A tidal wave of money flowed into Sri Lanka following the Tsunami, and every day seems to bring a report of aid falling into the wrong hands. I, however, am about to find out how difficult it has been to spend the money.

Immediately after the disaster, the staff of the Home for Human Rights contributed part of their salary towards the emergency and began visiting relief centers and villages, many of which were still under water. Francis Xavier, the HHR Director, quickly arrived from Colombo and decided to launch a relief project.

Xavier saw the Tsunami as an opportunity to broaden his organization’s mandate. The Home for Human Rights has been known for protecting the legal rights of Tamils since it was founded in 1977 by Xavier and two other lawyers. HHR has helped over 3,000 torture victims and taken several landmark cases before the United Nations.

But cases of torture fell after the 2002 ceasefire, and HHR’s exclusive focus on civil and political rights began to seem restrictive. An external evaluation last year strongly recommended that HHR expand its mandate, and move into social and economic rights.

Capable hands: Sanathani (left) and Parasuraman from the HHR staff.

This provoked some soul-searching in HHR. Xavier was in favor of the shift, but his long-time colleague and co-Director, V.S. Ganesalingam, pointed out that HHR’s expertise lay in legal protection. It would be hard to hold the government accountable for failing to provide jobs, schools and health services – particularly in the middle of a war or natural disaster.

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Such issues are keenly debated in human rights classes, but there was nothing academic about the mess that awaited the HHR team in Batticaloa. As they ventured into the refugee shelters and waded through the foul water, they received repeated reports of aid being withheld or dispensed arbitrarily. It was hard to know whether this was corruption or discrimination, but something was clearly not right.

Photo credit: Cristina Rumbaitis-del Rio

The Tsunami caused wells to become contaminated with salt water. A lack of coordination among well-intentioned aid groups led to overpumping and increased salinity of well water.

A new mandate began to emerge for HHR among the ruins. Xavier and his team decided that any money they raised would go to people who had been displaced by war, uprooted by the Tsunami, and discriminated against during the aid operation.

These three criteria would allow HHR to do what it did best and also broaden its mandate. Fighting discrimination was consistent with HHR’s traditional human rights mandate. At the same time, relief aid would allow HHR to address the survivors’ rights to shelter, health and food.

For once, money seemed to be no problem. Within weeks of the Tsunami, HHR has received around $15,000 from the United States, including $1,500 that was raised from students at Georgetown University by Michael Keller, a student who had interned with HHR the previous summer. HHR was also promised a generous grant by the Dutch Refugee Foundation (Stichting Vluchteling), one of several agencies charged with spending Dutch Tsunami donations.

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All of this gave HHR considerable leeway to develop an imaginative program. But at the same time, Xavier’s strategy is not without risks. We start to go over some of them in the journey to Batticaloa.

No matter how much HHR focuses on victims of discrimination, any emergency relief operation will call for technical skills which HHR does not possess. There is also the question of sustainability. Nothing is worse than starting a project and not being able to keep it going. But emergency aid is, by definition, intended to be short-term.

Any intervention, no matter how carefully planned and sensitively handled, will upset the normal balance of society, and challenge Karma. That is the nature of aid.

The best way to ensure sustainability is to invest in people not commodities – to help survivors manage their own aid and work together in ways that will last after agencies pull out. But even this raises some difficult questions.

For example, should HHR work with through communities or with individuals? Helping individuals might create resentment among others who are not chosen. But working through local community groups could make to harder to ensure that aid went to those who needed it. And what if the groups are not representative? Channeling aid through them will simply reinforce an unjust system.

One thing HHR already knows: any intervention, no matter how carefully planned and sensitively handled, will upset the normal balance of society, and challenge Karma. That is the nature of aid.

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It is also in the nature of aid to come with conditions. HHR’s new partner, the Dutch Refugee Foundation (Stichting Vluchteling), has a long tradition of supporting displaced persons and refugees, and is an ideal partner for HHR. At the same time SV also has its own donors to satisfy. They need to know that their money is reaching those who need it, and understandably so. SV tells us that the Dutch press is watching like hawks for any signs that aid is being misspent.

SV wants its money to make up income lost during the Tsunami – in other words, return to the status quo ante. A team from SV visited Sri Lanka in the spring and met with a group of young woman from the village of Poonichimunai, who were being trained in sewing by HHR. The SV team found that the girls had not been sewing before the Tsunami and decided that it could not support any further sewing activities with SV money.

This sent HHR back to the drawing board. Between June and August, the organization’s field officers ranged up and down the ravaged coast. Sarosh Syed, AP’s intern, also made several trips out to Batticaloa to help.

There was no shortage of needy communities, but HHR struggled to find a seat at the table among the army of relief agencies. The field team made several visits to a group of six Tamil Muslim villages known as Ollikulam and was received with interest. But when the team next visited, the villagers said that they had been told not to accept aid from anyone other than a German agency named SEEDS, which was providing 5,000 rupees a month ($50) to each family.

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HHR has now come up with a series of imaginative projects in six villages, which draw from the lessons is has learned over the past nine months and meet its three criteria. My task over the next week is to visit these communities, hear directly from the survivors, and help HHR develop its reporting on the project.

In spite of all the hard work that’s been done, it may not be plain sailing. Xavier wants to continue helping the sewers of Poonichimunai, even though this has been ruled out by our friends in Holland. Someone we must find a way of reconciling SV’s criteria with those of HHR.

I am also reflecting on SV’s request that its aid should go to pre-Tsunami activities. Must reconstruction mean restoring the status quo? Given what these communities went through before the disaster, there might be a strong argument for using the Tsunami aid to help them make a fresh start.

One thing is certain: nothing is ever simple following an emergency.