” of the former colonies; what little happened was at best a side-effect of the lending policies of these institutions and the few crumbs that fell off the table here and there, often to further Cold War interests.

From about the early 1950s, to the extent that it provided any reconstruction and development loans to the developing world, the IBRD acted in the interests of the United States, its largest single shareholder, and favoured the private sector.

For example, early Indian efforts to obtain IBRD loans for the public sector to set up core industries like steel, which needed large infusions of equity capital that the Indian private sector was in no position to provide, were turned down, based purely on the ideological dogma of private-vs-public-enterprise.

It was only much later that a separate window, the International Development Association (IDA), was created at the World Bank to provide soft loans (with low interest and long repayment periods) to low-income countries.

But the IDA did not function as professed and did not provide loans to set up industries or promote development in poorer countries; in actual practice it acted to advance the interests of the developed countries in the Third World.

IDA loans came with conditionalities to promote structural adjustment programmes, such as unilateral trade liberalisation, resulting in deindustrialisation of the poorer African countries. Even worse, IDA loans came with additional conditionalities to cater to the fads and fashions of the day and the concerns of Northern, in particular Washington-based, civil society.

The IDA “donor countries” dominated its governance and used their clout there to sway IDA lending – initially, the IDA obtained funds from the United States and other developed countries, and there were two or three substantial replenishments thereafter.

Subsequently, the funds from loan repayments and the profits of the World Bank (earned by lending at market rates to developing countries) were used to fund IDA, with small new contributions from the “donors” at every replenishment.

Though developing countries borrowing from the IBRD at market rates thus turned out to be the funders of the IDA, they had no voice in IDA governance, and the developed countries, with very little new money, have maintained control over the IDA and IBRD policies, to promote their own policies and the interests of their corporations in developing countries.

On the trade front, in successive rounds of negotiations at the GATT, the group of major developed countries (the United States, Canada, Europe, and later Japan) negotiated among themselves the exchange of tariff concessions, but paid little attention to the developing countries and their requests for tariff reduction in areas of export interest to them.

The only crumbs that fell their way were the result of the multilateralisation of the bilateral concessions exchanged in the rounds, through the application of the “Most Favoured Nation” (MFN) principle. From the Dillon Round on (through the Kennedy and Tokyo Rounds), each saw new discriminatory arrangements against the Third World and its exports.

In the Uruguay Round (1986-94), culminating in the Marrakesh Treaty, the developing countries undertook onerous advance commitments in goods trade, and in new areas such as ‘services’ trade and in intellectual property protection, on the promise of commitment of developed countries to undertake a major reform of their subsidised trade in agriculture and other areas of export interest to developing countries.

These remain in the area of promises while, after the 2013 December  Bali Ministerial Conference, the United States, Europe and the WTO leadership are attempting to put aside as ‘out of date’, all past commitments, while pursuing the ‘trade facilitation’ agreement, involving no concessions from them, but resulting in the equivalent of a 10 percent tariff cut by developing countries.

In much of Africa, this will complete the “deindustrialisation process” and ensure that the Third World will remain “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.  (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

* This text is based on Chakravarthi Raghavan’s recently published book, ‘The THIRD WORLD in the Third Millennium CE’.

Excerpt:

A local woman returns to her home with a new shelter kit. While the destruction is widespread, local rebuilding efforts are already underway. Credit: Simon Davis/DFID/cc by 2.0

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 21 2013 (IPS)

Nearly two weeks after Typhoon Haiyan devastated parts of the central Philippines, experts and activists here are warning that post-disaster reconstruction needs to be more transparent than past such efforts, while also focusing on a long-term assistance strategy that goes beyond immediate emergency relief.

In recent days, academics and civil society experts have also urged the international community to learn from some of the mistakes made during the disaster responses following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti."When the funding dries up, the rebuilding effort still needs to be taken care of." -- Prof. Jesse Anttila-Hughes

“I think there is a big myth that emergency response is split in different stages, with emergency relief coming first, followed by reconstruction and then rebuilding,” Jake Johnston, a research associate at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank here, told IPS. “But what you actually need is a more comprehensive view, from the very beginning.”

Johnston has closely followed reconstruction efforts in Haiti following the earthquake that left an estimated 316,000 people dead and 300,000 injured, and displaced almost 1.5 million people. He says there are several lessons learned from the Haitian disaster that can be applied to the current crisis in the Philippines.

Keeping locals in the loop

“One thing that, unfortunately, didn’t go very well in Haiti was that the local government and civil society were largely bypassed by foreign organisations,” he says. “For instance, you saw USAID” – the U.S. government’s primary foreign aid agency – “spending almost 1.3 billion dollars in awards to contractors and NGOs that were mostly based in the U.S., with less than one percent of that money actually going to Haitian organisations.”

In the Philippines, he notes, international organisations should keep the Manila government in the lead, making sure that it is a prominent part of the coordination of the entire reconstruction mechanism.

Transparency and accountability can also be vastly improved over past efforts. Experts say doing so would ensure that the organisations working on the ground meet local needs and are effective in doing so.

“Nongovernmental organizations and private contractors have been the intermediate recipients of most of these funds,” Vijaya Ramachandran and Owen Barder, two senior fellows at the Center for Global Development (CGD), a think tank here, wrote last week. “But despite the fact that these organizations are beneficiaries of public funds, there are few publicly available evaluations of services delivered, lives saved, or mistakes made.”

