Knight Ridder Newspapers

NEW YORK – In the days following the December earthquake and tsunami in South Asia, industrialized nations engaged in a bout of international one-upmanship, outdoing each other in their pledges of aid for the devastated region.

Six months later, has that “competitive compassion” been converted into dollars and yen and euros? Or, as has happened after other natural disasters, has interest waned now that the world’s attention has turned to other issues?

The verdict, at least so far, is that the money is materializing.

Of the $4.2 billion pledged to pay for emergency housing, food and medical help, the United Nations says its agencies, other aid groups and the governments of the affected countries have received cash or binding commitments of $2.8 billion, or two-thirds of the total.

The challenge now, according to UN officials, is to keep donations coming during the transition from the emergency phase to the long-term reconstruction of coastal areas of the dozen nations, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, that were hit by the Dec. 26 tsunami that killed at least 176,000 and left more than 50,000 missing.

“There is no doubt that the initial humanitarian emergency phase was very successful,” said UN humanitarian affairs chief Jan Egeland. “It is also very clear that it is not going to be as quick and easy to do the reconstruction of societies and livelihoods as it was to provide food and emergency shelter and emergency health care.”

In the six months since the disaster, more than 1 million children have been vaccinated against measles and more than 2 million people have received food aid. Schools have been rebuilt or set up in temporary quarters for virtually all the children in the affected regions.

“Many children who didn’t have schools or health care have them now,” said Egeland, who raised hackles in the Bush administration shortly after the tsunami when he called the world’s rich nations “stingy” in providing aid to the developing world.

Egeland estimated that the final bill for the tsunami, including the emergency and reconstruction phases, will amount to $12 billion.

So far, the nations of the world have pledged $6.7 billion in immediate and long-term aid, and individuals have donated several billion dollars more.

No agency keeps exact figures for private donations worldwide, but InterAction, which tracks fundraising by U.S. non-profits, estimates that Americans have donated about $1.4 billion toward tsunami relief efforts.

Rounding up the additional money needed for reconstruction is one of the jobs of former President Bill Clinton, who is serving as the UN envoy for tsunami recovery.

“In the initial emergency phase, governments translated pledges into cash in record time,” Clinton said in an e-mail. “Now, as we move from the relief to the recovery phase, there is no room for complacency. Both donor and affected governments need to move quickly to ensure that existing pledges are translated into tangible funding for the recovery effort.”

To date, the United States has fulfilled about $132 million of its aid pledge, according to the UN’s Reliefweb tracking system. That amount, which U.S. officials say was spent on emergency relief efforts, does not include the cost of sending aircraft carriers and helicopters to the disaster-stricken region.

The dollar amount of the U.S. relief package has gone up steadily since then-Secretary of State Colin Powell made an initial commitment of $15 million shortly after the disaster. As other nations weighed in with promises of hundreds of millions, Bush quickly raised the U.S. pledge to $350 million.

Last month, Congress approved the president’s request for an even larger tsunami aid package that U.S. officials say will raise the total to $906 million. The appropriation received little attention because it was part of an $82 billion emergency spending bill, most of which will go to pay for military operations in Iraq.

Other major donors have fulfilled all of their aid pledges. Japan’s package of $500 million, split evenly between private aid organizations and the governments of the tsunami-stricken nations, was paid almost immediately, UN spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker said.

The major reason that more U.S. aid has not been delivered already is that, unlike with other donor nations, such money usually is not given directly to the governments of the countries involved in natural disasters.

“The actual process of getting the money into the hands of a contractor or a grantee or institution is all done by us,” said Mark Ward, who is in charge of the tsunami relief effort at the U.S. Agency for International Development. “That’s not unique to the tsunami, and principally that’s because of our concerns about transparency.”

One of the signature projects the United States will pay for is the reconstruction of the road to the devastated port city of Banda Aceh in Indonesia. Much of the road, which is the lifeline for the remote Aceh province in northern Sumatra island, was washed away by the tsunami. The project, due to start in August, will cost an estimated $245 million and take nine months.

Although the checks are not yet on their way to the region, U.S. officials have been working with local government officials and contractors to plan the work that the money eventually will pay for. That allows such projects as the reconstruction of the Aceh road to start sooner, Ward argues.

“We have been in the field, putting the activities together that the funds will be used for,” he said. “So we will be able to start building the road in Indonesia sooner than if we had started the planning now.”

Egeland praised the U.S. response to the tsunami.

“What we asked for, we got,” he said. “When we asked for cash, we got it. When we asked for helicopters, we got it. And in that sense, the U.S. is a remarkable partner because it has such remarkable assets.”

The world’s generosity in responding to the tsunami appears to be lessening donations elsewhere, Egeland said. UN appeals for other humanitarian crises, especially in Africa, appear to be falling short.

“We should treat every human life as equal,” Egeland said. “And what we see is that we are underfunded in all of our African operations.”

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