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Lessons from 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami still not learned

A set of reports, billed as one of the most thorough studies of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami relief effort in south Asia, are now ready to be delivered to the Australian government's international aid agency, AusAid.

They point to serious shortcomings in how international aid agencies dealt with local groups, leaving them poorly equipped to manage with long-term recovery efforts. The researchers say they're already seeing many of the mistakes repeated in the wake of more recent natural disasters, with worrying consequences.

Presenter: Helene Hofman

Speakers: Dr Martin Mulligan, Director and Senior Research Fellow, Globalism Research Centre, RMIT University, Melbourne and Mohammed Azmi Thassim, Executive Director, Hambantota District Chamber of Commerce, Sri Lanka

Listen: Windows Media

HOFMAN : Dr Martin Mulligan saw the effects of the tsunami first-hand.

He was in Sri Lanka on 26 December 2004, when the waves rolled in, killing 230,000 people across 14 countries.

He was also there when international aid - an estimated US$7 billion worth - came pouring in for the millions of survivors.

Seeing how this aid was used and mis-used convinced Dr Mulligan to carry out the most thorough analysis of relief and rehabilitation efforts in India and Sri Lanka to date.

In 2006, Dr Mulligan and Yaso Nadarajah, his colleague at RMIT University, led a team of researchers from the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka, the University of Madras in India and RMIT and Monash universities in Melbourne.

Over some four years they collected information from representatives of four affected communities in southern and eastern Sri Lanka as well as India's Tamil Nadu region as Doctor Martin Mulligan explains.

MULLIGAN: It was fairly obvious early on, and quite widely reported, that quite a lot of aid money was being wasted because people didn't have enough local knowledge, and good partnerships with local organisations and there was competition between aid agencies so within six months there were quite a few reports about the wastage and duplication of aid funding but that's not enough. We needed to go further than that and find out what happened and were their some examples of good partnerships and good practice as well as wastage and so we decided to make a very intense study over almost four years to really properly find out the lessons of what happened.

HOFMAN: The result is a set of reports, collectively entitled "Lessons from Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka and India".

Each looks at how international aid agencies worked with local non-government organisations and community-based organisations on social recovery efforts.

These ranged from housing resettlement programs, income generation initiatives and attempts to rebuild the tourism industry.

In many cases they found the lack of local knowledge and planning meant cultural sensitivities were over-looked, aid was unevenly distributed and in some case, tensions between different ethnic groups were revived and exacerbated.

Mohammed Azmi Thassim, the Executive Director of the Hambantota District Chamber of Commerce in southern Sri Lanka took part in the study.

He says although his community is grateful for the help they received, they're still feeling the consequences of some of the mistakes made six years later.

THASSIM: The trauma and the counselling aspect still creates a problem. Some people are not fully recovered. Secondly the housing where they moved, whether the houses where they moved is adequate or they had to keep moving and then also distance, because their children are still going to a school which is 6-7 kilometres away from their residence. The roadways, the conditions when it is raining, that whole area where people are living, a lot of mud and people can't walk on the road. So all that put together, people got disrupted and dislocated so those are things that after five years people still feel bad about what happened at the end of the day.

HOFMAN: Last month, Dr Mulligan and his team presented their draft findings to a symposium in Mr Thassim's hometown of Hambantota.

It was attended by about 40 of the study's participants.

Together, they summarised the main lessons to be learned from their experiences into a two-page document known as the "Hambantota Communique.

Dr Mulligan says he hopes these 24 points will prevent the same mistakes from being made in the future.

MULLIGAN: There's a lot of rhetoric about putting communities in the driving seat and making sure they're properly consulted about rebuilding their communities but it rarely happens and its not well understand. So we are concerned, well I'm very concerned, that the world is moving on, there are so many disasters and not enough has been learn from the tsunami experience. It was the greatest effort to raise aid funding across the world in history, it was the disaster that affected more local communities than any time in history so we're rather disturbed that not enough lessons have been learned and communicated globally so the hard work starts now in a way, we now need to make sure that people hear about our research and our findings.

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