The analysts note that this lack of transparency and accountability has led to growing disillusionment among the local population in Haiti. Perhaps more important, lack of transparency can also end up affecting the relief’s efficiency itself.

“In Haiti, we saw that the groups on the ground weren’t actually communicating with each other, leading to a situation in which different groups simply duplicated the same things,” CEPR’s Johnston says. “That’s a clear indicator telling us that there wasn’t enough transparency and accountability around the aid that was being provided.”

Greater communication between groups would enable them to be more effective with their work, while also increasing their accountability to donors, he says.

Still, some NGOs currently working in the Philippines are stressing that transparency and communication are already at the core of what they do.

“We try to be very transparent about our finances, and we make sure that everyone sees where all of our money is going,” Rachel Sawyer, a member of the communications staff at All Hands Volunteers, a non-profit that works in disaster-stricken areas both in the U.S. and internationally, told IPS.

“We are also constantly communicating with other organisations. When we see one, we either partner with them or we try to meet the unmet needs somewhere else.”

She warns that “‘disaster relief’ is obviously a very broad term.”

Long-term funding

One other major issue experts point to is the problem of ensuring that the outpouring of funds raised in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is maintained over time, which is what long-term reconstruction requires.

“While media, funders and emergency responders spend a short amount of time dealing with immediate needs,” Lori Bertman, the president and CEO of the Louisiana-based Pennington Family Foundation, a grant-making institution, wrote on Monday, “this does not create the infrastructure to mitigate future risk, and leaves long-term needs such as resettlement, mental and public health, as well as fiscal viability, unfunded and unattended.”

Bertman’s article was later endorsed by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank here.

Some have suggested that this short-term response may be partially due to the cyclical nature of media coverage, which tends to shift the public’s attention quickly.

“Obviously the news cycle is a cycle, and trying to get people to give more attention is not really going to work,” Jesse Anttila-Hughes, a development economics professor at the University of San Francisco, told IPS.

He notes, however, that the current strategy can be improved.

“Funding in these situations is very much focused on shelter and food. But then when the funding dries up, the rebuilding effort still needs to be taken care of,” he said. “What really needs to be done in these situations is to ensure that funding calls are specifically tied to clear, long-term reconstruction.”

According to the latest information released by the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council, the Philippine government’s agency monitoring the current crisis, Typhoon Haiyan has so far killed over 4,000 people, leaving almost 4.5 million people without a home.

Earlier this week, the Washington-based World Bank announced that it would release 500 million dollars in funding to support the Philippines’ effort in recovery and rebuilding. The funds, which are a loan, came in response to a request by the government in Manila, and Bank officials are already looking to see how this money can be stretched for the long term – and how it can be used to sidestep some of the problems that have beset previous reconstructions.

“Given the scale of this disaster, the country will need a long-term reconstruction plan,” Axel van Trotsenburg, the World Bank’s vice president for East Asia said on Monday. “We can bring lessons learned from our work in reconstruction after disasters hit Aceh, Haiti and other areas that might be helpful in the Philippines.”

The Carlos Manuel de Céspedes plaza in central Santiago lost a large number of trees, which will take years to replace. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
SANTIAGO DE CUBA , Aug 10 2013 (IPS)

Nine months after Hurricane Sandy, the worst disaster to hit this city in eastern Cuban in decades, local residents say they are now better prepared for catastrophes.

“We have more information now, and more awareness of what happened, which was very hard to accept,” 31-year-old musician Melly Álvarez, who lives in the hard-hit centre of Santiago, told IPS.

“We never thought something like this could happen to us. Since Sandy we keep alert to meteorological warnings and we take precautions, to avoid further surprises,” she said.

Experts say every city in this Caribbean island nation should take precautions against hurricanes, especially places like Santiago de Cuba, which is in mountainous terrain and has densely-populated residential buildings.

“Education must be stepped up in parts of the country that don’t suffer these things frequently or with great intensity, to increase awareness of the risks,” meteorologist José Rubiera said in a recent interview with IPS.

The collapse of an adjacent building caused serious damage to Álvarez’s house, still only partially rebuilt despite a huge effort by her family. “At first there was corruption in the distribution of materials, but the authorities took measures and the reconstruction process was accelerated. It is more organised now,” she said.

The housing sector undoubtedly took the brunt of the up to 200 kilometres an hour winds that swept the city in the early hours of Oct. 25, 2012.

According to official figures, 15,888 housing units were completely destroyed and 22,000 partially collapsed. The total number affected is equivalent to half the housing stock in this city 847 kilometres from Havana.

Many buildings lost their roofs, and families are impatient over the delays in replacing them. “We need six million square metres of roofing and the country produces barely one million,” Madeleine Cortés, vice president of the state administrative council in Santiago province, told foreign journalists.

People whose homes were damaged receive a state discount of 50 percent on the cost of building materials and low-interest bank loans with long-term repayment plans. In the case of families who were left without a home, the state pays the cost of bank loans, while it also subsidises the lowest-income families.

Cortés said that as part of the recovery strategy, a programme has been designed to build 21,400 housing units for those affected by Hurricane Sandy, as well as families in the poorest neighbourhoods, by 2019.

According to the authorities, every new building must take into account the risk of hurricanes and earthquakes.

