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	International institutions need to get better at delivering aid & post-disaster reconstruction by IHT / UN News   Nov 2005   UN General Assembly calls for further strengthening United Nations humanitarian capacity to assist millions of disaster victims worldwide.   Deeply alarmed over the critical condition of millions desperately awaiting immediate response in Pakistan’s high altitude valleys following the 7.6 earthquake that rocked South Asia early on 8 October, the General Assembly requested United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to further strengthen the rapid response capacities for immediate humanitarian relief efforts in the devastated region, building on existing arrangements and ongoing initiatives, in one of four resolutions adopted today.   Spotlighting the plight of millions of people worldwide in 2005 who needed help to pull through crises ranging from large-scale conflict and abiding food insecurity to catastrophic earthquakes and their aftermath, Assembly President Jan Eliasson (Sweden) opened today’s meeting by stressing the significance of strengthening United Nations emergency relief assistance and boosting its coordination with the wider humanitarian aid community to help mitigate disasters, speed up the deployment of resources and stimulate post-disaster development.   He said that the complexity of today’s crises and the growing magnitude of disasters required that humanitarian assistance remain one of the Organization’s highest priorities. The draft resolutions under consideration concerned the recent South Asian earthquake, the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami and the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Hundreds of thousands of human beings in grave need and mortal danger were at the heart of the Assembly’s discussions, he said, adding “Our solidarity with them must be unwavering.”   By further terms of the text on the South Asian earthquake, the Assembly asked Mr. Annan to appoint a special envoy to, among other things, sustain the international community’s political will to support the medium- and long-term rehabilitation, reconstruction and risk reduction efforts.   Maintaining worldwide focus on the need to strengthen emergency relief, reconstruction and prevention after last December’s Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, which killed nearly 250,000 people and left an arc of devastation across 12 countries, the Assembly adopted another resolution encouraging continued effective coordination among the Governments of affected countries, relevant United Nations bodies, donors, regional and global financial institutions, civil society and the private sector, to ensure adequate response to remaining humanitarian needs.   Another provision of that text reaffirmed that all regional efforts should serve the purpose of strengthening international cooperation aimed at the creation of a global multi-hazard early warning system, including the newly established Indian Ocean Warning and Mitigation System.   Conscious of the long-term nature of the consequences of the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the Assembly also adopted a resolution requesting the United Nations Coordinator of International Cooperation on Chernobyl to organize, in collaboration with the affected countries of Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation, a further study of health, environmental and socio-economic consequences of the accident, consistent with the recommendations of the Chernobyl Forum.   When the floor was opened for discussion, delegations noted the serious challenges faced by the United Nations humanitarian response mechanisms during the past year. Agreeing on the need to strengthen the Organization’s coordination and disaster relief capacity, speakers said that addressing the world body’s funding capacity was one of the most critical steps to achieving that objective. Many delegations, particularly those in disaster-prone and small island regions, also highlighted the need to improve global disaster response and reduction mechanisms.   Noting the increasing demands on the Central Emergency Revolving Fund, delegations supported the Secretary-General’s recommendation to modernize that mechanism by expanding its target of $500 million to include a grant element alongside its existing loan element. The modernized Fund would be used to ensure resources were immediately available for rapid response to humanitarian crises and address critical humanitarian needs in under-funded emergencies. One speaker noted that making the modernized Fund a success required a flexible advisory group structure and clear criteria for the allocation of resources, as well as accurate needs assessments and appropriate accounting and reporting mechanisms.   October, 2005   International institutions need to get better at delivering aid & post-disaster reconstruction", says Gordon Brown & Hilary Benn. (International Herald Tribune)   This year"s catalog of natural disasters, while engendering a compassionate public response, has shown beyond all doubt that the world needs to get better at delivering humanitarian aid and carrying out reconstruction. Charities and national governments are far better coordinated than ever before. But international institutions need to improve their preparedness, speed of action and coordination of response.   For some years, the International Monetary Fund has had an emergency assistance facility to deal with the balance-of-payments problems that follow disasters, but because it is limited in scope and size, it pays out little even when the need is great.   