Quake victims in South Asia are going without aid because the global emergency relief system is overstretched, needs better co-ordination and has less than half of the funds required, a top UN official said on Wednesday.
UN Emergency Relief Co-ordinator Jan Egeland called on the world's nations to better prepare for disasters, and appealed to Pakistan and India not to let differences over Kashmir hinder aid distribution.
"I readily admit as the global emergency relief co-ordinator that the system is overstretched and is not working as it should do," Egeland told Reuters in an interview during a visit to assess Sri Lanka's relief progress after the December 26 tsunami.
"But part of the reason that co-ordination is not robust enough is, the good news: that there's never been as many relief actors," he added, saying he expected over 200 aid groups to help in quake-hit areas.
Government officials believe Saturday's 7.6 magnitude quake may have claimed more than 40,000 lives in Pakistan and India, and the United Nations says as many as one million people have been made homeless.
Egeland urged oil-rich nations to fill an emergency relief shortfall of over $7 billion a year with donations not just for allies and neighbours, but also for crises from Uganda to Congo that have dropped off the radar of many donors.
But the onus is also on every country to ensure they draw up national disaster plans, he added, to speed up the flow of aid and avoid the kind of aid delays seen in the United States following Hurricane Katrina and in disasters like South Asia's quake.
"There is no country and no authorities on earth that are in our experience taking adequate preparedness measures," Egeland said as he prepared to fly to Islamabad. "There is no nation on earth which is doing enough in terms of preventing the effects of natural hazards.
"The children that were killed in schools in Pakistan should not have been killed, because the schools should have been earthquake-resistant," he said.
"The children that were taken by the tsunami wave here in Sri Lanka should not have been taken, because there should have been a tsunami early warning system."
Some communities in the Himalayas will likely have to wait another two to three weeks for aid to reach them, and frustration that has already boiled over into attacks on relief workers will likely escalate, he added.
Egeland said he would urge Pakistani authorities, who have ruled out allowing Indian troops to carry out relief work in areas of Kashmir under its control, to accept all forms of aid from everyone.
"As human suffering has no borders, so should assistance have any borders. We should really forget about old divides in Kashmir and there should be a very open invitation to all assistance from everywhere," Egeland said.
"India is the biggest nation in the region. They should not only have a right but an obligation to provide major resources," he added. "I hope there will be full and free access for all humanitarians in the Kashmiri region and it is one of the things I will certainly bring up with the authorities when I go there."
Egeland is confident donor fatigue will not set in, saying the fact that rich countries on average give only 0.2 percent of their wealth in aid means there is plenty of scope to increase donations.
He wants donors to dig deep now, to meet an aid shortfall for quake victims who face a harsh winter in tents.
"We're still way behind in pledges for the earthquake victims, but I think the world is rising to the occasion in many of these media-focused natural disasters," he added.
"There is not enough money, there is not enough aid, too many children go hungry to bed because we cannot feed them, we cannot vaccinate them even, we cannot put them to school, we cannot give them adequate shelter because we don't have enough resources."
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