The Un's Tsunami Power Play

Disasters bring out both the best and worst in human nature. The tsunami that struck South Asia last week has inspired generosity and compassion in millions of people around the world. It has also created opportunities for profiteering and advantage-seeking -- and some of the very worst offenders happen to be found at the organization that generous donors trust to help the needy and bereaved: the United Nations.

The day after the tsunami struck, a UN official named Jan Egeland made headlines around the world by describing the rich countries' foreign aid budgets as "stingy." Egeland quickly retracted his remarks. But he had opened the way, and many others soon took up his message: nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam and liberal newspapers such as The New York Times, which editorialized on Dec. 30 that "Mr. Egeland was right on target."

The accusation was instantly seized upon and repeated around the world. The French newspaper Le Figaro sneered that the U.S.'s initial estimate of the sum needed -- an estimate made before there was any firm casualty count -- was less than one-tenth the daily cost of the Iraq war. (Le Figaro could have observed with equal accuracy that the estimate was also far less than the amount French political figures received in bribes from the Saddam Hussein regime. That, however, is a subject not to be discussed in France.)

From the start, though, there was something highly artificial about this debate, and it is this: Within minutes of zero hour on Dec. 26, rescue and aid workers have had every dollar they could possibly spend, and then some. Mr. Egeland himself belatedly acknowledged this in a press conference on Jan. 1. He announced that donor countries had pledged more than US$2-billion: the largest and fastest outpouring of funds in the history of disaster relief, more pledges in less than a week than the refugees of Sudan's Darfur region have received in more than a year.

And that's just the official money. Huge and as yet uncounted sums of money and supplies are pouring into charities from Sweden to Singapore. By the time all is done, aid officials in South Asia may well discover that -- as the 9/11 charities discovered -- they had collected more money than the job required.

With money so freely flowing, Mr. Egeland continued, "the biggest constraints" on the rescue operation are "logistical": "We need to make small damaged airstrips some of the busiest airports in the world." To support the overcrowded airports, the relief effort would need aircraft carriers and carrier-borne helicopters to ferry supplies to shore.

All of these urgently needed military assets have already moved to the area. An American aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, departed for Indonesia on Dec. 29. It will be joined by a fleet including six vessels carrying shipboard desalination units that can each purify 100,000 gallons of water per day and pump that water up to two miles. 1,500 U.S. Marines have landed in Sri Lanka to help keep order and speed relief efforts. Australia, India, the United Kingdom and other regional powers are making proportionate efforts.

So what were Mr. Egeland and Oxfam and The New York Times talking about? What impelled them to complain about "stinginess" as the evidence of generosity was piling up all around them?

In a Dec. 31 press release, Oxfam let the cat out of the bag: "As Colin Powell meets with [UN Secretary General] Kofi Annan to discuss how the 'core group' of the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India will work with the UN, Oxfam staff in Asia warned that further chaos and duplication would result unless the UN was allowed to lead and co-ordinate the global response. Oxfam's East Asia Regional Director Ashvin Dayal said: 'The US-led core group must come under the umbrella of the United Nations to be effective.' "

To put it yet more bluntly: The dispute over allegations of "stinginess" is not a dispute over how much should be given. It is a dispute over who will control what is given.

This dispute has a special urgency for the UN bureaucracy and its supporters. Just before the tsunami, the UN was struggling to contain and deny the worst financial scandal in its history: oil for food. As much as US$20-billion that passed through UN hands in the 1990s, supposedly on its way to help the Iraqi people, cannot be accounted for. A committee headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker is sifting through the UN's accounts, trying to trace the money. In the meantime, the people who presided over the scandal -- and who may have pocketed funds -- remain on the job at Turtle Bay.

Conscientious, taxpayer-minded governments understandably flinch from trusting such people to manage the money they give. For that reason, the Bush administration has chosen to work directly with the other major democracies in the Asia-Pacific area to distribute disaster relief and -- when the time comes -- reconstruction aid.

It is fear that the UN bureaucracy might be circumvented that has UN bureaucrats up in arms. In this time of horror and grief, their first thought was -- as usual -- for themselves.