| By LALIT K JHA |
NEW YORK — The chief UN humanitarian official said on Monday that the loss of crucial foreign aid due to distorted currency exchange rates, while “unacceptable,” should not be the basis for stopping or restricting UN-led international relief operations in cyclone-devastated parts of Burma.
“The losses are significant, but not absolutely gigantic,” John Holmes, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York on his return from a three-day trip to Burma.
Holmes was in Burma last week visiting parts of the Irrawaddy delta, which was devastated by Cyclone Nargis in the first week of May, to review the progress of humanitarian relief work in the region, and then traveled to the new capital, Naypyidaw, to meet the prime minister and other senior junta officials.
This was the first visit to Burma by a top-level UN official since Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s trip to the country in May.
Holmes estimated that the UN, which was initially reluctant to acknowledge the substantial loss of foreign aid money due to a currency exchange mechanism dictated by the junta, has lost some US $10 million of the $200 million in aid money it has so far dedicated to the relief effort.
“Clearly this is a significant problem in terms of the loss generated,” Holmes said. “That’s why we’ve raised it with the government now.” He added that the UN was pressing the Burmese regime to help minimize the currency loss.
Responding to a volley of questions from the media on this issue, Holmes said the impact of the currency exchange rate was being felt in areas where money is being spent locally, and not on imported goods or international staff salaries.
The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has calculated that the exchange rate affected about one third of total aid expenditure, he said.
Holmes said, clearly the current situation “is not acceptable when we’re losing 20 percent, even if it’s only on some of our expenditures.” He acknowledged that donors have expressed concern about the matter, but this is unlikely to have any adverse impact on these countries’ contributions towards the UN flash appeal, which now totals $482 million.
“This is a complicated issue, which we’ve had some time getting our heads around,” he said, adding that OCHA, which he heads, was not aware of the extent of the loss when he presented the revised appeal.
“If we had known it at that time, maybe it would have been better to include it in the appeal,” he said in response to a question.
“Obviously we would like to have a situation where there was no exchange loss. The ideal situation would be if we could pay with our dollars and get the market rate back in kyat—and that is what we’re asking for,” he said.
“Whether that can be achieved is another question, especially since any organization working in a country has to operate according to the rules of the host government. Those rules have been in place for a long time, but the problem is growing because the spread has widened so much,” he observed.
“Perhaps we were a bit slow to recognize—because the spread suddenly widened in June—how big a problem this was going to become for us. We have recognized it and are taking it up with the Government,” Holmes said.
Giving his impression of the progress of the humanitarian relief operations in the Irrawaddy delta, Holmes expressed a sense of satisfaction and said he appreciated the steps taken by the Burmese military junta in this regard.
“We’re in a much better position than we were just a couple of months ago,” Holmes said.
Citing major efforts to rebuild homes, repair schools and get health clinics up and running, Holmes said there has been a lot of progress in the last two months. Farming and other agricultural activities were also picking up, he said.
“A degree of normality” is beginning to return in some areas around the delta region, with many schools functioning and increased traffic on major waterways, he observed.
At the same time, Holmes asserted that challenges remain with regard to the humanitarian relief work in the Irrawaddy delta. “There is no room for any kind of complacency. There is still a lot to do to make this operation a lasting success and to reach all people with what they need for a sustained period,” he said.
The main challenge for the next few months, Holmes said, is to ensure a more systematic pipeline of aid, both food and non-food items. It is important to reach out to those in the most remote areas who were difficult to reach because of poor infrastructure.
“Systematic aid delivery is needed for at least six to nine months,” he said.
Among other challenges for the relief operation is the drop in the number of World Food Programme helicopters from ten to five.
Holmes hoped that some of these five could be kept flying for at least three or four months. This is to ensure that the most remote areas could be reached by aid workers delivering goods and supplies, he said.
