WHERE DID THE MONEY GO?

More than 1,000 fishermen have been protesting against the government in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, 300 days after the Asian tsunami. "What happened to the money the foreigners gave," read one banner carried by protesters, referring to the promised five billion dollars in foreign assistance. They said they had seen little of the billions that had been promised. One protest leader was detained by police.

"We are not from any political party, we are just fishermen trying to tell the government to help us," said L Jayatilleke, one of the organizers of the protest.

In fact the widely hyped tsunami recovery efforts undertaken by relief agencies and governments in five disaster-affected countries - Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and the Maldives - remain hampered by incompetence, corruption, discrimination and lack of public accountability

"Tsunami survivors, like many victims of Hurricane Katrina [in the United States], are angry and frustrated," said Laurel Fletcher, co-author of the study titled "After the Tsunami: Human Rights of Vulnerable Populations", released by the University of California's Berkeley Human Rights Center. "Months have passed and they are still living in displacement camps where they have virtually no say in how their communities.

The Berkeley study, produced in collaboration with the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, says governments in all five tsunami-affected countries failed to establish effective mechanisms to respond to complaints of abuses, and international humanitarian agencies often failed to report abuses. "A lack of coordination on the part of aid agencies, coupled with a lack of oversight, also led to inequities in aid distribution," the joint study added.

But it is not only the locals who are at fault.

Rivalries and poor coordination defeated the efforts of agencies that rushed to the rescue of tsunami victims, with aid groups jealously holding back information from each other.

A report by the British Red Cross tells how dozens of foreign surgeons tussled for the chance to treat one patient in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, while thousands of other victims were ignored. The UN, far from providing a co-coordinating role, often got in the way of relief efforts. The report says the devastation and chaos wreaked by the waves that hit southern Asia meant that many charities duplicated aid but neglected some of the worst-affected areas. Some aid agencies, eager to raise their profiles, concealed information about the disaster rather than share it with rival organizations, the annual World Disasters Report claims.

The Red Cross report notes the region was inundated with surgeons - Banda Aceh in Sumatra had 10 field hospitals and a hospital boat with 20 surgeons "competing" over one patient - but was desperate for midwives and nurses. "The operations were largely 'gender blind'," Matthias Schmale, the British Red Cross international director, said. "Few organizations considered providing women with sanitary needs, underwear or culturally appropriate clothing."

Oxfam with its own report says government agencies and aid organizations often failed to consult people in affected communities about aid distribution and reconstruction. "Without that consensus, charges of cronyism and corruption flourished." It says humanitarian assistance does not cover all needs, often arrives too late and is too often determined more by media profile or political criteria than humanitarian need. It concludes that these failings are condemning thousands of people to unnecessary suffering and death. Sources: Australian, Inter Press Service, Asia Times, AsiaNews