In Mar Verde, a beach community west of the city of Santiago, close to the spot where Hurricane Sandy made landfall, more than 40 families are waiting for new housing to be built to replace their homes, which were laid waste by the sea. In the meantime, they are living in cabins that used to be rented out to holiday makers.

“They are looking for solid land further away from the coast, as had been decided before the disaster,” said Heriberto Téllez, a 53-year-old caretaker of an agricultural cooperative who, like his neighbours, hopes that the new homes will come equipped with the electrical appliances that were swept away by the waves.

“We are a poor country, not everything can be done all at once. It will be our turn soon,” he told IPS.

Campesinos or small farmers from the southern coast of the province of Santiago said the worst thing in that area was the aftermath of the hurricane.

“Usually you’re happy because the cyclones bring rain,” Carlos Arias, president of an agricultural cooperative in the area, told IPS. “But Sandy did not alleviate the intense drought in these parts. It has barely rained at all in the last nine months.”

The farmer added that due to post-disaster stress, rabbits, pigs and other farm animals stopped breeding, hens laid fewer eggs, cows gave less milk and even bees did not make honey for a time. “We will be feeling the effects of the catastrophe for several years,” he said.

The government of President Raúl Castro reported in late July that the damage caused by Sandy to housing, roads and utilities like electricity and telephone lines in the three most heavily affected provinces – Santiago de Cuba, Holguín and Guantánamo – and by heavy rainfall and flooding in the central region of the country was estimated at seven billion dollars.

In Santiago alone, losses amounted to some 4.7 billion dollars, according to the provincial authorities, including 2.6 billion dollars due to total or partial destruction of housing.

In 2008, tropical storm Fay and hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma damaged 647,111 housing units in the country.

Extreme weather events have compelled the Cuban government to devote the majority of its housing resources to replacing homes damaged by hurricanes and heavy rains. The country has a housing deficit of approximately 700,000 units, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The eastern part of this island of 11.2 million people is also at risk from earthquakes due to its proximity to the Bartlett or Cayman Trough, a complex fault zone that forms part of the tectonic boundary between the North American and Caribbean plates. This poses yet another threat to housing in the region.

Heavy rains in Haiti’s northern city of Cap-Haïtien flooded streets, homes and fields in November 2012. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Apr 5 2013 (IPS)

Following the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, more than a billion dollars of U.S. aid money has gone to that country with little transparency or accountability on how the money is being used, according to new data released by a watchdog group here.

A report by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington think tank, identifies significant problems with the delivery of U.S. aid to Haiti, citing a lack of audits and evaluations, particularly on the part of the USAID, the country’s main foreign aid arm.There is a lot of resistance to change, especially when some of the largest recipients of contracts in Haiti are the for-profit development companies that have hired a lobbyist to push back on these reforms.

Since the 2010 earthquake, CEPR authors Jake Johnston and Alexander Main write, the few evaluations that have been carried out on U.S. aid to Haiti present “a troubling picture of the manner in which U.S. relief and reconstructions efforts have been conducted so far”.

They note, for instance, that contractors have hired far fewer Haitians than promised, while Haitian businesses have been largely excluded from U.S.-funded projects. In addition, goals have reportedly gone unmet, grantees have received inadequate supervision, and USAID had not conducted internal financial reviews of contractors.

Of the 1.15 billion dollars in U.S. contracts and grants awarded since the earthquake, Johnston and Main report that “over half went to the top 10 recipients of global USAID awards”, particularly a for-profit company called Chemonics International. In addition, less than one percent of USAID awards went directly to Haitian businesses or organisations.

“There has been some coalescing in the development community around changing the traditional aid model, which involves increasing local procurement, and working closer with host countries,” Johnston, a research associate with CEPR, told IPS.

“That’s part of the frame of this report, as we have not seen these kind of things happening from USAID. One of the main findings is just how little of the money, in the form of contracts and grants, have gone to Haitian organisations or Haitian companies.”

In addition, there is very little information available on the subcontracting done by the direct recipients of USAID awards. According to the report, of the 540 million dollars in contracts awarded by USAID, “only one of them, [to] MWH Americas, has reported any information on the use of subcontractors to the USASpending.gov database. Among grantees, only five have reported sub-grant data.”

“I am very much in agreement – we just don’t know where this money has gone. There is a real lack of transparency around this money,” Vijaya Ramachandran, a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a non-profit Washington think tank, who has also written extensively on U.S. aid to Haiti, told IPS.

“I estimated that three billion dollars in U.S. public funds has been distributed to various NGOs and private contractors around the world and we just don’t know what has happened afterward. These groups are supposed to be doing quarterly reports for the U.S. government, and presumably they are doing that but we just don’t know, as they are not available to the public – we don’t even know if anyone is really reading them.”

She says no hard data is publicly available on how many people U.S. funding has helped in Haiti, and echoes the report’s terminology, calling the whole situation a “black box”.

“I think this kind of situation is worse when money has been distributed following a major disaster, like the earthquake in Haiti, where money is rounded up and sent quickly,” Ramachandran said.

“It may be that USAID does not have enough resources to make some of this information public, as the agency has been understaffed for a long time. That said, with technology today, there are many ways to make information public, so that’s becoming less and less of an excuse.”

