How tsunami may buoy other giving

As a massive relief effort takes shape in Asia, some aid officials are already planning a next step: leveraging current world concern for tsunami-ravaged regions into greater interest in other humanitarian crises.

The Asian tsunami was a natural disaster of historic proportions. But as terrible as it was, the grinding conflict in eastern Congo has killed far more people. Similarly, fighting in the western Sudanese region of Darfur has displaced millions over the past two years. Disease and poor sanitation continue to devastate families in other parts of the globe's poorest regions.

There's some evidence that the interest generated by sudden tragedies does raise aid donations for other purposes as well, at least for a while. That's one trend that international organizations will probably do their best to encourage.

"An essential component of our mission ... is to point out that disasters happen everywhere, and we have to care about all of them," says Salvano Briceno, head of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

For now the need to help the battered countries ringing the Indian Ocean is first priority for most relief organizations. At a donors' conference in Jakarta Thursday, officials said they were in a race against time to help parched and hungry refugees.

A draft of the conference concluding statement called for the establishment of a tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean, and for the United Nations to coordinate the overall aid effort. Pledges of government aid were nearing $4 billion. "The disaster was so quick, so brutal, and so far reaching that we are still struggling to comprehend it," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told attendees.

At time of writing, Australia had made the largest government aid pledge, $810 million in US dollars. Germany was next, at $660 million, followed by Japan and the United States. Individual and corporate donations collected by major US charities reached $245 million on Wednesday, according to figures compiled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and were edging up toward the US government's pledge of $350 million.

If history is any guide, not all government pledges of aid will be fulfilled. By some measurements, nations promised upwards of $1 billion to help rebuild Bam, Iran, after it was devastated in a December, 2003, earthquake. But only about $17 million of that money has actually arrived, according to the Iranian government.

And as terrible as the situation on Indian Ocean coastlines, some displaced persons in other areas of the world may be wondering how they, too, can command such sympathetic attention.

It is the crisis in the eastern Congo that is currently the world's deadliest, after all. Since 1998, about 3.8 million people have been killed there by conflict, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The vast majority of these casualties were civilians caught up in the area's swirling conflicts, says an IRC study.

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