Tsunami an unprecedented challenge for the UN

The United Nations is facing unprecedented challenges in both co-ordinating the rush of international aid to the areas affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami as well as overcoming massive logistical problems such as washed-out roads and communities that were already isolated from the outside world.

The UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland, said yesterday that the world body had decided to focus its most immediate aid effort on the western coast of Sumatra and the area of Aceh, where he said the death toll could rise "exponentially" as rescue workers penetrate areas devastated by the waves.

"Nowhere do we have the kind of problems we are seeing in Sumatra and Aceh," Mr Egeland said in his daily news briefing in New York. "They had hardly roads before. Now they have nothing."

He added that the extent of the loss of life on the island's west coast may never be fully calculated.

"We may be talking about tens of thousands" more who died in the surge, he added.

Mr Egeland is expected to travel to Geneva next Monday to chair a ministerial meeting of donor countries. The meeting, announced yesterday by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, is to be convened to discuss the logistical hurdles and to ensure that aid reaches survivors as quickly as possible.

"We have to overcome all these logistical challenges," said OCHA spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs.

The UN will also be seeking to ensure that it maintains some overall control of the flow of aid to the affected regions and that, as in past such humanitarian crises, the aid effort does not become hampered by different donor nations as well as private charities competing with one another to get the aid to victims first.

In Indonesia, the UN has already been given the reins by the government in Jakarta to coordinate all international aid headed towards Sumatra. But in other countries, such as Sri Lanka, where governments seek to retain control themselves, the task for the UN aid agencies is often more difficult.

Concern has also been expressed about the danger of competing agendas between the UN itself and the core group of countries established by the US administration last week to speed aid to the region, so far made up of the US, India, Canada and Japan.

"It's critical that this structure is integrated into what the United Nations is doing and not operating as a special, separate coordinating effort," noted Nathaniel Raymond, a spokesman for Oxfam in the United States.

Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the UN, will argue for maximum coordination through the UN when he officially launches the organisation's international tsunami appeal on Thursday in Jakarta. The UN has already received pledges of $1.5 billion from donor countries.

- INDEPENDENT