Some have also argued that certain information should not be released given that countries are competing with each other for contracts. But Ramachandran rejects this on the basis that public money requires greater transparency regarding cost-effectiveness – on both sides.

“It is important that the citizens of Haiti be actually helped by these funds, and we can only know that if we can see how the money was spent,” she said. “So I think this information is important also to the recipient side.”

Wake-up call

Johnston and Main also note that USAID has taken further steps to keep this information out of the public realm, having reportedly blocked various attempts at disclosure, including through Freedom of Information Act requests.

“Issues like accountability and transparency are incredibly important, especially to ensure the Haitian government is taking a leading role in the reconstruction of their country and that they know what is actually going on with all the different aid agencies that are operating there,” Johnston said.

“It’s also important that U.S. taxpayers, who are funding these operations, have faith they are being carried out efficiently.”

Johnston says he personally was blocked by USAID while doing research for the new report, in both the United States and in Haiti, where he says agency officials refused to meet with him during a recent month of research in the country. (USAID did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

“It’s hard to say if this is totally unique to the Haiti experience … in other countries, USAID has gone further in terms of a reform agenda,” he continued.

“For instance, in 70 other countries, USAID missions have published reports stating that they have developed a new framework for publicising information as part of a reform agenda. But this has not happened in Haiti, nor is it planned to happen in the next couple years.”

Still, he says he hopes the new report can act as a “wake-up call”, potentially strengthening reformers within USAID.

“Of course, there is a lot of resistance to change, especially when some of the largest recipients of contracts in Haiti are the for-profit development companies that have hired a lobbyist to push back on these reforms,” Johnston said.

“Still, USAID’s stated goal is to conduct more local procurement, like awarding contracts and grants to local organisations and not always relying on the big development players. For those large companies, which receive a vast majority of their income from government contracts, they see these reforms as a threat to their business model. “

As foreign troops trickle out of Afghanistan, Kabul is increasingly controlled by local police or private security contractors. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

By Richard Sale
WASHINGTON, Mar 14 2013 (IPS)

Next year’s drawdown of U.S. forces and decline in U.S. aid will leave in its wake an Afghan political system lacking legitimacy and stability, according to interviews with Afghanistan experts, news reports and congressional studies.

Despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in U.S. funding, Afghanistan’s government has failed to sustain Washington-built development projects, experts here are warning, including the training and equipping of Afghan police and security forces. Much of this is due to corruption on the part of U.S. private contractors, lax U.S. and Afghan government controls, and the innate weakness of Hamid Karzai’s government.Without adequate security, reconstruction either comes to a halt or continues without the necessary oversight.

“How are we going to pay for this?” asked Andrew Wilder, an Afghan expert at the U.S. Institute for Peace. “This is the key question. How do we pay for these police and infrastructure programmes when the fiscal resources are going to shrink next year?”

According to Vanda Felbab-Brown, an Afghanistan specialist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, the U.S. aid that has flooded into Helmand and Kandahar provinces, instead of bringing sustainable development, has distorted local economies and triggered “contests over the spoils”

She added that she believes that turning off the U.S. spigot will produce “a massive economic constriction” inside the country that could increase political instability.

News about the corruption of U.S. private contractors has brought further dismay. After more than a dozen quarterly reports to Congress, 40 percent of the 56 billion dollars allocated to civilian projects in Afghanistan cannot be accounted for by SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.

In fact, corruption on the part of both Afghan and U.S. private contractors consumes much of U.S. aid to Afghanistan, according to studies, U.S. officials and analysts. More than 100 cases of corruption, by both U.S. contractors and Afghan subcontractors, have gone officially ignored, and when U.S. Government Accountability Office auditors looked at the programmes, they were not shown the uncompleted projects SIGAR found in 2011.

Claire McCaskill, a U.S. senator, said in a widely reported statement that the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the Afghan security forces have been identified “as central to our success in Afghanistan and to help secure Afghanistan’s public under the rule by law, maintain order and to prepare for the U.S. exit.”

Yet the failure to adequately develop the Afghan police has startled many. The contract for training the Afghan police has cost U.S. taxpayers over nine billion dollars but has displayed worse than disappointing results, McCaskill told Congress.

Overall, the United States has spent more than 29 billion dollars on the Afghan national security forces, with one third going to the ANP.

Ghost employees

The most acute problem lies with the fact that the Afghan government has no adequate structures by which to track the development it oversees. According to an April 2011 SIGAR audit, the Ministry of Interior Affairs cannot accurately determine the number of personnel that work for the Afghan police, and the ministry’s record-keeping is said to invite massive fraud.

The report makes clear there is no way to guarantee where payroll money is going. It also reported that there are likely to be “ghost employees” who simply don’t show up or others who collect paycheques under multiple names.

The audit also said there are significant doubts about the Afghan government’s ability to maintain the more than 800 facilities meant for the Afghan Army and the ANP currently being built with 11.4 billion dollars of U.S. aid.

For instance, a 2012 inspection report on a 7.3-million-dollar border police facility in Kunduz province, meant to house 173 people, found only 12 Afghan personnel on site. The facilities were locked, the police there had no keys with which to open the doors, and no one was sure whether it would be used in the future.

Just last month, SIGAR audits disclosed that although 30,000 vehicles were given to the ANP for eight provinces, the Afghans lack the capacity to perform maintenance on them. Further, the U.S. contract did not take into account vehicles that had not been in service for over a year or had been destroyed.

