Mark Steyn writes (EXCERPTS):
Remember the tsunami? Big story, 300,000 dead; America and other rich countries too "stingy" in their response; government ministers from every capital on earth announcing on CNN every 10 minutes more and more millions and gazillions. It was in all the papers for a week or two, but not a lot of water under the bridge since then, and as a result this interesting statistic may not have caught your eye:
Five hundred containers, representing one-quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on Dec. 26, are still sitting on the dock in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed.
At the Indonesian port of Medan, 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.
Four months ago, did you chip in to the tsunami relief effort? Did your company? A Scottish subsidiary of the Body Shop donated a 40-foot container of "Lemon Squidgit" and other premium soap, which arrived at Medan in January and has languished there ever since because of "incomplete paperwork,” according to Indonesian customs officials.
Well, those soapy Scots were winging it — like so many of us, eager to help but too naive to understand that, no matter the scale of devastation visited upon a hapless developing nation, its obstructionist bureaucracy will emerge from the rubble unscathed.
Diageo sent eight 20-foot containers of drinking water via the Red Cross. "We sent it directly to the Red Cross in order to get around the red tape," explained its Sydney office. It arrived in Medan in January and it’s still there. The Indonesian Red Cross lost the paperwork.
UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, sent 14 ambulances to Indonesia, and they took two months to clear customs.
This is not a problem unique to the tsunami situation. It seems to plague every major international relief effort.
Remember Live Aid?–the big concernt in the mid-1980s to raise food relief for the Ethiopian famine? Biggest fundraising event in world history? That massively-overplayed "We Are The World" benefit record?
The effort raised tons of money (figuratively) and thus tons of food (literally)–a lot of which went to waste because it couldn’t be gotten to the starving people between the poor infrastructure in that part of the world and the obstructionist govenment that was in place.
The fact is that, for all the head shaking and finger wagging directed toward first world nations (and particularly the U.S.) that imply we "aren’t doing enough" or are even "at fault" for third world poverty, a significant share of the blame must rest on the third world heads of government who have created obstructionist barries that–by accident, lethargy, misapropriation, or even a desire to punish certain segments of their own populations–prevent the aid from getting where it’s needed.
The U.N., as a chief mouthpiece for this head shaking and finger wagging (as we saw by the obstreporous, inaccurate, and ingrateful remarks of that U.N. official in the wake of the tsunami disaster) is complicit in this hypocritical shame game directed against the first world (and the U.S.) that covers up key sources of the problems in the third world, as well as its (the U.N.’s) own problems.
Back to Steyn:
Whatever one feels about it, the United States manages to function. The U.N. apparatus doesn’t. Indeed, the United States does the U.N.’s job better than the U.N. does. The part of the tsunami aid operation that worked was the first few days, when America, Australia and a handful of other nations improvised instant and effective emergency relief operations that did things like, you know, save lives, rescue people, restore water supply, etc. Then the poseurs of the transnational bureaucracy took over, held press conferences demanding that stingy Westerners needed to give more and more and more, and the usual incompetence and corruption followed.
