Posted on: Sunday, January 9, 2005
THE RISING EAST
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By Richard Halloran
Ever since the tsunami ravaged the shores of a dozen nations washed by the Indian Ocean, Americans have been accused of being "stingy" in response — an allegation that does not stand up in the glare of hard fact.
During a visit to the stricken region, Secretary of State Colin Powell noted that most victims were in Islamic nations and hoped the American relief effort would "give the Muslim world and the rest of the world ... an opportunity to see American generosity, American values, in action."
Petros Karadjias • Associated Press The New York Times editorialized that it considered President Bush's initial response to have been stingy, which generated an outpouring of letters agreeing and disagreeing. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution seemed to reflect other regional papers with a headline: "Do we give enough?"
The criticism continued even after the American relief mission got under way. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote: "When grieving victims intrude onto our TV screens, we dig into our pockets and provide the massive, heartwarming response that we're now displaying in Asia; the rest of the time, we're tightwads who turn away as people die in far greater numbers."
Not so.
Even before the tsunami, American individuals, foundations and corporations gave $238 billion in 2001 to churches, hospitals, medical research and other charities — at home and abroad. That sum was up to $241 billion in each of 2002 and 2003, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Andy Eames • Associated Press This giving is encouraged as public policy, in contrast to many other nations, by laws that permit taxpayers to deduct charitable contributions from the income on which they pay taxes. That applies to aid for tsunami relief.
What makes the shock of the tsunami more devastating than other natural or man-made horrors is that it rolled from the eastern to the western edge of the vast Indian Ocean.
The death toll of 155,000 and rising and the displacement of 3 million to 5 million survivors exceed the 100,000 who perished in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 and the 139,000 who died in a 1991 typhoon in Bangladesh.
Once the extent of the tsunami's destruction had become evident, the United States pledged $350 million in relief assistance and deployed 20 warships and a Coast Guard cutter across the Indian Ocean, quickly putting 13,000 Americans into the relief effort.
Critics wondered aloud why the armed forces were employed but were quickly silenced when Marines landed to erect temporary shelters, engineers got water systems working and medical specialists started treating the injured and hungry. No one else could have done this.
Most important, 46 U.S. helicopters, the world's most versatile aircraft, started ferrying supplies ashore and inland to survivors and carrying the injured and homeless to medical aid stations and shelters. The number of choppers is expected to rise to 90.
The cost to the American taxpayers is hard to measure. The commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. Thomas Fargo, could not give reporters in Washington an estimate but asserted: "The American taxpayers made an investment in a very solid and robust military capability that has a wide range of uses. And we're demonstrating the value of that investment today."
President Bush has two former presidents, his father and Bill Clinton, to lead private fund-raising. That may have been politically astute but probably was not necessary because nongovernmental relief organizations have reported an unmeasured flood of donations.
Australia, Japan and Germany have pledged sizable sums for relief, but China, which has been seeking to expand its influence in Asia, has promised only $60 million and sent 35 medics to Indonesia.
Other Asian nations have pledged less.
Islamic nations have not done much although most of the victims are Muslims.
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia, which is believed to have provided considerable funding for Muslim terrorists, has pledged only $30 million. Other Islamic nations have either put up lesser sums or have not been heard from.
Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia. He wrote this article for The Advertiser.
The criticism started with a senior United Nations official, Jan Egeland, who suggested that the United States and other prosperous nations had been "stingy" in their initial relief efforts. That assessment reverberated across Europe and Asia and in the United States itself.
Tsunami victims begin rebuilding their destroyed neighborhood in the coastal village of Kattankudi, Sri Lanka. Getting aid to millions of tsunami victims is a race against time, and nations must immediately come forward with the money they have pledged, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said last week during an emergency summit held in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Those annual donations were larger than the gross domestic products — the sum of all goods and services produced by a nation — of Norway, Denmark, Poland or Saudi Arabia. Indeed, American private charitable donations would constitute the world's 21st-largest economy.
An Indonesian carries relief supplies delivered by a U.S. Navy helicopter at Kuede Teunon, 62 miles south of Banda Aceh on the devastated east coast of Sumatra. Helicopters from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln brought emergency food supplies to the village, unreachable by land because most roads were destroyed.