SIGAR reported that 63 million dollars’ worth of funds designated for the ANP for the repair of police cars had been misused between April 2011 and September 2012, even as the Interior Ministry asked that the responsibility for repairs be switched from foreign to Afghan oversight.

According to news reports and confirmed by interviews, the Afghan police were using the U.S.-provided vehicles for personal use. The audit found deficiencies in spare parts inventories, and the Defence Contract Management Agency did not always conduct monthly oversights of the facilities, among numerous other failures.

Security bubble

Meanwhile, as the number of U.S. personnel shrinks, security has deteriorated.

One of SIGAR’s inspection teams was told that a location in northern Afghanistan was beyond the security “bubble” and “therefore deemed too unsafe to visit,” according John Sopko, who now heads SIGAR. In a November interview at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, he said that a lack of safety resulted in an inability to inspect 38 facilities, worth approximately 72 million dollars.

“We’re finding that we cannot always get the protection we need to conduct our work,” he said, even though Kabul is within the security “bubble”. He added: “Without adequate security, reconstruction either comes to a halt or continues without the necessary oversight.

Billions of additional dollars move into the numbered accounts of Afghan politicians who leave the country on official trips to Dubai never to return, former U.S. intelligence officials told IPS.

In November, Sopko touted his agency’s “innovative ways of conducting oversight”. He claimed that SIGAR has made “aggressive recommendations for suspension and debarment” of 206 contractors accused of fraud, with 43 of these cases involving companies that actively supported the insurgency.

Many of those referrals were not acted upon, however, which is why Sopko is currently seeking his own authority to suspend and debar contractors.

But whatever the result of the coming reforms, the message is still startlingly clear: when the United States draws down its forces next year, the Afghan security forces will not be ready to create a stable Afghan state on their own.

The reconstruction of the fishing village of Boyeruca, destroyed by the tsunami that swept over central-south Chile on Feb. 27, 2010, was meant to serve as a model of ecological and sustainable reconstruction.

But progress has been hindered by bureaucracy and disorganisation, and three years later, a vulnerable community continues waiting to rebuild their lives.

Boyeruca is a village in the “comuna” (county) of Vichuquén, 293 kilometres south of Santiago on Chile’s Pacific Ocean coast. Its 300 residents have always earned their livelihoods from the sea.

The 8.8 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which caused severe damages and losses for millions of people along a 600-kilometre strip of the Chilean coast, destroyed 80 percent of the homes in Boyeruca.

According to eye-witness accounts, the sea “rose up three times.” The first tsunami wave resulted in only minor damages, but the second destroyed practically everything in its path.

The fishing village of Boyeruca after the tsunami. Credit: Courtesy of IEP

To deal with the damages, an alliance of civil society organisations, private companies, environmental organisations and religious groups, coordinated by the Institute of Political Ecology (IEP), joined forces in a campaign for the sustainable reconstruction of the village.

“After our first visit to Boyeruca, we observed such a lack of everything that we decided to launch a campaign to contribute to reconstruction,” IEP communications coordinator Claudia Lisboa told Tierramérica*.

The joint initiative was aimed at the creation of an “eco-village” powered by renewable energy sources to promote local productive development.

Barrick Gold Corporation, a Canadian mining company, took charge of rebuilding the local school, which was relocated to the hills of Boyeruca to protect it in the event of another earthquake and tsunami in the future.

For its part, the collective redesigned the school library with an environmental theme, through donations of books and publications on environmental issues and the installation of pine wood furniture.

“With the help of a group of students from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, we rebuilt an ‘eco-classroom’, and a group of Chileans and other Latin Americans in Nuremburg, Germany helped us restock the library. We also conducted a study for the creation of an eco-friendly school garden, which is still pending,” said Lisboa.

Another group, led by psychologist Carmen Colomer, has provided integral mental health care and counselling for children and older adults.

“We have held workshops at the school, in the form of ‘story time’, and have provided support for the organisation of the library, the design of small-scale production projects, and the creation of a community fund, based on the experience of the ‘banks for the poor’,” said Colomer, referring to the Grameen Bank microcredit scheme founded in Bangladesh.

Hortensia Guerrero, a member of the Libertad fisherpeople’s union of Boyeruca, told Tierramérica that the non-governmental organisations provided “real” assistance that was extremely helpful to the community at the time.

But due to the sluggish bureaucracy of municipal and national authorities, “today people are living worse than before,” she said.

In 2010, local families were moved to higher ground, far from the coastline where their homes had been demolished. But they have returned to this “danger zone” where they now live in precarious housing, haunted by the ghosts of the peaceful life they once led.

In early 2012, the authorities promised that they would build decent housing on high ground, but this has yet to happen, reported Guerrero. “People are living without drinking water and without electricity.”

Before the tsunami, the village’s main attraction was an estuarine lagoon where Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) were raised.

“The oyster nursery was what attracted tourists to Boyeruca. But the tsunami washed sand into the lagoon, so that where the water used to be four metres deep, it’s now only half a metre or 20 centimetres deep,” said Guerrero.

The lagoon was also rich in bird life, including black-necked swans, red-gartered coots and various species of wild duck, which are no longer found here.

Local residents formerly used the salt flats of Boyeruca to process table salt as well. But this source of livelihood was also lost after the tsunami.