ေငြလဲႏႈန္းေၾကာင့္ မုန္တိုင္းအလွဴေငြ ၂၅% ထိ ဆံုး႐ံႈးေန
29 July 2008
နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္းက်ေရာက္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို လူသားခ်င္း ကူညီေထာက္ပံ့မႈဆုိင္ရာ ကုလသမဂၢရဲ႕ ေပးအပ္လွဴဒါန္းေငြေတြဟာ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေငြကို ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရရဲ႕ FEC ေငြလဲလွယ္ႏႈန္းနဲ႔ လဲလွယ္ထားတ့ဲအတြက္ ေထာက္ပံ့ေငြအားလံုးရဲ႕ ၁၅% ကေန ၂၅% အထိဆံုး႐ံႈးနစ္နာသြားခဲ့ရတယ္လို႔ ကုလသမဂၢရဲ႕ လူသားေဘးဒုကၡဆုိင္ရာ ကူညီကယ္ဆယ္ေထာက္ပံ့ေရး အႀကီးအကဲ ဂၽြန္ ဟုမ္းမ္စ္ (John Holmes) က မေန႔က ၀န္ခံ ေျပာၾကားလိုက္ပါတယ္။
နယူးေယာက္ၿမိဳ႕ ကုလသမဂၢ႐ံုးခ်ဳပ္မွာ မေန႔ကျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲမွာမစၥတာဟုမ္းမ္စ္က ေျပာၾကားခဲ့တာမွာ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရရဲ႕ ေငြလဲလွယ္္ႏႈန္းေၾကာင့္အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၀ သန္းေလာက္ ဆံုး႐ံႈးနစ္နာခဲ့ရတယ္လုိ႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။
FEC လို႔ေခၚတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေငြလဲလက္မွတ္ တစ္ေဒၚလာဟာ ျပင္ပေပါက္ေစ်းထက္ ၂၅%ေလ်ာ့နည္းေနတယ္၊ ဒီျပႆနာကို ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရကို မိမိတို႔က အေၾကာင္းၾကားထားတယ္၊ ဒီကိစၥမွာ ဘယ္သူ အျမတ္ထြက္ေနတယ္ဆိုတာ သူ႔ အေနနဲ႔ ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္းမသိဘူးလို႔ မစၥတာဟုမ္းမ္စ္ကဆိုပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရဟာ သူ႔ရဲ႕ ဘ႑ာတိုက္မွာ ေငြပိုေငြလွ်ံရေစဖို႔အတြက္ အတုအေယာင္ေငြလဲလွယ္ႏႈန္းကို အသံုးခ်ခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ေ၀ဖန္သူေတြက ဆိုၾကပါတယ္။
နာဂစ္မုန္တိုင္းသင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာရဲ႕ ကူညီေထာက္ပံ့မႈေတြကိုျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရက ကန္႔သတ္ခ်ဳပ္ျခယ္မႈေတြအေပၚ ျပစ္တင္ ႐ႈတ္ခ်မႈရဲ႕ ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာအခုလို ႏိုင္ငံတကာရဲ႕ ကူညီေထာက္ပံ့ေငြအေပၚ စစ္အစိုးရရဲ႕ ေငြလဲလွယ္ႏႈန္းေၾကာင့္ကူညီေထာက္ပံ့မႈမွာ ဆံုး႐ံႈးမႈျဖစ္ခဲ့ရတာကို ကုလသမဂၢက ၀န္ခံခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ႏိုင္ငံျခားအလွဴရွင္ႏိုင္ငံေတြက မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္သင့္အလွဴေငြ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ သန္း၂၀၀ ေလာက္ ထည့္၀င္ခဲ့ၿပီးျဖစ္ေပမယ့္ ကုလသမဂၢကေတာ့ ေဒၚလာ ၄၈၂ သန္းထိရရွိဖို႔ အလွဴရွင္ႏိုင္ငံေတြနဲ႔ ညႇိႏိႈင္းေနပါတယ္။
ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ မစၥတာဂၽြန္ဟုမ္းမ္စ္ရဲ႕ သံုးရက္ၾကာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံခရီးစဥ္မွာ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီးသိန္းစိန္နဲ႔လည္း ေတြ႔ဆံုခဲ့ပါတယ္။
လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ႏွစ္လ မစၥတာဟုမ္းမ္စ္ ပထမအႀကိမ္ မုန္တိုင္းၿပီးစ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ေရာက္ရွိခ်ိန္နဲ႔ ႏိႈင္းယွဥ္ရင္ ကူညီကယ္ဆယ္ေရး ႏိုင္ငံျခားသား ေစတနာ့၀န္ထမ္းေတြရဲ႕ မုန္တုိုင္းသင့္ေဒသေတြကလုပ္ငန္းေတြ ပိုမိုေခ်ာေမြ႔ေနတာ ေတြ႔ခဲ့ရတယ္ လို႔ ကုလသမဂၢေျပာေရးဆိုခြင့္ရွိသူ မစၥ မီရွဲလ္ မြန္းတာ့စ္ကဆိုပါတယ္။
ကုလသမဂၢ၊ အာဆီယံနဲ႔ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရတို႔ရဲ႕ သံုးဖြဲ႔ေပါင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့တဲ့ မုန္တိုင္းလြန္ဆန္းစစ္ခ်က္ PONJA အစီရင္ခံစာက လာမယ့္သံုးႏွစ္အတြင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ေဒၚလာသန္းေပါင္း ၁,၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ လိုအပ္တယ္လို႔ ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ေမလ ၂ ရက္နဲ႔ ၃ ရက္ေန႔ေတြမွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကိုက်ေရာက္ခဲ့တဲ့ နာဂစ္မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္ေၾကာင့္ လူေပါင္း ၁၄၀,၀၀၀ နီးပါး ေသဆံုး ေပ်ာက္ဆံုးခဲ့ၾကရၿပီးေတာ့ အိုးအိမ္၊လယ္ယာ၊ ကၽြဲႏြား စတာေတြ အမ်ားအျပား ဆံုး႐ံႈး ပ်က္စီးခဲ့ၾကရပါတယ္။
No comments:
Post a Comment