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Please 'take back' tsunami aid
11/05/2005 08:39 - (SA)
Sydney - International medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres is tracking down hundreds of thousands of tsunami donors worldwide and offering them their money back after it received four times as much money as it needed, a report said on Wednesday.
In Australia alone the charity sent out more than 4 000 letters telling donors it could not use their money for tsunami victims, the Sydney Morning Herald said.
It had 172 requests for refunds totalling A$93 000 (about R437 000) while about 1 700 donors specified other appeals and the rest left the matter up to the charity's discretion.
Medecins Sans Frontieres received four times the €20m it needed to fund its response to the December 26 disaster.
The charity's president, Rowan Gillies, was quoted as saying it was ethically compelled to contact every donor of the surplus and offer to return it.
"We have never before had to turn down funds and we've never before offered people money back. It's an administrative nightmare," said Philippe Couturier, executive officer of the Australian branch.
Those who wanted their money back did not wish it to go to lower-profile missions like in Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"There was such massive empathy for the tsunami victims because people could imagine it happening to them... but people in cities like Sydney can't imagine a civil war in Africa and the media isn't there," Gillies said.
More than 200 000 people were killed, almost all in Asia, after an earthquake off Indonesia's northwest coast triggered massive tidal waves.
Indonesia's Aceh province had almost 129 000 confirmed deaths.
But the recently-appointed head of an agency overseeing the province's reconstruction said on Monday that reconstruction is "close to zero" because of red tape.
Billions of dollars in aid pledged by donors and foreign countries have yet to be disbursed, said Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, head of the Agency for the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Aceh Province and Nias island.
- AFP
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