As the anniversary of Nepal’s devastating earthquake came and went last week, Tilakmananda Bajracharya peered up at the mountainside temple his family has tended for 13 generations, wondering how long it would remain upright.
The temple walls, which shook violently for more than a minute during the earthquake, are now split by fat, snaking cracks. Rescue workers braced the building’s sides with wooden planks last year, said Bajracharya, the temple’s priest,but they will snap as soon as the next large earthquake hits.
“Nothing will remain,” he said. “We will live with the consequences.”
Seeing the face of a foreigner last week, the priest brightened. Many people here pin their hopes on promises of foreign aid: After the disaster, images of collapsed temples and stoic villagers in a sea of rubble spread across the world after the earthquake were beamed across the world, and donors, principally India and China, came forward with pledges of US$4.1 billion in foreign grants and soft loans.
However, those promises, so far, have not done much to speed the progress of Nepal’s reconstruction effort.
Outside Kathmandu, the capital, many towns and villages remain choked with rubble, as if the earthquake had happened yesterday. The government, hampered by red tape and political turmoil, has only begun to approve projects. Nearly all of the pledged funds remain in the hands of the donors, unused.
The delay is misery for the 770,000 households awaiting a promised subsidy to rebuild their homes. With a yearly stretch of bad weather beginning next month, large-scale rebuilding is unlikely to begin before early next year, consigning families to a second monsoon season and a second winter in leaky shelters made of zinc sheeting.
Veterans of immense relief efforts in Haiti and after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami say it is normal for spending to remain low for the first year after a disaster, then ramp up only after legislation and construction standards are in place.
Moreover, since the earthquake, which killed almost 9,000 people, other problems have besieged Nepal, including violent protests over the passage of a new constitution and a blockade of fuel imports from India that lasted four-and-a-half months.
Still, some visitors who came here to assess the reconstruction expressed shock at how little had been done.
In March, a German lawmaker, Dagmar Woehrl, publicly warned Nepal’s president that private donations to foundations and nongovernmental organizations would no longer be available if Nepal did not use the aid soon.
She said it was the first time in her seven years as head of the German parliament’s economic development committee that she had given such a warning.
“I had the feeling that someone has to raise a voice and give an input from outside, because time is running out,” Woehrl said in an interview. “It does not help a single Nepalese if there are millions of dollars of donation money on charity accounts. The money has to be invested now.”
Others urged patience, saying the effort had shown signs of picking up steam.
“Compared to where we were six months ago, we’ve moved at thunderstorm lightning speed,” said Renaud Meyer, country director for the UN Development Program.
Sites like the ancient, battered town of Sankhu were a major reason foreign donors came forward so readily. Just before noon on April 25 last year, the earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.8, sent century-old brick buildings crashing into the streets, crushing 45 people and destroying 1,200 homes. Centuries-old temples sacred to Hindus and Buddhists tumbled down the hillsides.
Bajracharya recalled struggling to stay on his feet as the ground beneath the Bajrayogini Temple lurched violently, and then scrambling out of the complex to get clear of a storm of falling bricks.
“I myself surrendered,” he said. “I concluded that I was not going to live.”
Relief efforts kept pace during the weeks after the disaster, when half a million homeless families received about US$140 in emergency aid.
The good will reached Sankhu: By summertime, a foreign country had promised US$570,000 to rebuild Bajrayogini and surrounding structures, said Christian Manhart, who represents UNESCO in Nepal.
That early progress then halted. Leaders swung their attention to the fast-track adoption of the country’s first constitution, and its division of power infuriated ethnic communities in the south. Bloody clashes between protesters and police ensued, and Indian border crossings shut down, leading to acute shortages of fuel and building supplies. Parliament did not pass a law creating the National Reconstruction Authority until December.
By then, friction had begun mounting between the government, which preferred foreign grants to be deposited directly into its budget, and donors, who complained of excessive red tape and often preferred to work through nongovernmental organizations. Until last month, the government refused to allow international organizations to use their funds to begin building permanent housing, saying it wanted to control the standards.
“We are always dancing a little bit on the volcano,” Manhart said of international donors. “We have the feeling we should assist the government in doing the reconstruction in a better way, but on the other side is inherited sensitivity not to intervene too much.”
