* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
LONDON (AlertNet) - Fuel shortages, impassable roads and ruptured communications in earthquake-stricken Haiti are slowing the distribution of vital aid to survivors - but is poor coordination of aid work compounding these problems? The answer depends on wh
LONDON (AlertNet) - Fuel shortages, impassable roads and ruptured communications in earthquake-stricken Haiti are slowing the distribution of vital aid to survivors - but is poor coordination of aid work compounding these problems?
The answer depends on whom you ask.
Haitian President Rene Preval, for one, does not feel well-informed about the aid pouring into his Caribbean nation from all over the world.
"Aid is arriving and we're not prepared to receive it. When a plane arrives, people say to us: Where are the lorries to transport the aid? Where are the depots to store what arrives?
"What's important is coordination of the aid, so that we know what we receive, in what quantity, when and how it's distributed," he said on Radio France Internationale on Wednesday.
The United States sent more troops to Haiti on Tuesday to hand out food and water and prevent looting and violence, and the U.N. Security Council agreed to temporarily add more troops and police to its peace-keeping mission there.
At the same time, the United Nations' cluster system is in place, with different U.N. agencies leading the provision of different types of humanitarian aid in cooperation with non-governmental relief organisations.
"I don't really know who is in charge. Between the two systems (the U.S. and the U.N.) I don't think there is smooth liaison (over) who decides what," said Benoit Leduc, operations manager for medical aid agency
Medecins Sans Frontieres in Port-au-Prince, according to an
target="new">article in The Guardian.
John O'Shea, the head of Irish medical charity Goal, agreed.
"You have the U.S. military doing their thing at the airport. You have the United Nations saying we're in control of food distribution but the United Nations is not taking the pro-active role that they should be taking.
"And you have a Haitian president saying he's in charge and the Americans being politically correct and saying they will work under him. This is all going to lead to a situation of utter chaos," O'Shea told The Guardian.
But as the United Nations' humanitarian aid chief points out, "every disaster is chaos because that's what disasters produce", and the lack of coordination is not the issue.
John Holmes told reporters there were "problems of delivery and logistics not lack of coordination", according to a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evelyn-leopold/haiti-whos-coordinating-t_b_428850.html" target="new">blog by veteran U.N. reporter Evelyn Leopold in the
Huffington Post.
The U.N. World Food Programme is the "master of logistics" and "if they are struggling you can see how difficult it is", he added.
LOGISTICAL CHALLENGES
For example, the airport in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince can take only six planes at any one time and one plane has to be unloaded and leave before another one can land, Holmes noted in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
"That's one of the things we've been trying to sort out. What is the prioritisation to be given to different flights?" he said, adding that many aid flights had to be delayed when the airport was saturated.
"People were sending planes very often without warning, particularly in the first three or four days," he said.
Ben Ramalingam of ALNAP, a network of major international humanitarian agencies, also cautions against too much criticism of the aid operations.
"Government bodies - which would usually play a vital role in any response - are virtually non-existent (in Haiti). The Port-au-Prince area was a densely populated urban setting, which makes disaster relief work much more complex to plan and manage.
"Many agencies on the ground have lost staff, resources and facilities," he wrote in a
href="http://blogs.odi.org.uk/blogs/main/archive/2010/01/19/lessons_for_haiti_aid_response.aspx" target="new">blog.
WHO SHOULD BE BOSS?
But someone has to be in charge, observers say. What they disagree about is who should take the lead.
O'Shea told The Guardian it should be the Americans.
"Obama has to say: I'm in charge lads. Everybody would row in behind him. Like or lump the Americans, they're people who have the ability to get a job done. Somebody, somewhere has to grab this thing by the balls."
It looks like Haitians would welcome the idea.
They say the first black U.S. president, Barack Obama, is their best hope for building a new country from the rubble of their shattered homeland, which became the world's first black-ruled independent republic in 1804.
Others would prefer to see the United Nations at the helm. For example, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has accused the U.S. military of using aid operations as a cover to occupy Haiti.
But the truth may be that there is no other way to deliver aid to Haiti but with the U.S. military's help.
A World Food Programme spokesman said the organisation has only been able to distribute with protection from U.S. or U.N. troops. "We do need security to carry out distributions," he told The Guardian.
A major U.S. aid agency, which declined to be named for political reasons, told the paper: "It's quite apparent that the Haitian system can't handle this and I don't think there's a lot of confidence in the U.N. to provide security. It's clear the Americans are the ones to do this."
What do you think? Should aid work in Haiti be better coordinated? Who should be in charge and why?
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