The World Bank provides a range of services, but the fact is that while it and the regional development banks can redeploy financing, they have limited dedicated funding for responding to natural disasters.   There is a UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and an existing UN fund for emergency response. But the fund is only $50 million and can be used only to loan money to UN agencies that already have pledges from donors. So it only addresses the time gap between donors pledging to a project and actually handing over the money.   This is not good enough. A world that in just a year has seen a chain of disasters ravage communities and continents needs an international response that is more proactive in its ambitions and more coordinated in its reach - and quite simply gets more money support more quickly to where it is needed.   We believe there is a way forward. First, afflicted countries should be able to call immediately upon a new shocks facility at the IMF. Money should be frontloaded, fast disbursing and readily accessible. And potential borrowers should include all poor countries, not only those suffering from natural disasters but those affected by the oil-price rise or sharp falls in prices for their main exports. And donors must help these countries meet their total financing needs as estimated by the IMF.   With both loan capital and help for subsidies needed, Britain and France have agreed to finance the first stages of the facility. Oil-producing countries should contribute when the managing director, Rodrigo Rato, visits the Gulf states this week. The new facility should be set up immediately when the IMF board meets on Oct. 31.   The World Bank has always played a bigger role, not least in the financing of social and economic reconstruction after disasters.   The bank should now come forward with proposals for increasing its support for countries in distress, through additional financing to their poverty-reduction plans for disaster recovery and contingency planning and preparedness.   For reconstruction to work, emergency assistance must also work, a fact recognized within Europe by the creation of the European Solidarity Fund in 2002. So it is clear there is a need for a new humanitarian world fund into which donors pay and from which humanitarian coordinators can immediately draw funds when a crisis threatens.   Our priority, then, must be to reform the UN"s Central Emergency Revolving Fund, and the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs will indeed later this month make detailed proposals for this reformed fund. At present, six donors have pledged around $150 million (of which Britain"s contribution is $70 million), but we would like to see it grow. When the General Assembly meets on Nov. 14, it should agree to a fund that would start immediately, at the latest by January of next year.   And there is yet another vast area for global cooperation that we ignore at our peril. Millions are not vaccinated against even the most basic of diseases. We should invite more countries to contribute to the new International Finance Facility for Immunization. By frontloading $4 billion of additional expenditure, the fund will be able to save five million lives between now and 2015. With support from additional countries, it could do even more.   Out of the ruins of a year of catastrophe, we have seen helping hands reach across ancient conflicts, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to the subcontinent. Now as the IMF, the World Bank, the European Union and the United Nations look at how they can do better, we have a unique chance to be better prepared, swifter in response and fully coordinated to cope both with disasters and post-disaster reconstruction.   A year that began by reminding us of the extraordinary power of nature to destroy can end by revealing the extraordinary power of humanity to build anew.   (Gordon Brown is Britain"s chancellor of the Exchequer, and Hilary Benn is secretary of state for international development.)
	Make-believe Democracy by Lewis Lapham ABC Radio National - Big Ideas USA   16 October 2005   Lewis Lapham is the long-time editor of Harper’s Magazine in the United States, as well as being a writer of political and satirical essays. In this address, given in May this year for the opening of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Lewis Lapham delivers a stinging and trenchant critique of contemporary America.   His country, he says, has become a make-believe democracy because political debate and dissent is stifled, the media is compliant, and the population under-educated. His fundamental concern is with the loss of the democratic liberty to disagree.   Of course he’s speaking about the United States of America, but plenty of what he’s saying has resonances for democratic societies around the globe right now.   Lewis Lapham: Well, I wish I was the bearer of glad tidings and good news. And I don’t really know how to begin talking about the current situation in the United States, but I thought I’d read a few passages from senior high school and college examination papers and essays. Various professors of history collect these remarks and send them to the magazine and every three or four years we publish a small anthology, and I have saved some of the ones that please me the most. These are a fair indication of the state of the American mind at the moment.   