“There used to be a precious wetland, with a stream where we used to get water. But an unscrupulous individual went in with heavy machinery and diverted the stream, destroying the wetland, which used to stretch almost a kilometre,” said Guerrero.

At press time the Chilean authorities had still not released official figures on housing reconstruction three years after the earthquake. But government spokespeople have reported that 85 percent of overall reconstruction has been completed, and that 75 percent of the new homes needed have either been delivered or are currently under construction.

President Sebastián Piñera pledged that reconstruction would be complete by the end of his term, in March 2014. This would imply the repair of 110,000 homes and the construction of 112,000 new homes, according to the Ministry of Housing.

For Tusy Urra, coordinator of the National Movement for Just Reconstruction, the real situation does not match up with official figures.

“Many of the victims lost everything but have not even been able to submit the documentation to apply for a subsidy,” she stated.

In addition, “the process has been very slow, and many families continue to suffer the indignity of living in ‘mediaguas’ (prefabricated wood shelters without bathrooms) or with relatives or friends,” Urra told Tierramérica. “There is no plan with policies aimed at sustainability.”

Reconstruction has been targeted to meeting “immediate” needs, and because of this, “the government has missed out on a great opportunity,” she added.

“The ideal approach would have been housing construction policies adapted to the new times and the needs of neighbourhoods, preserving their history, their heritage, incorporating new technologies and sustainability. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened,” she concluded.

*This article was originally published by the Latin American network of newspapers Tierramérica.

Japanese university students survey the tsunami devastation in Minamisanriku before getting to work. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS.

By Daan Bauwens
TOKYO, Feb 4 2013 (IPS)

Funding for reconstruction is beginning to decline after the tsunami almost two years ago – but in large parts of Japan’s north-eastern region reconstruction has yet to begin. More and more young Japanese are now moving into this area for reconstruction in a new way.

It is six in the morning. A bus arrives on the barren plane that used to be the coastal town of Minamisanriku. Except for two metal frames of what once were large buildings, there is no sign of human presence.

Twenty students from Tokyo step out of the bus and visit the grounds. An hour later they join another group of volunteers and start digging the frozen ground to clear away debris the giant mud wave washed up two years ago.

Among them is Akinori Fujisawa, vice-president of the project University of Tokyo  Aid (UT Aid) that gathers students from all over Japan to volunteer in the stricken areas on weekends.

“Just after the tsunami,” he tells IPS, “all Japanese wanted to come here and volunteer. But many couldn’t. Students had the time but not the money to get here while employed people had the money but no time. That’s how we started: we got funding from individuals and companies and started organising these weekend trips.”

It’s not just students. “We come here every weekend with friends,” says Machiko Ogata, a young Japanese woman in her thirties. “We meet up in Tokyo and drive here together. We all met on one of these sites. It is a social happening.”

But initiatives like this are likely to die out soon. “There will be no more need for people shoveling and digging,” Akinori Fujisawa tells IPS. “We would like to start new projects, like trying to improve studying conditions for children in the area. At the moment most of them are doing homework on the streets. But we can’t do anything about it with the current budget.

“What’s more, it’s getting more and more difficult to gather funds,” Akinori adds. “People mistakenly think the reconstruction is over. You can clearly see that’s not the case. But there’s not a lot we can do about it, in two months our organisation will be put to a permanent stop.”

While grassroots projects as UT Aid are moving out of the area, an increasingly professionalised group of young NGO and social business leaders is moving in.

Entrepreneurial Training for Innovative Communities (ETIC) in Tokyo is a training centre for young entrepreneurs who want to start a social business. Since the tsunami, the organisation has started a fellowship programme that trains and sends young entrepreneurs into the region to help in rebuilding.

“We already sent more than 135 people into the region,” says Yoshi Koumei Ishikawa, ETIC’s research division manager. “Most of them are in their twenties and thirties and almost all quit their jobs at Japan’s biggest firms to start their own social project.”

At the same time, leaders of successful Japanese NGOs choose to relocate to Tohoku, a devastated region. Katariba, an NGO led by Kumi Imamura (33) has already set up three schools for more than 300 children to compensate for the lack of study space at the temporary homes of tsunami victims.

“But most importantly, local residents are employed as teachers and will soon take over the organisation of the programme,” says Retz Fujisawa (37), coordinator of almost all NGOs working in the area. “The first phase of relief is over,” he tells IPS. “Now our intention is to stimulate self-reconstruction, the Tohoku residents must assume leadership now.”

With the Tokyo-based Tohoku Earthquake Consulting Team, Fujisawa is guiding reconstruction efforts by NGOs. He is also member of the government’s Reconstruction Agency and Educational Reconstruction Council, where he defends a brand new reconstruction policy.

“The Tohoku region is devastated, the damage was enormous,” he tells IPS. “But even without a tsunami the region was heading towards a catastrophe. It was suffering from a very bad economic situation, especially caused by an aging society and the emigration of all young people to Tokyo. If we now are to rebuild the region, we must grab this chance to rebuild it in a way that it won’t happen again, and do everything we can to create a new style of living.”

Retz Fujisawa describes Tohoku as a test case for the rest of Asia. “We are suffering from the fact that all resources, capital and education are concentrated in large cities. In the meantime the rest of the country is being forgotten. We now have the chance to reorganise a whole region and to distribute resources.”

