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Irish Examiner, 3 September 2007
A NOISY inauguration ceremony took place in the grounds of Al-Jalal school in eastern Sri Lanka this summer. Al-Jalal was one of 62 schools reconstructed or built by GOAL Ireland during its two-and-a-half-year post-tsunami operation, Unlike the EUR7 per head of population donated by the British and EUR2 donated by Americans, the people of Ireland donated EUR25 towards tsunami relief.
Minister for Housing and Common Amenities Ferial Ashraf MP acknowledged this generosity.
"Let me take this opportunity to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for this wonderful school. And comparable is all the generosity of the Irish people and the dedication of the members of GOAL," she said.
Outside, there is little nowadays to indicate the extent of the calamity that struck on December 26, 2004. The fishing town of Sainthamaruthu is noted for the GOAL mile, a stretch of territory that comprises the reconstructed Beach Road Bridge, a fishermen's restroom and a number of school buildings.
The seas beyond are an idyllic expanse of turquoise spotted with fishing boats. But when those seas erupted and lashed the coasts of Sri Lanka in a great spraying wall, 35,000 people were killed.
GOAL assisted 180,000 people in three affected districts: Ampara, Hambantota and Matara.
His GOAL T-shirt partly obscured by ribbons and flowers, country director, John Wain, addressed the children and parents of Al-Jalal.
"Education provides a future for our youth. It's the key for a country's development," said Mr Wain, from Douglas in Cork.
"And that is the reason why we have spent 50% of our total budget on developing and fitting out 62 schools in Ampara district."
GOAL had an overall budget of EUR18 million, EUR15m of which came from the Irish public and corporate donors such as Allied Irish Bank.
In the emergency phase of the relief effort, GOAL constructed more than 1,350 temporary shelters, providing water arid sanitation for 6,000 people. Ampara is located in an area of the island inhabited by its Tamil and Muslim minorities. In Hambantota and Matara, the majority Sinhalese Buddhists predominate.
Harmony between the races has been the biggest challenge to Sri Lanka since the British granted independence in 1948.
And as the road from Ampara winds north to Batticaloa, it becomes clear that alongside the natural disaster is a man-made one. Camps of tented houses come into view.
The four-year ceasefire between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) collapsed last summer. But the LTTE separatists were in control of much of the rural areas of the eastern province when the ceasefire was called. Many of the coastal areas are in the territory claimed as an independent state known as Eelam for the Tamil minority.
During a massive government offensive to clear these areas over the past year, 300,000 civilians were displaced. Many of the 32,000 people who remain displaced are returning to find their homes uninhabitable.
In some coastal villages, the houses bear both tsunami and shelling damage. In Batticaloa district, there are 5,000 tsunami-affected people who remain in temporary housing.
Father Harry Miller, an American-born Jesuit who has lived in Sri Lanka since 1948, says that in the first days after the tsunami, trucks arrived from the interior. These carried rice, sleeping mats and utensils donated by Sinhalese villagers.
It was when the international aid began to flow in that arguments flared over regional and ethnic bias.
"You can go out to the coastline here and see large areas unrebuilt, some of them even uncleared," says Fr Miller.
"And on the west coast they said 50m, on the east coast they said 200m: no one was going to be allowed to use subsidy money to rebuild within 200m of the coast: And this was outrageous, so we started clamouring against that from the beginning."
Meanwhile, the LTTE proposed the setting-up of a distribution mechanism called the Post-Tsunami Operation Mechanism Structure (P-TOMS) that would allow it centralised control of aid distribution.
"Even if it was a five-man committee, they had control of that committee” says Fr Miller.
Right-wing Sinhalese and Muslim coalition partners of the government resigned in protest and the-then president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, suspended P-TOMS.
Access to aid in the northern and eastern areas was severely restricted as a result.
Even in the coastal areas of Ampara district, with relatively limited LTTE penetration, GOAL's schools programme finished seven months late largely because of declining security.
Further north, in the districts of Trincomalee and Jaffna, parts of the coast have been designated as military no-go areas, High Security Zones (HSZs).
Meanwhile, the foreign agencies found themselves paying taxes on the nearly $3 billion (EUR2.lbn) in aid that flowed in. Oxfam, for example, had to pay $lm (EUR733,115) in customs duty on off-road vehicles brought in by ship.
Last year, questions were raised in parliament and the press about a number of bank accounts into which the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had deposited 83 million rupees
(EUR500,000). The investigation tapered out last year when Sri Lanka's supreme court ruled that it was a violation of his rights.
But the Tigers have also been accused of helping themselves to aid money. In May and June, three expatriate Tamils in Australia were arrested and charged with using tsunami funds to procure weaponry; they have since been granted bail.
Overall, the Irish aid agencies raised EUR180m towards tsunami relief. The extent to which it has made a difference is dependent on which part of the country you visit.
The further north you go, the more disrupted reconstruction becomes. In the south, where there is a tourist industry and far from the Tamil rebellion, normalcy is returning.
But in disputed north and east, natural disaster is compounded by renewed war. And as often happens, the world's attention is drifting away to new disasters and human crises.
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