This is a history of civilisation as told by a collection of college and high level high school students:   Civilisation woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago. Flooding was erotic.   David was a fictional character in the Bible who pleased the people with his many erections and saved them from a tax by the Philippines.   Religion was polyphonic. Featured were gods such as Herod, Mars and Juice.   The Greeks invented three kinds of columns: Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth.   Plato invented reality. Pythagasaurus fathered the triangle. Archimedes made the first steamboat and power drill.   Rome was founded sometime by Uncle Remus and Wolf.   Neoplatonists celebrated the joys of self-abuse.   A German soldier put Rome in a sack. During the Dark Ages it was mostly dark.   Machiavelli who was often unemployed wrote The Prince to get a job with Richard Nixon.   Ivan the Terrible started life as a child, a fact that troubled his later personality.   The government of England was a limited mockery. When Queen Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, Hurrah! Then her Navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.   When the Davey Jones index crashed in 1929, many people were left to political incineration.   The USSR and the USA became global in power, but Europe remained incontinent.   We in all humidity are the people of current times. This concept grinds our critical seething minds to a halt.   That is a fairly accurate description of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. And I tend to bear in mind the last remark about grinding to a seething halt when I contemplate the canvas of the American political theatre and a popular culture enchanted by the magic of celebrity. The delusional is no longer marginal, and in no particular order, we have the last two presidential elections being probably stolen. The party in power, the Republican party, is determined on regime change, but regime change within the United States, not so much in Iraq or Afghanistan.   We live in a civilisation in the United States where the number of people who believe in the literal truth in the Book of Revelation exceeds the number of people who lived in all of mediaeval Christendom.   The American War against the intellect – by which I mean the drug trade, television, the pornographic film industry and so on – is now worth anywhere between $500 billion and a trillion dollars a year. In other words, it’s a more expensive undertaking than our military establishment. Our leading export at the moment is money. We borrow $4 billion a day in order to ... well, the position is, that our global war on terror is being funded by the People’s Republic of China, and the war itself is, to my mind, a futile enterprise. It would be like having a war on lust. It’s a war against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun.   Facts are not as important as the ways in which the facts are presented and perceived, and certainly that matter has been the lesson of the last three or four years with the weapons of mass destruction, among other fictions.. foreign policy is conducted in the same way that some of our high-end financial frauds have been conducted over the last several years. And we have a make-believe democracy, and we have a make-believe military empire, I think. I’m here to tell you that the hegemon has feet of clay. And I’m going to make remarks under a number of headings.   One is the notion of democracy. I went to Washington for the opening of the 109th Congress in January this year and I was impressed by the sense of a military encampment on Capitol Hill. To approach the Capitol building is to approach an entrenched position. There were as many as fifty armed men in black uniforms standing around; helicopters overhead; barricades blocking every conceivable approach. And the impression was that of a mediaeval walled town, preoccupied with its own weakness and fear, and well before I reached the last fortified checkpoint, I knew that the notion of a government by the people, for the people, and of the people wasn’t the kind of things likely to meet with the approval of the metal detectors.   And then once inside the Senate Chamber, it’s a vivid impression. The media like to talk about the nation’s piebald character, the democracy made of jumbled-together, wonderful diversity of colour, creed, cultural dispensation, and it’s a swell story, but in the United States Senate it is not one that is visible to the naked eye. I was in the Press Gallery and it gives you an occasion to study, from a distance of about twenty feet, the collection of faces – as if I were looking at portrait busts in the statuary hall, and even at that privileged distance, it was hard to imagine any of the members present finding the time to write his or her own speech, much less taking the trouble to read through the 3,000 pages of the Federal Budget that distributes an annual appropriation of $2 trillion.   These are people comfortably settled in their flesh, wearing expensive suits, all but a few of them white, of the executive class, the kind of people you expect to see on the Admissions Committee at a golf course. Nothing in their manner suggested a shred of difference in their preconceptions and modus operandi. Red steak, beefsteak, Old Testament, New Testament, popular assembly oligarchic junta – why argue the details as long as everybody knows how and when to count the money?   