According to Fujisawa, Tohoku is not just a test case but also the perfect example that his country is rapidly changing. “This is the first time an NGO leader is invited to work for the government,” he tells IPS. “It is the first time that policy ideas originate from young people down below the decision chain.

“There are as many female as male project leaders in Tohoku. Most are in their twenties and thirties and quit their jobs to come here. There’s one main reason for this: we are all connected by social media, information is being shared and no longer withheld. Young people can start acting on their own. This never happened before in Japan.”

According to the Red Cross there is a need for at least 129,000 new homes in Sri Lanka’s former war zone. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
MULLAITIVU, Sri Lanka, Dec 23 2012 (IPS)

The landscape in northern Sri Lanka’s former war zone can change abruptly from the ordinary to the surreal.

Areas that lie on the main highways, or major towns like Kilinochchi, Paranthan and Mullaittivu, have replaced the rubble with restaurants, banks, shops and ATM machines. Here, three and a half decades of civil war that only ended in May 2009 seem to have been long forgotten.

But travel deeper into the areas once controlled by the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and bombed, bullet-ridden buildings rise sharply up from the ground, creating craggy shadows and dark silhouettes at dawn and dusk.

Further to the east of the rebel-held areas, particularly where the final battles were fought, hundreds of rusting buses, trucks, cars and bicycles are heaped on the side of the roads. Among these remnants of a bloody past, men, women and children walk with their heads bowed, all their attention focused on the ground.

What they are likely looking for is the best means of making some money in the region – scrap metal.

Buyers from outside the region flock to towns like Mulliattivu to buy the scrap that fetches between 30 and 40 rupees (0.20 to 0.30 dollars) per kilo.

Seasoned collectors can rake in anything from 2.5 to 3.5 dollars a day, a hefty amount in a region where new jobs are scarce and unemployment is feared to be as high as 30 percent by some experts, though no officials figures are yet available.

And things are likely to get worse.

Sri Lanka is facing serious funding shortfalls to meet the massive rebuilding requirements in the former war zone. Earlier this year the government and the United Nations made an appeal for 144 million dollars through the Joint Plan of Assistance for the Northern Province, but had received only 33 million dollars in pledges by the second week in December.

This marks the second consecutive year that the U.N.-Sri Lanka joint appeal will record a shortfall of over 100 million dollars. In 2011, the country needed close to 289 million dollars but when the appeal closed in mid-January it had received just 93 million dollars in pledges.

Officials at the U.N. country office here told IPS that some underfunded projects from last year were transferred over to 2012, making the budget even tighter this year.

Those involved in the reconstruction effort warn that the funding gaps have slowed down the recovery process for the over 470,000 people who have returned to the northern and eastern provinces, including over 241,000 who were displaced during the last bouts of fighting between mid-2008 and April 2009 as government forces advanced into rebel-held territory, forcing the LTTE to retreat deeper into their de facto state.

The construction of new houses is one such area that is staring at a huge funding shortfall.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) estimates that there is a need for at least 129,000 new homes, while 41,000 units are in need of extensive repairs.

So far there are commitments to build around 80,000 new units. The bulk of that comes from the 43,000 units the Indian government is constructing. The IFRC is building around 16,000 houses funded by various donors including India.

By mid-November little over 21,000 houses had been completed and a further 6,070 were under construction, according to data maintained by the U.N. country office. But beyond that, there is not much on the horizon.

Mahesh Gunasekera, IFRC’s senior programme coordinator for northern Sri Lanka, says the funding gap is worse than he has ever experienced in his long career in humanitarian work in Pakistan, Sudan and Nepal.

Gunasekera told IPS that the northern region is looking at a funding shortfall for around 70,000 to 80,000 new houses in 2013, including those in need of major repairs.

“No one knows from where or how the money will come in,” he said.

Experts like Gunasekera attribute the funding gaps to global financial woes, other humanitarian disasters taking attention away from this small country and, ironically, Sri Lanka being labelled as a Middle Income Country by the World Bank.

A recent evaluation by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that the responsibility of sustaining post-war recovery should now move from the shoulders of humanitarian organisations to the government.

“The needs of those that have returned could be argued to be more recovery and development oriented and the responsibility of the Government of a middle income country…” according to the report.

Experts believe this will require a significant policy shift at the centre. The Sri Lankan government, which has so far carried out the bulk of the development and infrastructure work in the region, would have to open up the region to increased private and external funding, said World Bank Managing Director Sri Mulyani Indrawati who toured the north in early November.

“You definitely want more opening up and faster. It will create more opportunities for other resources to come in,” Indrawati said.

The north – especially those areas where the fighting was intense – has lagged behind in job creation due to a lack of incentives and stimulants for the private sector, as well as for local small and medium scale industries, according to analysts.

Indrawati said that even big infrastructure projects need to be planned so that they use the available local resources.

So far these projects have been heavily reliant on machinery and provided limited employment opportunities for the local population.

He believes development and reconstruction needs to include the participation and utilise the capacity of the local community in order to create sustainable employment opportunities.

(END)

Two years after the earthquake and tsunami in south-central Chile, the worst natural disaster to hit the country in half a century, thousands of families who saw their homes destroyed are still waiting for a solution.

The earthquake measured 8.8 degrees on the Richter scale and lasted almost three full minutes, and was followed by a devastating tsunami. At least 520 people died and close to a million were affected, according to official figures.

