Aceh a testament to aid successes and failures

Billions, though, remain unspent, now earmarked for the years of work ahead.

Save The Children, for instance, still has nearly two-thirds of its $157 million budget for Indonesia, now planned for use through 2009.

The tasks remaining are immense: rebuilding the road that runs along the battered western coast; building tens of thousands of homes; digging sewage systems and pipe networks to bring clean water.

The aid community insists that reconstruction must be viewed in the long-term, despite pressure many feel from donors to get things done as fast as possible.

“We don’t want the situation where the pressure to spend money makes us do things so quickly,” said John Sparrow, of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Invasion of good intentions
In the first few days, though, aid workers were simply stunned by what they found. Corpses filled the streets of Banda Aceh. Entire villages had disappeared. Hunger and disease threatened to kill still more people.

Making things worse, the local government had basically ceased to exist. Officials were dead, hospitals destroyed, electricity connections and phone services were gone.

“It was pretty much a failed state,” said Ahmad Humam Hamid, an academic and longtime human rights campaigner who leads the Aceh Recovery Forum, which has been in the forefront of working for survivors’ rights.

The result was an invasion of good intentions and almost no oversight. “People came and did pretty much whatever they thought was right,” he said.

The early days, many acknowledge, were chaotic as planes and helicopters quickly began ferrying in everything from surgeons to high-calorie food bars.

Soon, at least 200 aid agencies were working in Aceh.

“The result was a messy relief operation,” according to a recent report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, “in which information circulated badly and coordination at times appeared nonexistent.”

Aid agency competition
The early days saw intense competition among aid agencies eager to “plant the flag” — aid community parlance for showing quick results.

Agency coordination meetings were often exercises in barely controlled chaos, with aid workers laying claim to rebuilding destroyed villages they’d “discovered,” and making promises that often remained unfulfilled. As the meetings became known for their disorganization, many people began avoiding them, making coordination even more difficult.

In part, the trouble was the money.

In major humanitarian emergencies, the United Nations is most often the biggest financial player, allowing it to oversee the aid situation as it doles out funding to agencies for particular projects.

This time the roles were reversed, as aid agencies arrived in the tsunami-hit regions with enormous financial resources.

Where $1.4 billion was pledged to the United Nations for tsunami work, nearly four times that much — $5.5 billion — was pledged to non-governmental organizations and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, according to the office of the U.N. Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery.

“You’ve been given all this money by the public so there is huge pressure,” said Sarah Lumsdon, a top official in Aceh with Oxfam. “I think in the early days (the competition) was quite bad ... Now, it’s much better.”

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