It has been an oppressive program that the majority Republican party has been pushing through the Congress over the last several years, and they make no secret of their intention to pass more laws limiting the freedom of individuals and fewer laws restraining the freedoms of property, and this is the premise that underlies the legislation that has to do with medical insurance, the environment, military budget, the reformulation of the tax code and the one belief despite occasional factional differences, that there is the sound and bedrock opinion that money is good for rich people and bad for poor people.   I came away feeling that we had already lost the war on terror. The fearfulness of the people in the Congress, the Democratic minority afraid to utter much more than a squeak of objection. The rules have been changed in the House of Representatives so that there is no floor debate permitted on a resolution brought by the Republican Caucus. Congressional requests for information from the Executive agencies of government, from the Pentagon about the cost of weapons, or about the $10 billion that the Halliburton companies somehow lost in the sand in Iraq, or the intentions of the Justice Department with regards to its policies on torture and the detention of enemy combatants, or on the heightened and ratcheted up degrees of surveillance permitted to the FBI which is now allowed to tap anybody’s phone, read anybody’s mail and as of about three weeks ago, to go through anybody’s financial records. And unable to get even a piece of paper out of the Executive, the Congressional Democrats are forced to file lawsuits in order to discover how the government for which they’re held responsible conducts itself behind closed doors.   And the impression was again made more vivid to me because during that same week the Capitol was preparing for the inauguration of President Bush, and the fortifications around the Capitol were again mediaeval. On the day that the President was inaugurated there were 10,000 uniformed police or military on or around the parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue. People that wished to protest or object were kept in cages, sometimes two or three blocks from the parade, so as to be invisible to the cameras.   So from my point of view, maybe it’s still worth the trouble to wonder why or how or when the American democracy lost its footing in Hollywood or in Washington, but the historical fact is I think no more open to dispute than the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet or the disappearance of Sickles’ brigade in the wheatfield at Gettysburg. And any doubts, any other further doubts on that score, I think you could have inferred from the election of 2004. There was every reason to believe that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had a chance because of the record that the Bush Administration had assembled in his first term, the botched liberation of Iraq, the paranoid devotion to the world wide war on terror, and a foreign war of course, is a lollipop that gets stuffed in the mouth of a possibly quarrelsome press, or restive electorate. It’s under the guise of the war on terror we will subtract the civil liberties, we will constrict your freedoms and movements and so forth.   Kerry also could have talked about the mortgaging of the American future to foreign banks. In other words, there was every reason to believe that there would be a vigorous political argument over the course of the election campaign, possibly even a meaningful debate about the character of the American democracy in the shape of its respective future. The hope was short-lived. Kerry showed up in July at the Democratic nominee convention in Boston, stepped briskly on the stage, saluted the television cameras, and said that he was reporting for duty. And he then went on to present himself as an at heart, better Republican than George W Bush. As well acquainted with the glory of money and the songs of Yale, but steadier in character, more temperate in disposition, more reasonable in judgment. A truer and more agreeable companion, better read, more widely travelled, a stronger fashion statement.   And it didn’t work, and it deserved not to work because there was the sense from Kerry that he wished to be appointed to the office. Power is taken, not given. Kerry was a series of poses, on a surfboard, with schoolchildren, hunting ducks with a shotgun, but no difference in his policies towards the war in Iraq, towards the problem of medical insurance, towards the environment, towards education. No effort to align himself with organised labour, no call for a minimum wage, in other words, nothing in his campaign that would disturb the governors of the New York Stock Exchange.   And by early October, the campaign had resolved itself into a single question: which of the two candidates looked more heroic in the costume of a military action figure capable of defending the American fatherland against its mortal enemies? And President Bush proved to be a bigger hit in the role of Batman than did Senator Kerry in the role of Flash Gordon.   I come now to the question of the invincible American military empire. Bush in his second inaugural speech said (I quote) ‘All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.’ That is a serious misreading both of American history and the American character. Americans never have had much liking for what President John Quincy Adams in 1828 said ‘Going abroad in search of monsters to destroy’, and we’ve never had much liking for the heroics cherished by the ancient Romans and by the neo-conservative thinkers who surround the President.. (cont.) Visit the related web page
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