Two years later, this house in the coastal town of Iloca still bears witness to the devastating force of the tsunami. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

In the early morning hours of Feb. 27, 2010, Rosa Núñez, 75, found herself unable to sleep. Nuñéz lives in Iloca, a small tourist town on the Pacific Ocean coast, 300 km south of Santiago. For many years she ran a little restaurant in a house that was washed away by the sea.

Thanks to her insomnia, Nuñez was awake when the earthquake began and ran out of the house, enduring the tremor outdoors. Her home was roughly 100 metres from the coast, and 30 metres from a tree-covered hill where she took refuge along with her oldest son’s family.

A single classroom in the primary school in Iloca survived the worst natural disaster in Chile in 50 years. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

Once she was safely up on high ground, she turned her back on the ocean so she would not have to witness the destruction. “I will never forget the sound of the sea destroying everything, washing away everything we had built with so much hard work,” she recalls today.

Two hours later, when she returned with her son, she saw that “the sea took everything away… there were no walls, the sea had swallowed up everything,” Núñez told Tierramérica.

Today she lives in a small, solidly built house that she already owned, across from the house she lost, and that she was able to repair with assistance. Her oldest son lives next door, in a small home he constructed from half of a mediagua (a prefabricated wooden house without a bathroom, meant to serve as temporary housing) that someone donated.

Her youngest son, a fisherman, lives in a wooden cabin with a bathroom in a small housing complex donated by a foreigner. Behind it he is building a more solid, permanent home. Now that her restaurant is gone, Núñez depends on the financial support of her children.

The landscape around Iloca, in the central Chilean region of Maule, has yet to recover its tranquil beauty. The coastline is dotted with ruins. What were once luxurious summer vacation homes still look out over the sea, but are now irreparably damaged.

Just a few metres away, fishermen and rural workers live in camps made up of mediaguas.

According to official figures, 76,000 homes have been repaired or rebuilt in the six regions affected – Bío-Bío, La Araucanía, Maule, O’Higgins, Santiago and Valparaíso – while work is currently underway on another 140,000.

But these figures are disputed by the victims of the disaster, who complain of the slow pace of reconstruction.

Lorena Arce, spokesperson for the victims in the seaside tourist town of Dichato, in the southern region of Bío-Bío, maintains that only 10 percent of the homes destroyed there have been rebuilt, and these belong to low-income families living in camps or temporary settlements the government refers to as “villages”.

The other 90 percent of the families left homeless are middle-class, and many of them are not considered eligible for the government reconstruction program.

Senator Ximena Rincón, of the opposition Christian Democratic Party, told Tierramérica that “the government has fixed the numbers to be able to measure greater progress by mixing reconstruction subsidies with ordinary subsidies.” This results in a lack of transparency that makes it impossible to determine the real progress made, she stressed.

President Sebastián Piñera pledged that his government would repair 110,000 homes and build 112,000 new homes by the end of his term in March 2014. This promise will not be kept, predicts Rincón, a senator for the region of Maule.

“There is going to be a great deal of frustration among the citizens over these broken promises,” she warned.

While touring the six regions affected on Feb. 21-27, Piñera reiterated his pledge that “no family will spend more than two winters living in villages that were created as temporary emergency solutions.” However, he admitted that it will not be possible to achieve this goal by the time the next Southern hemisphere winter begins.

In the meantime, Chilean television stations are broadcasting a government publicity campaign that cost 805,000 dollars about the progress made in reconstruction.

The area affected encompasses a strip that stretches 600 km in length.

Nuñéz and most of the other residents of Iloca and the surrounding area say that they have not seen any government contribution to local reconstruction efforts. They have done what they can to get back on their feet by dipping into their own savings and through private donations of mediaguas and building supplies for the neediest.

The waves damaged homes in the foothills more than 100 metres from the coast, such as this house in La Pesca, 5 km south of Iloca. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

Specialists believe that the problem lies in the model for reconstruction, based on the promotion of housing construction through the allocation of subsidies to construction companies.

If the companies deem that the government subsidies fall below the price they would normally charge for the housing constructed, they are simply not interested in such an unprofitable undertaking, and there is nothing the government can do about it.

In addition to the delays, says Lorena Arce, the companies are building homes of lesser quality to compensate for the perceived loss of profitability.

Chile has construction standards to ensure that new buildings are earthquake-proof, but not to ensure that they can withstand a tsunami. This means that the location of new buildings and their proximity to the coast are crucial considerations. Arce reports that properties along the coastline are being expropriated, but, at the same time, large tourism resort-style buildings are being constructed in these same areas.

But she has not given up hope.

“We hope that the government will work conscientiously, that it will recognise that a great deal more construction is needed and that it will provide more resources, because they are needed: reconstruction cannot be done with cardboard. We hope they will show greater will, and adopt state policies that will continue over into the new government that will take office in 2014,” she told Tierramérica.

There are no official figures on damaged or destroyed schools, but many have been replaced with prefabricated modular classrooms, such as those now being used in Iloca, thanks to private donations.

Secondary school students, who in 2011 played a key role in the biggest social protest movement seen in Chile in the 20 years since the return of democracy, are planning demonstrations to protest the slow pace of the reconstruction of schools, while civil society organisations are planning a national public survey on the progress of reconstruction.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.