In January, the country that had promised to rebuild the Bajrayogini Temple informed UNESCO that the grant had been withdrawn because of budget cuts, said Manhart, who did not identify the country.
A new benefactor has stepped in, he said, although the slow pace of work has tempered donors’ enthusiasm.
The Nepalese authorities say they must maintain control over the actions of nongovernmental organizations and foreign donors. Bhishma Bhusal, an undersecretary at Nepal’s reconstruction authority, said nongovernmental organizations had used relief funds “to distribute Bibles and Korans and the Gita, when the people needed food and shelter.”
China and India seemed to have geopolitical motivations, proposing projects in sensitive zones near their borders, Bhusal said,.
“We didn’t want to make Nepal like Haiti, where more than US$14 billion has been spent, but still people are living in tents,” he said.
Bhusal acknowledged that the reconstruction agency remained weak, with more than half of its 208 positions unfilled, largely because civil servants hesitate to be posted there, since “the work is kind of hectic.”
His office has a ghostly feeling, with rows of empty cubicles and some swivel chairs still wrapped in plastic.
“We don’t sleep more than four hours a night,” he said.
Reconstruction spending was set to increase steeply, Bhusal said, as 329,000 homeless families — promised a sum of 200,000 rupees, or about US$2,000, for rebuilding — receive a first payment of about a quarter of that sum.
Word of this has not reached the residents of Sankhu, many of whom remain crowded in metal-sided enclosures. Last week, they sat in doorways to escape the convection-oven heat inside the shelters and speculated idly on whether the government actually had the money to distribute.
“It has been a horrible year,” said Anju Shrestha, 36, whose shed stands on a site that once held a three-story brick house.
A neighbor, Kanchhi Shrestha, guessed her age at about 75, based on a major earthquake that occurred two years before she was born. She pulled her skirt up to show feet splotchy with raw sores.
“I will die in this shelter if they do not give me money,” she said. “I have nothing to eat.”
However, she added, it would be inappropriate for a person like her to demand assistance from Nepal’s government.
“We cannot scold the government,” she said. “If the government provides, we will fold our hands and tell them: ‘You are God.’”
Additional reporting by Bhadra Sharma
There are moments in history when America has turned its back on its principles and withdrawn from past commitments in service of higher goals. For example, US-Soviet Cold War competition compelled America to make a range of deals with unsavory and undemocratic figures across Latin America and Africa in service of geostrategic aims. The United States overlooked mass atrocities against the Bengali population in modern-day Bangladesh in the early 1970s in service of its tilt toward Pakistan, a relationship the Nixon administration deemed critical to its larger aims in developing relations with China. Then, of course, America switched diplomatic recognition
The international women’s soccer match between Taiwan and New Zealand at the Kaohsiung Nanzih Football Stadium, scheduled for Tuesday last week, was canceled at the last minute amid safety concerns over poor field conditions raised by the visiting team. The Football Ferns, as New Zealand’s women’s soccer team are known, had arrived in Taiwan one week earlier to prepare and soon raised their concerns. Efforts were made to improve the field, but the replacement patches of grass could not grow fast enough. The Football Ferns canceled the closed-door training match and then days later, the main event against Team Taiwan. The safety
The National Immigration Agency on Tuesday said it had notified some naturalized citizens from China that they still had to renounce their People’s Republic of China (PRC) citizenship. They must provide proof that they have canceled their household registration in China within three months of the receipt of the notice. If they do not, the agency said it would cancel their household registration in Taiwan. Chinese are required to give up their PRC citizenship and household registration to become Republic of China (ROC) nationals, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said. He was referring to Article 9-1 of the Act
Strategic thinker Carl von Clausewitz has said that “war is politics by other means,” while investment guru Warren Buffett has said that “tariffs are an act of war.” Both aphorisms apply to China, which has long been engaged in a multifront political, economic and informational war against the US and the rest of the West. Kinetically also, China has launched the early stages of actual global conflict with its threats and aggressive moves against Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan, and its support for North Korea’s reckless actions against South Korea that could reignite the Korean War. Former US presidents Barack Obama
RSS